"Thank you for inviting me to this day.
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 at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county 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 this murder.
When I asked the people who invited me here why wouldn'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."
Nurit Peled-Elhanan:
A Jerusalem Mother's Statement
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The Dominion of Death
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A Speech to Women in Black
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Mrs. Peled-Elhanan's only daughter, Smadari, was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in September 1997, two weeks before her 14th birthday.
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Peace and War (pdf)
dedicated to Smadar Elhanan by her father, Rami Elhanan, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite who served in the Israeli Army during the War over the Suez Canal.
