Vorige week luisterde ik naar een schitterende toespraak van de joods-Israelische Nurit Peled. De dag erop interviewde ik haar en haar zoon. Dit weekeinde stuurde ze mij haar toespraak op. Tijdens de bijeenkomst was er nauwelijks Nederlandse pers. Nurit's verhaal valt buiten de officieel goedgekeurde consensus. van de commerciele massamedia. Dus ook al is ze slachtoffer van zowel Palestijns als joods-Israelisch terrorisme, haar stem mag in de zogeheten vrije pers niet gehoord worden. Dit had ze te vertellen:
'Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli peace activist, professor at Hebrew University, and is among the founders of the Bereaved Families for Peace. After the death of Elhanan's 13 year-old daughter in 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan 7.5.2008 Amsterdam
I would like to dedicate my words today to a young woman of thirty years old Miasar Abu Maatak, and to her children Rudeina and Hana, ages 3 and 6, to her son Salah age 4 and to her baby Musaab, age 15 months who were all killed on the 28.4.2008 by Israeli soldiers as they were eating in their home yard in Gaza. Four children and their mother have joined the evergrowing underground kingdom of dead children where my own little girl lies alongside Palestinian children in perfect equality.
Israel said it was sorry – as if it was a wrong move in a ping-pong game - but immediately blamed the Hamas, which was compared to Nazis. Foreign minister Zipi Livni said to the Jerusalem Post:
“I would expect that when Israeli civilians are harmed by deliberate Palestinian terrorism, people won't make a comparison between them and Palestinian civilians that are harmed during Israel's defense operations."
And the murderers? What about them? Do they know they have committed a crime? Do they toss and turn in their beds at night? Are they tormented by images of the small bodies that convulse and fall under their rifles, bombs and shells? Probably not. We know of no case in which an Israeli or any other soldier turned himself in and expressed remorse for his actions. This is the biggest success of Israeli education: the distinction between blood and blood, between a Jewish dead child and an Arab dead child, and the inculcating of the conviction that the murder of Palestinians and their children is not a crime. Everyone who enlists in the Israeli army knows that and is being prepared for that in 12 years of schooling.
However, no child is born evil. Not even Israeli children. The young men who killed the Al-Maatak family, like those who invaded the Centre for Remedial Education in Gaza and wrecked it to pieces, those who torture people in the checkpoints and order old women to undress at gun point, who harass and destroy and spread terror around them, were not born evil. They are all the product of education .
The cruelty that cannot be expressed in words, the orderly, ingenious abuse, that the best Jewish brains have been put to work planning and perfecting, did not emerge from a void. It is the fruit of systematic, deep, total education.Israel's children are educated within an uncompromisingly racist discourse. A racist discourse that does not stop at checkpoints, but governs all human relations in this country. Israel's children are educated to see in the evil that they are destined to implement immediately after the end of their schooling, a necessity of the reality in which they are called to fulfill their roles.For sixty years now, racism, heterophobia and megalomania have dictated our lives. Sixty years during which Israeli children are educated in racism of the type that has been unknown in the civilized world for decades. Sixty years during which they have learned to hate the neighbours just because they are neighbours, to fear them without knowing them, to equate them with Nazis, to see a quarter of the citizens of the State as a demographic danger and an enemy within, and to relate to the residents of the ghettos created by the policy of occupation as a problem that must be 'solved'. Only sixty years ago Jews were residents of ghettos and seen in the eyes of their oppressors as a problem that needed to be solved. Only sixty years ago the Jews were enclosed behind ugly concrete and electrified walls topped with watchtowers manned by erect armed figures, and deprived of the ability to make a living or to raise their children with dignity. Only sixty years ago racism exacted its price from the Jewish people. Today racism rules in the Jewish state, tramples people’s dignity underfoot and deprives them of liberty, condemns all of us to lives of hell. For forty years now the Jewish head has unceasingly been bowed in worship of racism while the Jewish mind is devising the most creative ways to devastate and demolish and destroy the holy land which has become a wasteland. That is what remains of the Jewish genius, once it becomes Israeli. Jewish compassion, Jewish mercy, Jewish cosmopolitan spirit, love of humanity and respect for the other have been long forgotten. Their place was claimed by hate and suspicion and racism. It was only racism that motivated the soldiers to kill innocent children and their parents in Gaza. It is only racism that motivates the drivers of bulldozers to demolish houses on top of their occupants, to destroy vineyards and fields, to uproot centuries-old olive trees. Only racism can invent roads on which circulation is classified on the basis of race, and it is only racism that motivates our children to humiliate women who could be their mothers and to abuse old people at the evil checkpoints, to strike young people their own age who, like them, want to drive with their families to bathe in the sea, and to look on impassively as women give birth on the road. It is only pure racism that motivates our best pilots to drop one-ton bombs on residential buildings in Gaza and it is only racism that permits those criminals to sleep well at night.
