[WCUSP] Israeli mother's exceptional speech: Education or Mind Infection?

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

Dr. Nurit's speech given at Connecticut College, New  London, CT 09/27/06


Below is a powerful speech by an Israeli  mother who lost her daughter by a 
Palestinian suicide bomber and her two sons  refuse to serve in the Israeli 
army. She blames Israeli atrocious policies  towards Palestinians for the problem 
in the Middle East.  
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a Lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew  
University in Jerusalem specializing in discourse in Israeli education with  
emphasis on visual and verbal presentation of Palestinian and non-western Jews.  In 
September 1997, Nurit's daughter Samarder was killed by a Palestinian suicide  
bomber. She and her family are members of the Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved 
 Families for Peace. Her two elder sons are active in the peace movements of 
the  Refusenik and Combatants for Peace, a new movement of Israeli and 
Palestinian ex  fighters. Dr. Peled-Elhanan is the recipient of the European 
Parliament 2001  Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and Freedom of Thought. She is now 
touring the  US together with a Palestinian women (Hanan Abu Ghosh) who lost her 
17 year old  brother to Israeli gunfire.

Education or mind  infection?
By Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Speech _http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/_ 
(javascript:ol('http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/');) 

I  would like to dedicate these words to all the Palestinian boys and girls, 
and to  all the Lebanese boys and girls, and to all the Iraqi boys and girls 
who have  been massacred by mind-infected Israeli and American soldier boys, 
and who have  recently joined my own little girl in the underground kingdom of 
dead children,  which is growing under our feet as I speak. I would like to 
tell them not to  worry: “You will be well received there, children, and no one 
will hurt you just  because you wandered off on your way to school or because 
you wore a scarf on  your head or because you lived in a certain place. Rest in 
peace, everyone is  equally worthy in your new world. This is the world where 
Israeli children dwell  side by side with Palestinian children. There they 
lay, victims and murderers,  whose bloods have long been absorbed by the holy 
land which has always been  indifferent to blood. There they rest, all of them, 
victims of  deceit.

All of you dead children were deceived, because your death has  achieved 
nothing at all and the world goes on living as if your blood had never  been shed. 
Because the leaders of the world keep playing their murderous games,  using 
you as their dice and our grief as fuel for their killing machines.  Because 
Children are abstract entities for generals and grief is a political  tool. 
Living at both sides, that of the victims and that of the killers, I keep  asking 
myself, what are the means by which good Israeli children are turned into  
murdering monsters, what are the means by which they are so mind-infected as to  
kill and torture and humiliate other children, their parents and grandparents, 
 and sacrifice their own life for nothing but the folly and megalomania of 
their  chiefs. In the so-called Western enlightened world everyone feels very  
well-founded when they blame Islam for suicide bombing and terror. But who 
would  ever blame Judaism for murder? 
And yet, Ulta Orthodox Jewish children who have never left Brooklyn know that 
 to kill Arabs is a 'mitzva' (holy commandment) for they are 'vilde hayeths'  
(wild beasts). And Israeli children actually commit the crimes of slaughter 
and  tporture. Neither Judaism nor Islam nor any religion for that matter are 
the  cause for murder and terror. Racist education is. American imperialism is, 
and  Israeli ruthless regime of occupation is. The women and children who 
suffer most  from western violence today are Muslim women but racism has its way 
and the  blame for their suffering is attributed to their being  muslim.

The western world today is infected with fear of Islam  and of the muslim 
womb. Great France of liberte egalite and fraternite is scared  of little 
head-scarved girls, Jewish Israel calls in public speeches and  schoolbooks the Arab 
citizens of Israel a demographic nightmare and the enemy  from within. As for 
the Palestinians refugees living under occupation, they are  defined in 
Israeli History schoolbooks as a 'problem to be solved". Not long ago  the Jews were 
a problem to be solved.

This in spite the  fact that the people who are destroying the world today 
are not muslims. The  people who are using the most sophisticated disastrous 
weapons to kill thousand  of innocent civilians are not Muslims. They are 
Christian, and  Jewish. Nevertheless people who belong to the Judeo-Christian 
cultures, who  support American-British and Israeli crimes against humanity, and 
particularly  against Muslims all over the world, people who send their children 
to fight  these ruthless useless wars in the name of democracy and freedom 
which are cover  names for greed and megalomania, dare call themselves enlightened 
and blame it  all on some imaginary clash of civilizations.. What does this 
fear-stricken  world offer as a solution to Palestinian , Iraqi or Afgan people 
who are  harassed, abused, tortured and famished by western crimes and 
exploitation? The  general offer this enlightened world gives them is: Be like us. 
Constitute a  Democracy like ours, embrace our values which despise you, which 
consider you an  inferior primitive lot to be cultivated or cleansed away.

