Becoming
Humane - Being Humane Evolution of the
Humane - Globalisation of Peace - World in
Balance Authentic
Testimony of Contemporary Witnesses (
pdf.file
) (Spanish) ( German
version
) WOMEN by Nurit
Peled-Elhanan Dr. Nurit
Peled-Elhanan, mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when
killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997,
made this speech in Strasbourg on International Women's Day
2006 Thank you for inviting
me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to
be here, among you (at the European Parliament). However, I must admit
I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman in my
stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my
country are the Palestinian women. And I would like to
dedicate my speech to Miriam R'aban and her husband Kamal,
from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children
were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries
in the family's strawberry field. No one will ever stand
trial for this murder. When I asked the
people who invited me here why didn't they invite a
Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the
discussion too localized. I don't know what is
non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be
theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their
impact is always local, and real. Pain is local;
humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very
local, and so are the scars. It is true,
unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on
Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the
Israeli army, has expanded around the globe. In fact, state
violence and army violence, individual and collective
violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in
Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is
setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is
hardly ever addressed and which is half-heartedly condoned
by most people in Europe and in the USA. This is because the
so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim
womb. Great France of "la
liberte égalite et la fraternité" is scared of
little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is
afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a
demographic threat. Almighty America and
Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with
blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile,
primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being
non-democratic, chauvinistic, and mass producers of future
terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who
are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them
is a devout Christian, one is Anglican, and one is a
non-devout Jew. I have never
experienced the sort of suffering Palestinian women undergo
every day, every hour, I don't know the kind of violence
that turns a woman's life into constant hell. This daily
physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of
their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity,
women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and
night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in
front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are
demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any
normal family life: this is not part of my personal
ordeal. But I am a victim of
violence against women insofar as violence against children
is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi,
Afghan women are my sisters because we are all in the grip
of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves
leaders of the free enlightened world, - and in the name of
this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our
children. Furthermore, Israeli,
American, Italian, and British mothers have been for the
most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree
that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only
allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or
Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children
or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and
daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses
engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may
have various illustrious names - such as Democracy,
Patriotism, God, Homeland - are all the same. They are all
part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich
the rich and to empower the powerful. We are all the victims
of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us
to one homogenous group of bereaved or potentially bereaved
mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their
uterus is a national asset, as they are taught to believe
that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are
educated not to cry out: 'I gave him birth, I breast-fed
him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose
life is cheaper than oil, whose future is worth less than a
piece of land.' All of us are
terrorized by mind-infecting indoctrination, to believe all
we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home, or
be proud of their dead bodies. And all of us were
brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear
and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail
Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or
Irish mothers. I am a victim of state
violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been
violated and are violated because I had to fear the day my
son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me
to be the instrument of criminals such as Sharon, Bush,
Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land
thirsty generals. Living in the world I
live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I
don't dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change
their lives. I don't want them to take off their scarves, or
educate their children differently, and I will not urge them
to constitute Democracies in the image of Western
democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask
them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for
their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to
have children and to maintain a dignified family life in
spite of the impossible conditions my world is imposing on
them. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same
pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even
though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are
mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my
taxes. Islam in itself, like
Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a
threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism IS, European
indifference and co-operation is, and Israeli racism and its
cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational
propaganda, and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli
soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip
in front of their children for security reasons; it is the
deepest disrespect for the other that allows American
soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that gives license to Israeli
jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without
necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter,
without clean water or clean mattresses, and to separate
them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their
way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to
confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees, and prevent
them from cultivating their fields. I cannot completely
understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don't
know how I would have survived such humiliation, such
disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the
voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this
war-stricken planet. Mothers's cries are not heard because
mothers are not invited to international s such as this one.
This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me
to remember these women are my sisters, and that they
deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And
when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on
filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are
shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were
educated to believe that love and compassion are race- and
religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them
and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova -
another mother who lived in a regime of violence against
women and children - asked: Why does that streak of blood
rip the petal of your cheek?
By Lucinda Marshall
My family is Jewish.
