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Nurit Peled-Elhanan is recipient of the European
Parliament's 2001 Sakharov prize for her peace advocacy
in the Middle East. She lost her daughter in the
September 4, 1997 suicide bombing. She is also a
lecturer in language and education at Hebrew University.
Good evening. It is a great honour for me to stand on
this stage beside my friend and brother Bassam Aramin, a
man of the Palestinian peace camp, one of the founders
of the Combatants for Peace movement of which two of my
sons, Alik and Guy, are members of. Only last week, on
Tuesday in Anata and on Thursday in Tul Karem, the
Combatants for Peace movement succeeded in organizing
two massive gatherings and recruited 10 thousands
Palestinians to their goal—a joint non-violent struggle
against the occupation through close cooperation between
Israelis and Palestinians. If not for the racist laws of
the State of Israel all those of thousands of people
could be with us here this evening to prove once and for
all that we have a partner.
Bassam and I are both victims of the cruel occupation
that has been corrupting this country for forty years
now. The two of us came this evening to lament the fate
of this place that has buried our two daughters—Smadar—the
bud of the fruit* and Abir—the perfume of the flower*,
who were murdered at an interval of ten years, ten years
during which this country has filled with the blood of
children and the underground kingdom of children on
which we tread day by day and hour by hour has grown to
overflowing.
But what unites Bassam and me is not just the death that
the Occupation sentenced us to. What unites us is
principally faith and a willingness to raise the
children that have been left to us so that they will
never again allow corrupt, greedy and power-hungry
politicians and generals who thirst for blood and
conquest to rule over their lives and set them against
each other. No more will they allow the racism that has
spread over this country to lead them off the path of
peace and brotherhood that they have paved for
themselves. Because only that brotherhood can bring down
the wall of racism that is being built before our very
eyes.
For forty years now, racism and megalomania have
dictated our lives. Forty years during which more than
four million people do not know the meaning of freedom
of movement. Forty years in which Palestinian children
are born and raised as prisoners in their homes that the
Occupation converted into a prison, deprived at the
outset of all the rights that human beings are entitled
to because they are human. Forty years during which
Israeli children are educated in racism of the type that
has been unknown in the civilized world for decades.
Forty years during which they have learned to hate the
neighbours just because they are neighbours, to fear
them without knowing them, to see a quarter of the
citizens of the State as a demographic danger and an
enemy within, and to relate to the residents of the
ghettos created by the policy of occupation as a problem
that must be solved.
Only sixty years ago Jews were residents of ghettos and
seen in the eyes of their oppressors as a problem that
needed to be solved. Only sixty years ago, the Jews were
enclosed behind ugly concrete and electrified walls
topped with watchtowers manned by erect armed figures,
and deprived of the ability to make a living or to raise
their children with dignity. Only sixty years ago racism
exacted its price from the Jewish people. Today racism
rules in the Jewish state, tramples people’s dignity
underfoot and deprives them of liberty, condemns all of
us to lives of hell. For forty years now the Jewish head
has unceasingly been bowed in worship of racism while
the Jewish mind is devising the most creative ways to
devastate and demolish and destroy this country.
That is what remains of the Jewish genius, which has
become Israeli. Jewish compassion, Jewish mercy, Jewish
cosmopolitan-ness, love of humanity and respect for the
other have been long forgotten. Their place was claimed
by racism. It was only racism that motivated a Border
Guard soldier to pull the trigger from inside his
armoured vehicle and to shoot at the head of little Abir
as she huddled by the wall of her school in fear of the
military vehicle that was plopped down in the schoolyard
as if it owned the place. It is only racism that
motivates the drivers of bulldozers to demolish houses
on top of their occupants, to destroy vineyards and
fields, to uproot centuries-old olive trees.
Only racism can invent roads on which circulation is
classified on the basis of race, and it is only racism
that motivates our children to humiliate women who could
be their mothers and to abuse old people at the evil
checkpoints, to strike young people their own age who,
like them, want to drive with their families to bathe in
the sea, and to look on impassively as women give birth
on the road. It is only pure racism that motivates our
best pilots to drop one-ton bombs on residential
buildings and it is only racism that permits those
criminals to sleep well at night.
Because racism eliminates shame. This racism has erected
for itself a monument in its own image – the monument of
an ugly, rigid, menacing and invasive concrete wall. A
monument that proclaims to the whole world the
banishment of shame from this country. This wall is our
wall of shame, it is testimony to the fact that we have
turned from being a light unto the nations to “an object
of disgrace to the nations and a mockery to all the
countries.” **
And this evening we must ask where we take our shame?
How will we remove the disgrace? But first and foremost,
how is it that the shame does not keep us from sleeping
at night? How do we consent to have half our salaries be
used for the execution of crimes against humanity?