This,  ladies and gentlemen is the attitude that permit American soldiers to 
rape,  torture and kill muslim men women and children by the thousands, that 
permits  Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women to strip in front of their 
children  for security reasons, jailers to keep them in inhuman conditions, 
without  necessary hygienic aids, without clean water or clean mattresses and 
separate  them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To block their way to 
education,  to confiscate their lands, to destroy their water wells, to 
uproot their trees  and to prevent them from working their fields. This is what 
permits Israeli  pilots to drop a hundred bombs of one ton a day on the most 
crowded area in the  world -Gaza. This is what permits Israel to issue racist laws 
that separate  mothers from fathers and children. Palestinian Iraqi and Afgan 
women are mothers  like me. And when they lose a child, even if it is one of 
12, their pain is  equal to mine. But in addition to losing their children 
they also lose their  homes and their livelihood and their future because the 
world does not listen to  their sufferings and does not punish their murderers. 
Their honour as women and  mothers is crushed. Their identity is destroyed and 
their cry is not heard.  their faith and customs, their centuries-old ways of 
life are disregarded and  despised.

Not only American soldiers but also Israeli soldiers  who actually perform 
massacres of 'Arabs' - Palestinian or Lebanese - may never  see an Arab human 
face until they are drafted to the army, but they learn, for  12 long years, 
that these people are primitive, bear children in order to send  them to the 
streets and throw stones at our peace-keeping soldiers, uneducated  because they 
don't receive our education, conniving and dirty because they have  different 
notions about politeness, they dress differently and cover their heads  with 
different pieces of cloth. Well, from my experience there are many  more Kafiehs 
in the camp of peace lovers than there are kippas. Israeli children  are 
deprived from knowing their immediate neighbours, their history and their  culture 
and their merits. Israeli children are educated to see their neighbours  as 
an unwanted element. This is not education, this is mind  infection.

The scientist Richard Dawkins was the first to speak about  viruses of the 
mind. Children, because their minds are gullible and open to  almost any 
suggestion, are not immune to mental infections of all sorts of  propaganda and 
fashion. They are easily persuaded to pierce their faces and  tattoo their bottoms, 
to turn their hats around and bare their bellies, to  believe in angels and 
fairies. They are equally easy to acquire political  beliefs and to appropriate 
mental maps which will later influence their  decisions on the question of 
the future borders of the state and on the  necessity of war. All of Our 
children are mind-infected from an early age. So  that by the time they are old 
enough to become real soldiers, they have already  learned to be good soldiers, 
which means their minds are totally infected and  they are incapable of 
questioning the 'truth' that has been inculcated to  them. 
This is part of the explanation one can give to the terrible deeds that are  
committed today by good Israeli boys, who are characterized once and again as  
"people of values". Therefore it is high time to ask, what values are these? 
The  following lines are part of a personal preface by Tal Sela, one of my 
university  students to his term-paper, which included the analysis of a History  
textbook:

On the 5th of September 1997 I found myself in LEbanon , on a  rescuing 
mission . All my friends were in the battle, 12 soldiers were killed.  The 
following days I was happy: " I am alive, I survived" I said to myself.  However, a 
year later I was in deep depression. Sad and morose. I decided to  consult a 
psychologist. After a few sessions I was able to gather up my forces  again, both 
physical and moral. I could reorganize my thoughts. Then I  understood that 
the mental crisis I had was in fact a moral crisis, a crisis of  consciousness. 
What I actually felt was frustration, shame and anger. … How  could I be so 
gullible and let myself be duped? How can I explain that a man of  peace, 
exposes himself to such a morbid experience of his own free will? Today,  like 
every two weeks, I drove peace activists to the military check-points of  the 
Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. I saw an officer put  tight 
handcuffs on a taxi driver because he failed to obey the soldiers' order  to 
park here and not there. "We told him a thousand times" the soldiers said.  The 
man was lying on the ground in the worst heat of the summer, thirsty, for  
hours on end. His friend was luckier: He had to stand on his feet, in a cell,  
without handcuffs. What pushes these young Israeli boys to play the rôle of  
supreme judges until they lose all judgment? In my opinion it is the Grand  
Zionist Narrative which serves as a collective conscience to the whole Israeli  
society, explicitly as well as implicitly. This grand narrative is the system of 
 values that makes us belong to this particular collective.