This racism has erected for itself a monument in its own image – the monument of an ugly, rigid, menacing and invasive concrete wall. A monument that proclaims to the whole world the banishment of shame and compassion from the holy land. Because racism eliminates shame. This wall is our wall of shame, it is testimony to the fact that we have turned from being a light unto the nations to “an object of disgrace to the nations and a mockery to all the countries.” **
And yet we succeed in packing endless daily suffering, hunger, malnutrition, children’s trauma, disablement, orphanhood and bereavement into one alienating word: “politics”?
And yet our children continue to strut and swagger in the uniforms of brutality that they wear when they serve in the army of slaughter and destruction?
And yet all the splendid institutions of the world stand aside and cannot do a thing to save one child from death or to remove one concrete block from the wall of shame? And yet none of the peace and human rights organizations is able to stop the jeeps of the Border Guards that come to terrify schoolchildren and to kill them, or to demolish houses on top of their occupants, to rescue one olive tree from destruction or one schoolgirl who lost her way to school and found herself in the gunsights of the soldiers of the Occupation?
The reason for this success is that the State of Israel is able to silence and paralyze the entire world because there was a Holocaust. The State of Israel has acquired a permit to abuse an entire nation because there is anti-Semitism. The State of Israel is bringing existential disaster – economic, social and human, on its citizens and on its subjects and no one dares to stop it because once there was Hitler. And all that while the survivors of the Holocaust are suffering the ignominy of hunger in the Jewish democracy of Israel.
This evening I want to appeal to you for help in ridding Israel of the shame. To explain to the world that if it wants to rescue the people of Israel and the Palestinian people from the imminent holocaust that threatens all of us it is necessary to condemn the policy of occupation, the dominion of death must be stopped in its tracks.
The time has come for us to stop handing our children over to an educational establishment that plants in them false and racist values and teaches them that their contribution to society is summed up in the abuse and killing of other people’s children. The time has come for us to reveal to them that the local population of the world is not divided into good Jews and Anti-Semitic non-Jews as is written in their school-books, but into human beings who want to live in peace and quiet in spite of everything, and to those who crave for war and bloodshed, and that both groups include Jews and non-Jews. Because Israel's children are educated to see international resolutions, laws and orders as empty utterances that do not apply to us because they were devised by non-Jews. Today, while the entire civilized world enjoys slandering and smearing the Palestinian education system, there is no school-book in Israel that presents a picture of a Palestinian as a modern ordinary human being. The only representations of Palestinian citizens and non-citizens are Primitive farmers or nomads – usually in the form of a caricature - refugees that go from nowhere to nowhere, and face-covered terrorists. There is no school-book in Israel that presents a map that shows the true borders of the State. Israel's children learn that the real geographical entity that belongs to us is the biblical promised Land of Israel, which includes parts of Jordan and Lebanon and of which the State of Israel is only a small and temporary part. There is no school-book in Israel in which the word “occupation” appears. Our children are conscripted into the army of occupation without knowing the place in which they are living and without knowing its history and its people. Israel's children know more about Europe their imagined homeland and the heart's desire of the rulers of the country than they do about the Middle East in which they live and from which more than half of the Israeli population derives its origins. Jewish children in the State of Israel are educated to legitimate past and present massacres of Palestinian in the name of the Jewish Democratic state and its vital need to keep a Jewish majority.
