Why does that streak of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?

>Professor Avraham Oz Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature,

>University of Haifa 2105 Eshkol Tower, Mount Carmel, 31905 Haifa, Israel

>Office Tel +972-4-8240672 Office Fax +972-4-8249713 Home Tel +972-3-5609627

>Home Fax +972-1533-5609627 Mobile +972-50-7220783 Email:

><mailto:avitaloz_at_research.haifa.ac.il> avitaloz_at_research.haifa.ac.il

>

>Women

>By Nurit Peled-Elhanan International Women's day,

>The European Parliament, Strasbourg, March 8. 2005

>

>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 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 Gazza 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 head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb

>which ans 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 turn 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 homogeneous 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 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 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 of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?

>
Received on Wed Jul 20 2005 - 02:08:36 CDT