Dear Friends,
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg earlier this month. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world.
For better days,
Professor Avraham Oz Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature University of Haifa
WOMEN
Nurit Peled-ElhananThank 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 at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county 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 at 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 halfheartedly 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 fraternite” 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 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 at 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 homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like 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 less worth than a piece of land.`
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education 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 have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool 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 in putting them in. 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 allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give 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` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums 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 o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
A few days ago, British Chief of Defence Staff General Sir David Richards admitted that victory in Afghanistan is unachievable. “In conventional war,” said Richards, “defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation’s capital.”
It took a few years for British military elites to admit that the war in Afghanistan cannot lead anywhere : a valuable lesson to learn from mid to late 20th century warfare, is that conventional military might cannot easily defeat mass civilian resistance.
It is interesting to reflect too, that the Jewish state has exercised a ‘strategy’ of occupation for sixty two years — and for some reason the penny has still failed to drop. The Israelis are still convinced that they can manage to knock down the resilient Palestinians using siege, indiscriminate killing, carpet bombardment and chemical warfare.
The results are pretty obvious: and bearing in mind that Israel considers itself to be a ‘Jews only democracy’, then every Jewish Israeli is complicit in a colossal war crime against a civilian population.
But it goes further: more and more Israeli soldiers of all ranks are directly involved in an endless list of crimes — some stop pregnant women from receiving urgent medical attention , while others drop bombs on populated neighbourhoods. Some use children as human shields, while a few perform executions of peace activists. And others just feed the cannons with white phosphorus shells.
The perpetrators of these crimes are actually subject to universal jurisdiction laws. They can be detained everywhere around the world. They may end their life in jail.
A few brave Israelis must be very concerned with the moral condition of their state, because a few days ago, a document identifying 200 Israeli soldiers suspected of war crimes leaked out of Israel. It made it to the internet. The list included the names, ranks, military posts, pictures and addresses.
The people who leaked the information and put it on the net stated that the names that followed were “the direct perpetrators, agents for the state of Israel that in Dec.- Jan. 2008- 2009 attacked scores of people in the besieged Gaza. The people listed… held positions of command at the time of the attack therefore not only did they perform on behalf of a murderous state mechanism but actively encouraged other people to do the same. They bear a distinctive personal responsibility. They range from low-level field commanders to the highest echelons of the Israeli army. All took an active and direct role in the offensive.”
On the 17th I was quick to refer to the story: I posted a link to the Israeli War Criminal site on my writing page. On the 18th, I was falsely accused by the Israeli News Channel (Channel 10) and a few other Israeli blogs as being the man behind the publication of the names and the faces.
Needless to mention that this fact didn’t make me overwhelmingly popular in Israel. My email box looked like an Israeli war zone, and one of my recent youtube clips that was screened by the Israeli TV soon became a platform for Israeli vile ugliness.
It all reminded me why I had denounced my Jewishness and left Israel. It rang a bell. It reminded me why I decided years ago never to step foot in that doomed place ever again — The Israelis were desperate and angry. They needed someone to blame. And after all, ‘blaming someone’ is far easier than admitting that something is systematically and categorically wrong at home.
On the 19th, the Israeli news channel managed to get hold of me : They were trying to trace the whistle blower. I obviously couldn’t help them; nor would I like to help them. As far as I am aware, no one knows who the people behind the publication of the list are. Though initially the Israelis claimed that the list was fabricated and included many names that had nothing to do with the crimes in Gaza (2008-9), the Israeli media soon admitted that the list was leaked from an IDF source and was probably genuine.
I tried to point out to the Israeli Channel 10 researcher that the publication of the list is the best thing that has happened to Israel for years : The list is a clear signal for Israeli future combatants. It is there to suggest to them that non-ethical conduct may bear some heavy and direct consequences. Such a recognition is vital for Israelis so they can start to amend their path and find a way to live in peace with their neighbours.
One may also find it strange that in the so called ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, a list of 200 suspected war criminals is leaked — and the entire media is chasing a whistle blower instead of engaging with the real story. It shows clearly a society that is rapidly drifting away from any form of recognition of international law, let alone ethical awareness.
