[E-rundbrief] Info 638 - Women and Children in Gaza and Israel

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 638 - Nurit Peled-Elhanan (Women in Black): In the 
State of Israel the Jewish mother is disappearing. (Children dying in 
Gaza; protests of Women in Black in Israel and worldwide).

Bad Ischl, 5.1.2008

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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In the State of Israel the Jewish mother is disappearing

Nurit Peled-Elhanan -- Women in Black 28/12/2007

http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=24294

I thank Women in Black for inviting me to speak here today. At this 
hour, I would like to dedicate my words to the children of the Gaza 
Strip, who are withering slowly from hunger and disease, and to their 
mothers, who continue to bring children into the world, to feed and to 
educate them wonderfully. The rate of literacy in the Gaza Strip today 
stands at 92% -  among the highest in the world, and all that in the 
most terrible concentration camp on earth, the residents of which are 
being strangled as the civilized world looks on in silence.

I wish we could celebrate today the conclusion of the activities of the 
Women in Black. But the truth is that their activities are becoming 
harder every day. In a state in which the gods of death and money rule, 
in a state where the economy is flourishing while the children are 
hungry, where the mythological heroes are fearless murderers, where the 
leaders openly and publicly admit that human life is not worth a fig in 
their eyes, in a state that sends its sons to be killed without even 
bothering to invent a reason for it, in a state that imprisons millions 
of human beings in ghettoes and enclosures and kills them slowly, the 
persistent quiet voice of the Women in Black is the strongest 
conscientious voice of refusal. The Women in Black are example and 
paragon of refusal to worship the god of death, refusal to obey the 
racist laws of the State of Israel. The action of The Women in Black is 
in itself the rejection of racist education and the routine systematic 
poisoning of minds that sustains the schools, the media and the speeches 
of the nation's elected representatives.

In the State of Israel the Jewish mother is facing extinction. The 
Jewish mother of today is closed off in neighbourhoods like Mea 
Shearim*, there the mothers protect their children from the army, and 
outside those neighbourhoods the voice of the Jewish mother is not heard 
except in organizations like Women in Black, which the society in 
general condemns and vilifies. The State of Israel condemns and vilifies 
the voice of the Jewish mother, which is the voice of compassion, 
tolerance and dialogue. The State of Israel does all it can to ensure 
that that voice will be muted and silenced forever.

Outside the peace organizations that are considered in the general 
discourse to be marginal sleepwalkers and extreme leftists, the voice of 
the Jewish mother ceased long ago to be a maternal voice. The Israeli 
mother as she exists today embodies a motherhood that is distorted, 
lost, confused and sick. The Jewish mothers like Yochabad the mother of 
Moses; like Rachel who wept for her children and refused to be 
comforted; like Mother Courage; the mother who cannot find solace and 
healing in the death of the children of another mother, have been 
replaced by mothers who are nothing but golems that have turned on their 
creators and are more terrible and cruel than they, who dedicate their 
wombs to the apartheid state and to the occupation army, who educate 
their children in uncompromising racism and are prepared to sacrifice 
the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders' megalomania, 
greed and bloodthirstiness. Those mothers are also to be found among the 
teachers and the educators of our day. And only the women who stand here 
week after week, in the rain and the sun, they are the one and only 
reminder that the voice of the other motherhood, the natural one, has 
not completely disappeared from the face of this wasteland that had once 
been the Holy Land.

Few are the parents in Israel who admit to themselves that the murderers 
of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olives and poisoners of 
wells are none other than their own beautiful sons and daughters, their 
children who have been educated in this place over the years in the 
school of hatred and racism. The children who have learned for 18 years 
to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbours, the 
gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam -- a fear 
that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass 
murderers. And not only do those boys and girls kill and torment; they 
do so with the full support of Mom, with the full appreciation of Dad, 
encouraged by this entire nation, which does not so much as raise an 
eyebrow at the deaths of children, of old and of disabled people. A 
nation that rallies around pilots who do not feel a thing except a bump 
on the wing** when they drop bombs on entire families and crush them to 
death.

In this hell in which we live, in the daily inferno under which stirs 
and grows the underground kingdom of dead children, the role of the 
Women in Black, the mothers and the grandmothers who stand at this 
square*** and in similar squares all over the world, is to be the 
guardian of sane natural motherhood and to ensure that its voice is not 
silenced and does not disappear from the face of the Earth. To remind a 
world that has lost its human image that we were all made in His Image; 
consistently and tirelessly to say that still, despite the apartheid 
Wall, despite the cruel siege of Gaza, despite the wars without cause, 
and in the face of the fury of the rulers of this country, all of whom 
down to the last one are criminals against humanity, the voice of women 
and mothers -- the voice of compassion, justice and hope -- will not be 
silenced. More power to you.

* An ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Jerusalem most of whose 
residents do not recognize the State of Israel and most of whom do not 
serve in the Israeli armed forces -- trans.

** The reference is to Israeli air force pilot and former IDF 
Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz, who, when asked by a journalist -- shortly 
after the Israeli air force dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment 
building in the Gaza Strip killing several civilians -- what he felt as 
a pilot when he dropped a bomb, replied "I feel a slight bump on the 
wing when the bomb is released" -- trans.

*** Paris Square in Jerusalem

-- 

Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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