Gaza, Haifa, Somalia, Colombia, Srebrenica: Nurit Elhanan's "Women" at the Euro Parliament

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

Correction: Nine years have passed since I worked in eastern Bosnia in 1997. In July 1995 the mass killings took place there, in the town of Srebrenica. I also remember the quiet and private sheroism of two women whom I met there in early '97 in the course of my work. I want to thank those ladies. The first rushed up to us just outside Srebrenica's municipal building. She had the grace and courage to walk right over and personally welcome home the Bosnian Muslim man with us on his first return. I do not recall his name but he was the first Muslim member of Srebrenica's post-war municipal elections commission. Another member of our staff, a woman, had driven him over from Tuzla - across the IEBL. The IEBL is a boundary: the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, a border separating mostly Muslim parts of Bosnia from the eastern region's self-styled Bosnian Serb Republic - Republika Srpska. The second lady I met just before Orthodox Easter. I was walking in the center of Srebrenica when she intently crossed the main street to meet me. This wasn't far from the Dom Kultura (Cultural Center) building. She handed me a beautiful, hand-painted Easter egg, a real, edible egg, and I accepted it from her with a thank-you in her language and a smile. Srebrenica's a very small town. Yet even the whole world is small in many ways, especially once people begin to know each other. I was deeply touched by and will not forget the kindness at the root of these small yet expansive acts of willingness and courage shown by two women whose names I do not know; women I've yet to meet again.

Last March 8 (International Women's Day) in her speech to the European Parliament, Israeli educator Nurit Peled-Elhanan - mother of a 5 - correction: 13 year old daughter killed by a suicide bomber - posed a question made eternal by the writing of the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966; real name Anna Andreyevna Gorenko). "Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your cheek?"

Nurit Elhanan's comments here about motherhood and the womb draw attention to this masculinist idea of 'womb as political demographic enemy', the verbal expression of which, sadly, I've witnessed in my international human rights work, often or usually expressed by men from their exclusively male positions of political and/or religious authority.

The "Muslim womb" is hardly the only perceived enemy. On a personal tip, the same attitude's been in the U.S. and the Americas since Columbus arrived in 1492, followed by his son's arrival a short time later with his first cargo to the Americas of captured Africans. In recent United States' experience the hostility toward "other wombs" and the fertility of "others" - both female and male - has included forced sterilisation and sterilisation under vastly uninformed consent. A nurse in Pennsylvania once asked whether I wished to be sterilised. At that moment I was in active labour no less, and thank goodness with no drugs by choice. My immediate, unfiltered and exact reply was "HELL NO."

I received Elhanan's remarks as forwarded by Paola Manduca from Sami Ramadani of London. Paola shared them on an email list in preparation for last spring's Women's assembly of the 2006 European Social Forum in Atena (Athens, Greece). In the same vein we ask your support and signature on this online petition for the Kampala Resolution on Women, Peace and Conflict. Thank you. Peace.

                                                 Women

                             Nurit Peled-Elhanan

"Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always
an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the
European Parliament).

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 country are
the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate
my speech to Miriam Raban 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. [continued below]

Women, by Nurit Peled-Elhanan (cont'd)

... 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 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 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-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 everyday, 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
ofwomen 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 ofthe 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 degreethat 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
willnot let him be the one whose life is cheaper than
oil, whose future isless 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. 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,
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 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. Idon'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--asked:

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

Comments

[antonia]

Hi,i got here by the catalogue of feminist blogs and i really enjoyed to read your blog and the mention to Nurit Peled-Elhanan's speech.
I will visit this blog in the future.
PD: excuse my bad english and my bad draft ,i'm chilean and i'm not used to write in english or speak it.