How did it happen that we succeeded in restricting the
shame to two columns in the newspaper, and to devote to
it no more than the minutes that we devote to a cursory
reading of the articles of Gideon Levy and Amira Hass,
as one reads a report on a scenario that was known in
advance?
How did it happen that we succeeded in packing endless
daily suffering, hunger, malnutrition, children’s
trauma, disablement, orphanhood and bereavement into one
alienating word: “politics”?
How is it that our children continue to strut and
swagger in the uniforms of brutality that they wear when
they serve in the army of slaughter and destruction?
How is it that all the splendid institutions of the
world stand aside and cannot do a thing to save one
child from death or to remove one concrete block from
the wall of shame? How is it that all the peace and
human rights organizations are not able to stop the
jeeps of the Border Guards that come to terrify
schoolchildren and to kill them, are not able to stop
one bulldozer on its way to demolish a house on top of
its occupants, to rescue one olive tree from destruction
or one schoolgirl who lost her way to school and found
herself in the gunsights of the soldiers of the
Occupation?
One of the answers to these questions is that the State
of Israel is able to silence and paralyze the entire
world because there was a Holocaust. The State of Israel
has acquired a permit to abuse an entire nation because
there is anti-Semitism. The State of Israel is bringing
existential disaster—economic, social and human, on its
citizens and on its subjects and no one dares to stop it
because once there was Hitler. And all that while the
survivors of the Holocaust are suffering the ignominy of
hunger in this country.
This evening we must appeal to the world for help in
ridding ourselves of the shame. This evening we must
explain to the world that if it wants to rescue the
people of Israel and the Palestinian people from the
imminent holocaust that threatens all of us it is
necessary to condemn the policy of occupation, the
dominion of death must be stopped in its tracks. All war
criminals who put away their uniforms and set out to
travel in the world must be arrested, tried and
imprisoned instead of being allowed to enjoy the
pleasures of freedom while they are still dragging
behind them a jingling cashbox full of war-crimes.
And the time has come for us to stop handing our
children over to an educational establishment that
plants in them false and racist values and teaches them
that their contribution to society is summed up in the
abuse and killing of other people’s children. The time
has come for us to explain to them that the local
population of this place is not divided into Jews and
non-Jews as is written in their school-books, but into
human beings who want to live in peace and quiet in
spite of everything, such as Bassam Aramin and many
others like him, who if not for the racial laws that
restrict their movements would be standing with us
today, and people who have lost their humanity and take
pleasure in destruction and devastation. And the time
has come for us to tell our children where they are
living.
Today, while the entire civilized world enjoys
slandering and smearing the Palestinian education
system, there is no school-book in Israel that presents
a picture of a Palestinian as a modern ordinary person.
There is no school-book in Israel that presents a map
that shows the true borders of the State. There is no
school-book in Israel in which the word “occupation”
appears. Our children are conscripted into the army of
occupation without knowing the place in which they are
living and without knowing its history and its people.
They join the army imbued with hate and fear. Our
children are educated to see everyone who is not Jewish
as the Goy, the Other, who generation after generation
seeks to destroy us. This education makes it easy for
the military establishment to turn children into
monsters.
Therefore the only way to prevent our children from
becoming tools in the hands of the machine of
destruction is to teach them the history of this place,
to draw for them its borders, to help them to know the
neighbours, their culture, their customs, their courtesy
and their rights on the land where they live and lived
for many generations before the Zionist Pioneers arrived
at the Promised Land of Israel. And above all to teach
them not to submit to the State, not to respect its
authority, because the State is ruled by petty thieves
and base opportunists who do not control their sexual
and other impulses even in the most dire times and run
this country according to the laws of the Mafia. You
killed one of mine - I’ll kill a hundred of yours. You
threw a home-made bomb at me—I’ll drop on you a hundred
of the most elaborate and destructive bombs in the world
that will leave no trace of you or your family or your
neighbours. You burned one of my cars so I’ll burn one
of your cities. That is the logic of the criminal
world.
This evening we must think about those who are condemned
to death in the next year, and of those who are
condemned to fall into crime under the cover of the law
and the uniform. We must rescue all of them. We must
teach all of them not to obey orders that, even if they
are legal according to the race laws of this State, are
manifestly inhuman, clearly.
And above all, this evening we must stop for a moment,
all of us, and look into the face of little Abir Aramin,
her head shot from behind, whose murderer will never
face judgement in this country and will never be
punished in any way he deserves, and ask ourselves,
Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of her
cheek.***
* The literal meanings of the girls’ Hebrew and Arabic
names.
** Ezekiel 22:4.
*** Anna Akhmatova
http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/speech-by-nurit-peled-elhanan-at-the-tel-aviv-demonstration-commemorating-40-years-of-the-occupation-20070617.html
See also:
International Women's Day address
&
Bereaved Parents for Peace
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