They join the army imbued with hate and fear. Our children are educated to see everyone who is not Jewish as the Goy, the Other, who generation after generation seeks to destroy us. This is not education, this is mind infection. And infected minds are very easy to manipulate and therefore very convenient for the military establishment which turns our children into monsters.
Therefore the only way to prevent our children from becoming tools in the hands of the machine of destruction is to teach them the real history of their region, to draw for them its real borders, to help them to know the neighbours, their culture, their customs, their courtesy, their beauty and their rights on the land where they live and lived for many generations before the Zionist Pioneers arrived at the Promised Land of Israel. And above all to teach them not to submit to the State, not to respect its authority, because the State is ruled by petty thieves and base opportunists who do not control their impulses even in the most dire times and run the country according to the laws of the Mafia. You killed one of mine - I’ll kill a hundred of yours. You threw a home-made bomb at me - I’ll drop on you a hundred of the most elaborate and destructive bombs in the world that will leave no trace of you or your family or your neighbours. You burned one of my cars so I’ll burn one of your cities. That is the logic of the criminal world.
This is the logic inculcated to Israeli children in their schools.
This evening we must think about those who are condemned to death in the next year, and of those who are condemned to fall into crime under the cover of the law and the uniform. We must rescue all of them. We must teach all of them not to obey orders that, even if they are legal according to the race laws of this State, are manifestly inhuman
Some young people like Israeli refusniks such as 'Combatants for Peace' have managed to free theselves from the virus of racism, 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. 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 handsome 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 in unnecessary wars 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 Holland, to admit we were raised on false racist values. On heterophobia and racism. 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 .Nevertheless, we must all ask our children's forgiveness for not being more alert, for not fighting sooner to keep our promises for a better world, and for letting them be the victims of the horrible, mental infection we are all suffering from. Our crying need today is to expose this racist system of education and to demand its revision. Unless we do that, very soon there will be nothing else to say, nothing else to write, nothing else to hear except for the muted cries of dead children.
"And I, my heart is dead, no longer is there prayeron my lips;
All strength is gone, andhope is no more.
Until when,
How much longer,
Until when?"
(Haim Nahman Bialik 1903)'
I would like to dedicate my words today to a young woman of thirty years old Miasar Abu Maatak, and to her children Rudeina and Hana, ages 3 and 6, to her son Salah age 4 and to her baby Musaab, age 15 months who were all killed on the 28.4.2008 by Israeli soldiers as they were eating in their home yard in Gaza. Four children and their mother have joined the evergrowing underground kingdom of dead children where my own little girl lies alongside Palestinian children in perfect equality.
Israel said it was sorry – as if it was a wrong move in a ping-pong game - but immediately blamed the Hamas, which was compared to Nazis. Foreign minister Zipi Livni said to the Jerusalem Post:
“I would expect that when Israeli civilians are harmed by deliberate Palestinian terrorism, people won't make a comparison between them and Palestinian civilians that are harmed during Israel's defense operations."
And the murderers? What about them? Do they know they have committed a crime? Do they toss and turn in their beds at night? Are they tormented by images of the small bodies that convulse and fall under their rifles, bombs and shells? Probably not. We know of no case in which an Israeli or any other soldier turned himself in and expressed remorse for his actions. This is the biggest success of Israeli education: the distinction between blood and blood, between a Jewish dead child and an Arab dead child, and the inculcating of the conviction that the murder of Palestinians and their children is not a crime. Everyone who enlists in the Israeli army knows that and is being prepared for that in 12 years of schooling.
However, no child is born evil. Not even Israeli children. The young men who killed the Al-Maatak family, like those who invaded the Centre for Remedial Education in Gaza and wrecked it to pieces, those who torture people in the checkpoints and order old women to undress at gun point, who harass and destroy and spread terror around them, were not born evil. They are all the product of education .
