'These Palestinian women are my sisters'

Catholic New Times, April 24, 2005

The following is a speech delivered by Nurit Peled-Elhanan on International Women's Day, in the European Parliament at Strasbourg. Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli woman whose son was killed by a suicide bomber.

Thank you for inviting me to this day. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you. 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 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 wouldn'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 U.S.

This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.

Great France of la liberte, l'egalite et la fraternite is scared of little girls with head scarves, Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb and its ministers call it 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.

Palestinian suffering

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--the 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 in at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at 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 and Homeland, 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 are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset, just 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 education to believe that 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.