When I was growing up, we were taught to love mercy, do
justice and walk humbly. The lessons of the Holocaust and
Israel's right to exist were drummed into us. Never again,
we said. Today however, we seem
paralyzed by an eye-for-an-eye mentality between Israel and
its neighbors. The other day I received a very slick
multi-media presentation that explained that the deaths of
123 Israeli kids between October, 2000 and January, 2005 as
justification for Israel's current military campaign. Yet
more than 300 children have been killed in Lebanon in recent
days and 31 children were killed in Gaza during the month of
July alone. This line of reasoning bears an uncomfortable
similarity to the Bush Administration's use of the deaths on
September 11 as justification for the killing of tens of
thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the American
Jewish community, which provides substantial financial
support to Israel, doggedly continues to buy off on Israel's
foreign policy. In a letter to the editor of the Louisville
(KY) Courier Journal, David Kaplan, the Chair of the
Community Relations Council of the Jewish Community
Federation of Louisville writes, "Israel is simply
acting as a moral, democratic nation should act when faced
with the most difficult wartime circumstances." Mercy, justice and
"Thou Shalt Not Kill" have sadly become empty platitudes in
the Judaism of might makes right that Mr. Kaplan
represents. Let me be very clear
about this, I do not support or condone terrorism or human
rights violations by any party, and certainly not the
killing of innocent civilians, especially children. Nor do I
believe that all the blame for the current situation lies
with Israel, it does not. Yet whenever I have
the temerity to speak out against violence as a solution in
the Middle East, it is patiently explained to me that I do
not understand the history behind the current situation.
Thousands of years of history that have brought us to the
current situation, a history that includes the Holocaust.
Surely the genocide committed against our own people should
be enough to make us understand? But none of this is
actually to the point. Continuing to rehash a debate that
has gone on for this long is not going to lead to peace.
What the Jewish community, particularly American Jews who
donate so generously to Israel, must do is to acknowledge
the reality of the current situation, and that is
this: --As of August 4, 3000
people have been wounded in Lebanon and 900 are dead
according to the BBC. One third of those are children.
During the same period, 62 Israelis have died, 4 of them
civilians. --Bombing of roads and
bridges in Lebanon has made evacuation of civilians and
delivery of aid almost impossible. Bombs have landed on a UN
post, an ambulance and a refugee convoy holding white
flags. --As many as 1,000,000
have been displaced from their homes, mostly women and
children. --The Mount Naftali
Forest in northern Israel has been destroyed by Hezbollah
rocket strikes and more than 110,000 barrels of oil have
spilled into the Mediterranean in the aftermath of the
Israeli bombing of a coastal power plant. The oil slick has
covered 1/3 of the Lebanese coast and contains
cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene. The magnitude of
the spill may rival the Exxon Valdez spill, according to UN
experts. Assessment of the damage and cleanup is impossible
with continued Israeli bombing, jeopardizing ocean life with
damage that may extend to the shores of Greece and Cyprus if
immediate action is not taken. --Human Rights Watch
reports that the Israelis are using cluster bombs and there
have been numerous reports of phosphorous munitions being
used. Both are illegal under international law. More
frighteningly, depleted uranium expert Dr. Doug Rokke has
confirmed Israel's use of bunker busters obtained from the
United States that have uranium warheads. As Dr. Rokke
points out, "We've got all the
Lebanese being effected, all the women and children being
affected, all the Israelis being effected, and the areas
over there are so small you're going to have the whole
region effected and contaminated." --The hostilities
between Israel and Lebanon have not lessened the violence in
Gaza where things grow increasingly more desperate. Since
June 28, 164 Palestinians have been killed, and over 600
wounded. During the same time period, 25 Israelis have been
killed. Palestinians have fired approximately 300 homemade
rockets, the Israelis have fired 3000 artillery shells in at
least 217 bombings. The problems of malnutrition (affecting
more than half of Gaza's children), limited healthcare
access, electrical shortages (affecting 1.5 million people),
lack of essential medicines, contaminated water and
untreated sewage are unrelenting and growing problems in
Gaza, according to the United Nations. There is nothing moral
or democratic about any of this. The Australian Section of
the by Women's International League For Peace And Freedom
(WILPF) points out that, "?if past injustices are accepted
as sufficient reason to oppress and kill others, then there
never can be an end to war and oppression." And as author
and Holocaust survivor Silvia Tennenbaum writes, "The time is long
overdue for Jews to return to their role as the world's
conscience, who come to the aid of the dispossessed, the
wretched of the earth. Once again, we must join those who
demand the end to unjust wars - in Iraq as well as Lebanon -
and an unjust occupation in Gaza. We must honor the example
of American civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner, not that of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein or
Yigal Amir, killer of Yitzhak Rabin." As Jews we must
rethink the meaning of Never Again and realize that it
applies not only to our own religion but to all people, even
those we see as enemies. We must finally accept that An Eye
for an Eye has truly made us blind. Only then can we begin
the long road to real peace and security in the Middle
East. Lucinda
Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and activist. She
is the Founder of the Feminist Peace Network,
www.feministpeacenetwork.org.
Her work has been published in numerous publications in the
U.S. and abroad including, Counterpunch, Alternet, Dissident
Voice, Off Our Backs, The Progressive, Countercurrents, Z
Magazine , Common Dreams and Information Clearinghouse. She
blogs at WIMN Online. Source: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-08/22marshall.cfm
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'Never
Again' Does Not Mean 'An Eye for an Eye'
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Emanzipation
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