The cruelty that cannot be expressed in words, the orderly, ingenious abuse, that the best Jewish brains have been put to work planning and perfecting, did not emerge from a void. It is the fruit of systematic, deep, total education.Israel's children are educated within an uncompromisingly racist discourse. A racist discourse that does not stop at checkpoints, but governs all human relations in this country. Israel's children are educated to see in the evil that they are destined to implement immediately after the end of their schooling, a necessity of the reality in which they are called to fulfill their roles.For sixty years now, racism, heterophobia and megalomania have dictated our lives. Sixty years during which Israeli children are educated in racism of the type that has been unknown in the civilized world for decades. Sixty years during which they have learned to hate the neighbours just because they are neighbours, to fear them without knowing them, to equate them with Nazis, to see a quarter of the citizens of the State as a demographic danger and an enemy within, and to relate to the residents of the ghettos created by the policy of occupation as a problem that must be 'solved'. Only sixty years ago Jews were residents of ghettos and seen in the eyes of their oppressors as a problem that needed to be solved. Only sixty years ago the Jews were enclosed behind ugly concrete and electrified walls topped with watchtowers manned by erect armed figures, and deprived of the ability to make a living or to raise their children with dignity. Only sixty years ago racism exacted its price from the Jewish people. Today racism rules in the Jewish state, tramples people’s dignity underfoot and deprives them of liberty, condemns all of us to lives of hell. For forty years now the Jewish head has unceasingly been bowed in worship of racism while the Jewish mind is devising the most creative ways to devastate and demolish and destroy the holy land which has become a wasteland. That is what remains of the Jewish genius, once it becomes Israeli. Jewish compassion, Jewish mercy, Jewish cosmopolitan spirit, love of humanity and respect for the other have been long forgotten. Their place was claimed by hate and suspicion and racism. It was only racism that motivated the soldiers to kill innocent children and their parents in Gaza. It is only racism that motivates the drivers of bulldozers to demolish houses on top of their occupants, to destroy vineyards and fields, to uproot centuries-old olive trees. Only racism can invent roads on which circulation is classified on the basis of race, and it is only racism that motivates our children to humiliate women who could be their mothers and to abuse old people at the evil checkpoints, to strike young people their own age who, like them, want to drive with their families to bathe in the sea, and to look on impassively as women give birth on the road. It is only pure racism that motivates our best pilots to drop one-ton bombs on residential buildings in Gaza and it is only racism that permits those criminals to sleep well at night.
This racism has erected for itself a monument in its own image – the monument of an ugly, rigid, menacing and invasive concrete wall. A monument that proclaims to the whole world the banishment of shame and compassion from the holy land. Because racism eliminates shame. This wall is our wall of shame, it is testimony to the fact that we have turned from being a light unto the nations to “an object of disgrace to the nations and a mockery to all the countries.” **
And yet we succeed in packing endless daily suffering, hunger, malnutrition, children’s trauma, disablement, orphanhood and bereavement into one alienating word: “politics”?
And yet our children continue to strut and swagger in the uniforms of brutality that they wear when they serve in the army of slaughter and destruction?
And yet all the splendid institutions of the world stand aside and cannot do a thing to save one child from death or to remove one concrete block from the wall of shame? And yet none of the peace and human rights organizations is able to stop the jeeps of the Border Guards that come to terrify schoolchildren and to kill them, or to demolish houses on top of their occupants, to rescue one olive tree from destruction or one schoolgirl who lost her way to school and found herself in the gunsights of the soldiers of the Occupation?
The reason for this success is that the State of Israel is able to silence and paralyze the entire world because there was a Holocaust. The State of Israel has acquired a permit to abuse an entire nation because there is anti-Semitism. The State of Israel is bringing existential disaster – economic, social and human, on its citizens and on its subjects and no one dares to stop it because once there was Hitler. And all that while the survivors of the Holocaust are suffering the ignominy of hunger in the Jewish democracy of Israel.
