Sunday, April 23, 2006

Italian, Israeli, American, British Mothers Sacrifice Children For Fake Ideologies to Enrich the Powerful

The ANNOTICO Report

Preface: The best way to Support our Troops, both American and Italian is to BRING THEM HOME.

And Don't Send the Troops to IRAN or ANY other place as "canon fodder", to promote or protect Corporate Greed!!!

Jamaican Journalist Wayne Brown engages in a grande "mea culpa" regarding the Middle East's seminal casas belli: the tragedy of the Palestinian people, reduced to semi-vagrancy in their own land.

He uses as the foundation for his argument, mostly Jewish jornalists and authors, but most persuasively the speech of an Israeli woman whose 13-year-old son was killed by a suicide bomber.

Brown says as far back as the 70s, in the wake of the '73 Arab-Israeli war that surely the world, in collective atonement for the unspeakable excrescence of the Holocaust, owed the Jews a special indulgence, a greater than normal understanding and tolerance of the suppressed hysteria which so obviously lies behind Israeli militancy and Israeli imperialism in our time?

And even when, over the next two decades, Israel's brutalisation of its Palestinian vassals increased (or I became increasingly aware of it), my reaction was mainly one of depressed resignation. The evil that men do lives after them. The evil of the Nazi atrocity lived on in the immense damage it couldn't help but wreak upon the psyches of the Jewish generations following their own.

But Brown says now, this was a failure of intellect on my part. In the sphere of the emotions, understanding may tend us insensibly towards tolerance; but they are not necessarily the same thing.

It took me much too long to see the - admittedly, difficult - intellectual task of holding fast, at one and the same time, to two quite contradictory attitudes to Israel: compassion for the damaged Israeli national psyche, and condemnation of the merciless Israeli imperialism it has produced.

One reason for that default has been the writer's preoccupation with the grave and gathering danger posed not just to Iraq but to the world by the cabal of barbarian raiders currently occupying the White House.

But there's been another, unarticulated reason. As a student of the Nazi era, I've long 'felt' for the survivors of the Holocaust - and, by extension, for their Israel, with its dream of security and an end to the 'immemorial wanderings' of the tribe.

This sympathy derives from parallels with my own Caribbean's history. Fully 170 years after the abolition of West Indian slavery, that long-gone abomination is still often cited, in explanation and excuse of distortions in the West Indian psyche - distortions which persist to this day.

Brown's view started to change a few years ago, when a Jamaican friend returned from a trip to Jerusalem and wrote me about it. Her e-mail described 'the bone dryness of one spot [on the Palestinian side] directly opposite the lush greenery of Israeli-engineered irrigated farms....On the beige sandy [Palestinian] hillside, the inevitable poor, surviving the heat and the dust under cloth-covered hovels...

Everywhere she went, she said, she had been made aware of the inequity in the distribution of water between the Palestinian and Israeli's sides.The distribution of water. In the desert.  Imagine that.

So, finally, in my imagination, the obscenity being vented by the Israelis - their turn now! - upon the Palestinians became much more than a depressing fact; became a living reality. And with it came the difficult realisation referred to above: that compassion and one's share of our collective historical guilt for that unspeakable demoralisation of our species, the Holocaust, could not excuse Israel's own brutal oppression of the Other now.

The murderer may himself be a victim (a case often argued by defence attorneys in the west today); but he is still a murderer.
Apropos all this, last week I came across two essays, each striking for, respectively, its geopolitical and moral clarity.

The first, by Tony Judt, the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was a dispassionate defence of another essay, The Israel Lobby, co-authored by Harvard's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, which attracted widespread vituperation in the US as anti-Semitic when it first appeared.

The Israel Lobby argues two simple - and to my mind, self-evident - points: that America's reflexive support of Israel has often run counter to its own interests, and that US foreign policy has long been distorted by its domestic Israel lobby.

Judt - himself a Jew - also finds both assertions defensible. 'Some would prefer', he writes ('A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy', NYT, April 19), 'when explaining American actions overseas, to point a finger at the domestic 'energy lobby'. Others might blame the influence of Wilsonian idealism, or imperial practices left over from the cold war. But that a powerful Israel lobby exists could hardly be denied by anyone who knows how Washington works.'

Moreover, the Israel Lobby 'has been rather successful: Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid and American responses to Israeli behaviour have been overwhelmingly uncritical or supportive.'

Judt is less sure that pressure to support Israel distorts American foreign policy. But he indicts the 'silence' of the US mainstream media on the subject - a silence, he concludes, born of fear of being labelled anti-Semitic.

In support of the conclusions reached by The Israel Lobby (the essay), Judt enlists the support of: David Aaronovitch, a London Times columnist who wrote, 'I sympathise with the Palestinians desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the US to understand the plight of the Palestinians'.

The Israeli journalist Tom Segev, who, discussing the Mearsheimer-Walt essay, acknowledged: 'They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests.'

.Israel's own 'impeccably conservative' Jerusalem Post, which described Bush Administration hawk Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defence, as 'devoutly pro-Israel'. ('Are we,' enquires Judt, 'to accuse Israelis, too, of 'anti-Zionism'?)