However, I know very well why the Israelis are so furious — People around the world do not realise that for Israelis, the Jewish state is nothing but a prison. As much as the Israelis claim to love their state, there is nothing they love more than leaving it behind, and I guess that the Israelis are starting to grasp the true meaning of the de- legitimisation of their state : It is now reaching a point of no return, and it has become personal, because the people on the list will have to think twice before they set foot on a plane.
Interestingly, the people who published the list used a tactic that was used by Jewish and Zionist institutes after WWII : Instead of chasing leaders and military commanders, the Nazi hunters had collated information about ordinary people — the low ranking officers, the soldiers, the guards; those ordinary people who had perpetrated crimes against humanity.
This tactic proved to be effective in incriminating generations of Europeans as vile anti-Semites. After the war, European guilt was quickly translated into Zionist power.
Clearly, the people behind the Israeli War Criminal list leak are letting Israel taste its own medicine : By listing 200 soldiers of all ranks, the message is clear — the Israeli society itself is deeply ill. It is not just the people at the top, it is actually the very ordinary ones. Rather than Israel — it is actually the ‘Israeli’. The malaise seems to be deeply imbued in the society and its culture.
In the case of Germany and other European nations, it was Israel and Jewish leaders who were given the choice of whether they wanted to forgive, or withhold forgiveness. It was the Israelis and Jews who, tentatively and conditionally, have given European nations a kosher amnesty.
I guess the fate of Israel is similar — Yet now it is the Palestinians and only the Palestinians who can save the Israelis from themselves and their brutality. It is only the Palestinians who are entitled to pardon Israeli criminals. The more crimes Israel commits in the present — the more Israelis are dependent on Palestinian’s future kindness.
Once the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Israeli war crimes is founded in Palestine, it will be the Palestinian people who decide who to pardon.
Reload from PressTVGlobalNews | PressTV.ir
In this Edition of Press TV’s News Analysis, the focus is on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. It is heard compelling evidence of corporate complicity in Israeli violations of international law in occupied Palestinian territories, such as US companies, which provide bulldozers that demolish Palestinian homes. Holding no legal authority, it will publish its findings, at a minimum, for public awareness of Israeli crimes.
Documentary film, “Against the Wall: the Battle for Al Walaja”
In a small Palestinian village between the ancient cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, lies the village of Al Walaja.
In early 2010, the Israeli military entered the village to oversee the confiscation of Palestinian land for the construction of Israel’s separation barrier, in defiance of international law.
In the months since, the people of Al Walaja, with support from Israeli and international activists, have launched a spirited campaign of non-violent resistance against the theft of their land.
Featuring in depth interviews with the people at the front of the struggle,”Against the Wall: the Battle for Al Walaja” offers a rare insight into the proud struggle of a small community against near impossible odds.
If the wall is completed, the village will be surrounded on all sides by concrete and barbed wire, forming an open air prison, with only one entry and exit point under military control.
As yet, both the wave of demonstrations and appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court have not stopped construction, and several villagers have lost land whilst others have been arrested for demonstrating their opposition.
Yet despite the threat of intimidation and arrest and the ongoing construction which continues to date, the villagers are refusing to back down from their peaceful protests.
Tuesday, 23 November 2010 12:54 Tindersticks
It is with sadness that Tindersticks announce the cancellation of their forthcoming concerts in Tel Aviv.
When agreeing to play our music in Israel we, perhaps naively, believed that the music we make is beyond political considerations.
Over the past weeks, the pressure exerted on us by people and organisations, some close to us, has shown us that this is not the case. It is difficult to defy a rapidly growing movement with whose aims we agree, even if we are not wholly convinced by their methods.
The songs we looked forward to playing and singing have already been tainted and their enjoyment stifled, if not completely drowned out by the political furore.
We sincerely look forward to a time when we, and others, can make our music for the people in the Middle East for the pure joy of the music itself.
Last night on Countdown, Michael Moore got an interesting opportunity to talk with Wendell Potter, a man who by his own confession was sent by the “industry” to “push Moore off a cliff.”
Watch the fascinating conversation below, parts I and II, and read Alternet’s rundown of Potter’s explosive allegations here