This is the  system that dictates the relationships between us and the 
Palestinians. How else  can one explain young people who were educated to love their 
neighbour as they  love themselves killing their neighbours, destroying their 
educational  institutions, their libraries and their hospitals, for no 
apparent reason other  than their being neighbours? The only explanation is that 
their minds are  infected by parents, teachers and leaders, who convince them 
that the others are  not as human as we are, and therefore killing them is not 
real killing; it has  other legitimating names such as "cleansing" "purifying", 
"punishment",  "operation", "mission", "campaign" and "war". Although I speak 
about Israeli  boys this is not an Israeli affair because, as you know, the 
epidemic is  worldwide. My nephew, Doroni, 7 years old, who lives in the US, 
came home on  Halloween day and said he wanted to be a soldier, and then to go to 
Iraq and  save America. How many American young men, ignorant as he is of the 
absurdity of  this statement, actually went to Iraq and died there without 
knowing why, but  with the words "save America" on their lips? The question is, 
how were these  false values imprinted on their minds and how can they be 
erased?

The  human psyche, says Dawkins, has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry 
vendetta  across generations and the tendency to fasten group labels on people 
rather than  see them as individuals. We all suffer because of labels, but 
only those of us  who died because of labels have realized that the way to fight 
labels is to  refuse labels. The way to defeat false value systems is to 
expose them. The  viruses of the mind are only partially weakened by young people 
like Tal and  other Israeli refusniks such as 'Combatants for Peace'. But most 
of our mind  infected children would not be free of the grip of those viruses 
until they find  their final rest in the evergrowing, underground kingdom of 
dead children . Only  there will they realize that is doesn't matter whether 
their head was bare or  not in a synagogue or a church or a mosque, whether 
they were circumcised or  not, whether they pronounced forbidden words, ate pig 
or cow or whether they had  a hot chocolate after their salami pizza just 
before they were blown up by  someone who didn't. Israeli, American, English, 
Italian mothers raise their  children with all the love and care in order to 
sacrifice them to the god of  death, as if their uterus is a national or rather an 
international asset. and  fathers urge their children to commit themselves to 
armies whose interests have  nothing to do with defense. And when these 
children die for the profits of  somebody else their parents bear it with dignity and 
pride, as they were taught,  put their dead children's photographs on the 
mantelpiece and sigh: He was so  handsome in uniform. It is time to tell these 
parents that no-one is andsome in  the uniform of brutality. It is time to tell 
them uniforms and ranks and medals  have become ugly. Tell them their dignity 
and pride are misplaced.  
It is time to tell Jewish people that the only way to discourage  
anti-Semitism is by condemning the only government in the world who deliberately  sends 
young Jewish boys and girls to their certain death and who persecutes to  the 
point of genocide a whole Semitic nation, explain to them that it is the  
Jewish government and the actions of its army, not some primordial hatred for  the 
Jewish race, which are the reasons for the invention of the new sign we  often 
see in pro-Palestinian demonstration, where the Star of David is equated  
with the swastika.

It is a terribly hard task for people who  were educated in Israel or in the 
USA or in any other 'western' 'democratic'  country, to admit we were raised 
on false racist values. On heterophobia. The  only thing that can enhance such 
a change of spirit is the constant image of the  mutilated small bodies of the 
victims of these values . Tomorrow is Yom Kippur,  the holiest day for the 
Jews. On this day people are required to ask  forgiveness. Not to forgive but to 
try and be forgiven. I would like to quote  one stanza from a poem written by 
the late Hanoh Levin, one of Israel's greatest  playwrights, in the 1970s:

Dear Father, when you stand on my grave
Old  and tired and very lonely,
And you see how they bury me in the ground  -
Ask me to forgive you my father.

We must all ask our children's  forgiveness for not being more alert, for not 
fighting hard enough to keep our  promises for a better world, for not 
refusing the evil viruses before and for  letting them be the victims of the 
horrible, mental infection we are all  suffering from, to look at their innocent, 
astonished, disillusioned small faces  and ask ourselves: why does that streak of 
blood rip the petal of their  cheek??? 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20061029/d42000d0/attachment-0001.html