Judt thinks America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is bad for Israel: 'by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences.'

And he ends with this warning: 'Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East - and its enduring implications for our standing there - has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all.' (Italics added.)

Future Americans will be puzzled to understand 'why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue?'

The other essay was in fact the text of a speech by Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli woman whose 13-year-old son was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. A member of the Families' Forum, a group of Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost their children to the conflict, Dr Peled addressed the International Women's Day in Strasbourg earlier this month. One day last week, a Jamaican friend sent me her speech.

It was exceptional in its moral clarity and outrage. Dr Peled's transcendence of the natural promptings-to-revenge of both grief and ethnic solidarity is a triumph of the human spirit, and ennobles us all. It also reminded this writer that Israeli imperialism is by no means unanimously supported by those in whose defence it claims to act; and that in fact, because of its history and present circumstances, Israel is a theatre where one of the profoundest moral dramas of our time continues to be played out.

I got in touch with Dr Peled and got her permission to reproduce her address here. Slightly edited for length, this was (what my Jamaican friend called) Dr Peled's cri de coeur:

'Thank you for inviting me to this today. 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 country 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 their murder.

'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 localised. I don't know what is non-localised 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, йgalite, 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 Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from 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 into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at gunpoint 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 realise 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 into one homogenous group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who 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 breastfed 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 terrorised 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 to hail Mama Courage in public. Never to be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers..

'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 the Western democracies that despise them and their kind.

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 allows American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that gives 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 breastfed 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. 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?'

(Footnote: Dr Peled's speech comes against the backdrop of a decision, by the Bush Administration and the Israeli government to starve the Palestinian people into submission for the 'crime' of electing Hamas. Unless oil-rich Iran really has the political will to rescue them with a version of the Marshall plan (which means in turn that the Iranian regime will need to survive the massive attack which the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice cabal means to unleash upon Iran, sometime no doubt before the US Congressional elections in November), the world will have to brace itself to witness what is going to be the Palestinians' truly piteous fate. WB.)

The complete article follows.

FACING THE PALESTINIAN TRAGEDY

The Jamaica Observer

Wayne Brown
Sunday, April 23, 2006

[Wayne Brown is a black Jamaican journalist]

As the reader may have noticed, this column has only infrequently referred to what is of course the Middle East's seminal casas belli: the tragedy of the Palestinian people, reduced to semi-vagrancy in their own land.

One reason for that default has been the writer's preoccupation with the grave and gathering danger posed not just to Iraq but to the world by the cabal of barbarian raiders currently occupying the White House. But there's been another, unarticulated reason. As a student of the Nazi era, I've long 'felt' for the survivors of the Holocaust - and, by extension, for their Israel, with its dream of security and an end to the 'immemorial wanderings' of the tribe.

This sympathy derives from parallels with my own Caribbean's history. Fully 170 years after the abolition of West Indian slavery, that long-gone abomination is still often - and justifiably - cited, half in explanation and half in excuse of distortions in the West Indian psyche - distortions which persist to this day.

Then, why is it, I would argue, that we here cannot seem to afford the same compassionate understanding to today's Jews, many of them within living memory of the first methodical attempt by a superpower in the history of the world not merely to enslave a people but to exterminate them, as a race?

Think of that. And think, too, of the fundamental difference between the insults paid to us and them by history. As the late Eric Williams demonstrated in Capitalism and Slavery, the essential insult paid to the children of Africa by Europe's 'barbarian raiders' was to see them as limitlessly coercible as a source of cheap labour; both the evangelising humbug and the racist rationalisations followed afterwards, and were never really the point (though, it must be said, the former continues to succeed, spectacularly).

By contrast, the Nazis conceived of the Jews as evil, evil per se: as malignant viruses, to be expelled en masse from the blood of the human family.

Imagine that. And imagine the shell-shocked psyches of the survivors of that diagnosis, some of them still within living memory of the 'antidote' vented upon six million of their parents and siblings.

Surely you and I, surely the world, in collective atonement for the unspeakable excrescence of the Holocaust, owed them a special indulgence, a greater than normal understanding and tolerance of the suppressed hysteria which so obviously lies behind Israeli militancy and Israeli imperialism in our time?

I remember making this case to several of my own (passionately demurring) compatriots as far back as the 70s, in the wake of the '73 Arab-Israeli war. And even when, over the next two decades, Israel's brutalisation of its Palestinian vassals increased (or I became increasingly aware of it), my reaction was mainly one of depressed resignation. The evil that men do lives after them. The evil of the Nazi atrocity lived on in the immense damage it couldn't help but wreak upon the psyches of the Jewish generations following their own.

But this was a failure of intellect on my part. In the sphere of the emotions, understanding may tend us insensibly towards tolerance; but they are not necessarily the same thing.

It took me much too long to see that. Or to essay the - admittedly, difficult - intellectual task of holding fast, at one and the same time, to two quite contradictory attitudes to Israel: compassion for the damaged Israeli national psyche, and condemnation of the merciless Israeli imperialism it has produced.

