International Women's Day Address to the European Parliament
8 March 2005
by
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan,
the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide
bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997.
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 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-emocratic, 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 is 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 orderPalestinian 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` cries are
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 of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
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