The
Suffering Palestinian Women Undergo Every Day
By Nurit Peled-Elhanan
30 March, 2006
Mostlywater.org
[The following is the speech Nurit Peled-Elhanan delivered at the
European Parliament, Strasbourg, on March 8 on the occasion of International
Women's Day.]
Thank
you for inviting me to this day. It is always an honor and a pleasure
to be here, among you.
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 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 USA.
This is because the so-called
free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
Great France of la liberté
l'égalité et la fraternité is scared of little
girls with headscarves, Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim
womb. 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.
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 in 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 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 are 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 cooperation is and
Israeli racist and 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 in 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, had asked:
Why does that streak o blood,
rip the petal of you cheek?