I first understood this vividly a few years ago, when a Jamaican friend returned from a trip to Jerusalem and wrote me about it. Her e-mail described 'the bone dryness of one spot [on the Palestinian side] directly opposite the lush greenery of Israeli-engineered irrigated farms....On the beige sandy [Palestinian] hillside, the inevitable poor, surviving the heat and the dust under cloth-covered hovels without sides...

The Mount of Olives where an [Arab] urchin hands you a faded olive branch, not in peace but to collect a few shekels...'. And she told me how saddened she'd been by the glaring contrast between the quality of life on either side of 'the line'.

Everywhere she went, she said, she had been made aware of the inequity in the distribution of water between the Palestinian and Israeli's sides.
The distribution of water. In the desert.
Imagine that.

So, finally, in my imagination, the obscenity being vented by the Israelis - their turn now! - upon the Palestinians became much more than a depressing fact; became a living reality. And with it came the difficult realisation referred to above: that compassion and one's share of our collective historical guilt for that unspeakable demoralisation of our species, the Holocaust, could not excuse Israel's own brutal oppression of the Other now.

The murderer may himself be a victim (a case often argued by defence attorneys in the west today); but he is still a murderer.
Apropos all this, last week I came across two essays, each striking for, respectively, its geopolitical and moral clarity.

The first, by Tony Judt, the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was a dispassionate defence of another essay, The Israel Lobby, co-authored by Harvard's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, which attracted widespread vituperation in the US as anti-Semitic when it first appeared.

The Israel Lobby argues two simple - and to my mind, self-evident - points: that America's reflexive support of Israel has often run counter to its own interests, and that US foreign policy has long been distorted by its domestic Israel lobby.

Judt - himself a Jew - also finds both assertions defensible. 'Some would prefer', he writes ('A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy', NYT, April 19), 'when explaining American actions overseas, to point a finger at the domestic 'energy lobby'. Others might blame the influence of Wilsonian idealism, or imperial practices left over from the cold war. But that a powerful Israel lobby exists could hardly be denied by anyone who knows how Washington works.'

Moreover, the Israel Lobby 'has been rather successful: Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid and American responses to Israeli behaviour have been overwhelmingly uncritical or supportive.'
Judt is less sure that pressure to support Israel distorts American foreign policy. But he indicts the 'silence' of the US mainstream media on the subject - a silence, he concludes, born of fear of being labelled anti-Semitic.

In support of the conclusions reached by The Israel Lobby (the essay), Judt enlists the support of:
. David Aaronovitch, a London Times columnist who wrote, 'I sympathise with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the US to understand the plight of the Palestinians'.

. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev, who, discussing the Mearsheimer-Walt essay, acknowledged: 'They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests.'

. Israel's own 'impeccably conservative' Jerusalem Post, which described Bush Administration hawk Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defence, as 'devoutly pro-Israel'. ('Are we,' enquires Judt, 'to accuse Israelis, too, of 'anti-Zionism'?)

Judt thinks America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is bad for Israel: 'by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences.'

And he ends with this warning: 'Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East - and its enduring implications for our standing there - has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all.' (Italics added.)

Future Americans will be puzzled to understand 'why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue?'

The other essay was in fact the text of a speech by Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli woman whose 13-year-old son was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. A member of the Families' Forum, a group of Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost their children to the conflict, Dr Peled addressed the International Women's Day in Strasbourg earlier this month. One day last week, a Jamaican friend sent me her speech.

It was exceptional in its moral clarity and outrage. Dr Peled's transcendence of the natural promptings-to-revenge of both grief and ethnic solidarity is a triumph of the human spirit, and ennobles us all. It also reminded this writer that Israeli imperialism is by no means unanimously supported by those in whose defence it claims to act; and that in fact, because of its history and present circumstances, Israel is a theatre where one of the profoundest moral dramas of our time continues to be played out.

I got in touch with Dr Peled and got her permission to reproduce her address here. Slightly edited for length, this was (what my Jamaican friend called) Dr Peled's cri de coeur:
'Thank you for inviting me to this today. 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 country 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 their murder.

'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 localised. I don't know what is non-localised 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, йgalite, 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 Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from 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 into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at gunpoint 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 realise 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 into one homogenous group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who 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 breastfed 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 terrorised 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 to hail Mama Courage in public. Never to be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers..
'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 the Western democracies that despise them and their kind.

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 allows American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that gives 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 breastfed 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. 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?'

(Footnote: Dr Peled's speech comes against the backdrop of a decision, by the Bush Administration and the Israeli government to starve the Palestinian people into submission for the 'crime' of electing Hamas. Unless oil-rich Iran really has the political will to rescue them with a version of the Marshall plan (which means in turn that the Iranian regime will need to survive the massive attack which the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice cabal means to unleash upon Iran, sometime no doubt before the US Congressional elections in November), the world will have to brace itself to witness what is going to be the Palestinians' truly piteous fate. WB.)

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/

20060422T220000-0500_103211_OBS_FACING

_THE_PALESTINIAN_TRAGEDY_.asp

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