This evening I want to appeal to you for help in ridding Israel of the shame. To explain to the world that if it wants to rescue the people of Israel and the Palestinian people from the imminent holocaust that threatens all of us it is necessary to condemn the policy of occupation, the dominion of death must be stopped in its tracks.
The time has come for us to stop handing our children over to an educational establishment that plants in them false and racist values and teaches them that their contribution to society is summed up in the abuse and killing of other people’s children. The time has come for us to reveal to them that the local population of the world is not divided into good Jews and Anti-Semitic non-Jews as is written in their school-books, but into human beings who want to live in peace and quiet in spite of everything, and to those who crave for war and bloodshed, and that both groups include Jews and non-Jews. Because Israel's children are educated to see international resolutions, laws and orders as empty utterances that do not apply to us because they were devised by non-Jews. Today, while the entire civilized world enjoys slandering and smearing the Palestinian education system, there is no school-book in Israel that presents a picture of a Palestinian as a modern ordinary human being. The only representations of Palestinian citizens and non-citizens are Primitive farmers or nomads – usually in the form of a caricature - refugees that go from nowhere to nowhere, and face-covered terrorists. There is no school-book in Israel that presents a map that shows the true borders of the State. Israel's children learn that the real geographical entity that belongs to us is the biblical promised Land of Israel, which includes parts of Jordan and Lebanon and of which the State of Israel is only a small and temporary part. There is no school-book in Israel in which the word “occupation” appears. Our children are conscripted into the army of occupation without knowing the place in which they are living and without knowing its history and its people. Israel's children know more about Europe their imagined homeland and the heart's desire of the rulers of the country than they do about the Middle East in which they live and from which more than half of the Israeli population derives its origins. Jewish children in the State of Israel are educated to legitimate past and present massacres of Palestinian in the name of the Jewish Democratic state and its vital need to keep a Jewish majority.
They join the army imbued with hate and fear. Our children are educated to see everyone who is not Jewish as the Goy, the Other, who generation after generation seeks to destroy us. This is not education, this is mind infection. And infected minds are very easy to manipulate and therefore very convenient for the military establishment which turns our children into monsters.
Therefore the only way to prevent our children from becoming tools in the hands of the machine of destruction is to teach them the real history of their region, to draw for them its real borders, to help them to know the neighbours, their culture, their customs, their courtesy, their beauty and their rights on the land where they live and lived for many generations before the Zionist Pioneers arrived at the Promised Land of Israel. And above all to teach them not to submit to the State, not to respect its authority, because the State is ruled by petty thieves and base opportunists who do not control their impulses even in the most dire times and run the country according to the laws of the Mafia. You killed one of mine - I’ll kill a hundred of yours. You threw a home-made bomb at me - I’ll drop on you a hundred of the most elaborate and destructive bombs in the world that will leave no trace of you or your family or your neighbours. You burned one of my cars so I’ll burn one of your cities. That is the logic of the criminal world.
This is the logic inculcated to Israeli children in their schools.
This evening we must think about those who are condemned to death in the next year, and of those who are condemned to fall into crime under the cover of the law and the uniform. We must rescue all of them. We must teach all of them not to obey orders that, even if they are legal according to the race laws of this State, are manifestly inhuman
Some young people like Israeli refusniks such as 'Combatants for Peace' have managed to free theselves from the virus of racism, 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. 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 handsome 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 in unnecessary wars 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 Holland, to admit we were raised on false racist values. On heterophobia and racism. 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 .Nevertheless, we must all ask our children's forgiveness for not being more alert, for not fighting sooner to keep our promises for a better world, and for letting them be the victims of the horrible, mental infection we are all suffering from. Our crying need today is to expose this racist system of education and to demand its revision. Unless we do that, very soon there will be nothing else to say, nothing else to write, nothing else to hear except for the muted cries of dead children.
"And I, my heart is dead, no longer is there prayeron my lips;
All strength is gone, andhope is no more.
Until when,
How much longer,
Until when?"
(Haim Nahman Bialik 1903)'
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