No Faith in Afghan Clerics By Mona Eltahawy April 17, 2009 Metro Canada
When Taliban gunmen shot dead prominent women’s rights activist Sitara Achakzai in Kandahar on Sunday, they had nothing to hide. It was broad daylight after all.
To further underline that bloody message of hatred for women, a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the murder.
Clearly, misogyny has married impunity and the Taliban — ousted from power in 2001 — are, once more, terrorizing the women of their country.
Achakzai’s assassination was but the latest in a series of murders targeted at women’s rights activists. Under almost identical circumstances, Taliban gunmen in September killed the highest-ranking female police officer in Kandahar, Lt.-Col. Malalai Kakar.
Such murders are just the most visible signs of the violence meted out to the girls and women of Afghanistan. Just last month, the United Nations warned in its annual human rights report that Afghan women’s rights were little better today than they were during the brutal reign of the ultra-conservative Taliban.
Girls as young as seven are targets of rape, while other females suffer “honour killings,” early and forced marriages, sexual abuse and slavery, the UN report said.
Obviously, in the absence of rule of law everyone is vulnerable in Afghanistan. But girls and women are on the bottom of everyone’s lists. President Hamid Karzai was forced to reconsider his signature on a law allowing marital rape after an international outcry earlier this month. Hardline clerics seem hell-bent on justifying the most heinous of acts in the name of Islam.
When the president is willing to sell women out and when those who claim to be the gatekeepers of God give sanction to such selling out, it is not difficult to understand why the Taliban’s hate for women gets a free ride.
We hear a lot about the need to talk to the Taliban to end fighting in Afghanistan. Such a conversation must not happen at the expense of Afghan girls and women.
I am a Muslim woman who is fed up of those leaders and clerics who claim to speak in the name of my religion and yet who ignore its message of justice and equality. They are just as much to blame as the gunmen who shot Achakzai and Kakar.
Both women were Muslim and knew the violence had nothing to do with religion, but was just plain old misogyny. Kakar used to protect abused wives by physically beating their husbands.
As I say a prayer for Sitara and Malalai, I hope they’ve found peace in feminist heaven.
Mona and Pakistan on Time.
The Happy Muslims Who Confuse You
Video:
When columnist Mona Eltahawy talks about the Islamic world, she often has to compete with the usual stereotypes
http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bclid=0&bctid=19402457001
Moslem Women:
Last update - 10:30 05/04/2009
'Teenage Bedouin gunwoman sought to avenge Gaza op'
By Yanir Yagana, Haaretz Correspondent
The 16-year-old Bedouin girl killed during a foiled weekend shooting attack at a Border Police base in the Negev had apparently sought to avenge Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip, the Israel Police said late Saturday.
Basma Awad al-Nabari opened fire on Border Police barracks at the Shoket Junction near her village on Saturday afternoon and was subsequently killed by officers.
Police revealed later Saturday that they had found among al-Nabari's notebooks letters claiming that she wanted to become a shahid - martyr - and that the aim of the shooting was to avenge the offenses committed by Israel's defense establishment against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The girl arrived at Shoket Junction shortly before 2 P.M. and walked toward the main gate of the base. When she tried to fire on the sentry from a distance of a few meters, he turned the barrel away and escaped the bullets. She then ran away and took cover, while the sentry and another officer who had arrived at the scene tried to persuade her to turn herself in.
When the brief negotiation failed, another gun battle ensued, at the end of which the officer shot the attacker dead.
According to investigators, police found letters among the attacker's books in which she had written
Investigators were looking to determine whether the girl acted alone, or whether some organization stood behind the incident, which would have provided training, support and equipment.
The police findings contradicted the claims of Al-Nabari's family, who argued that the girl had been shot for no reason. Ali al-Nabari, the attacker's cousin, said following the incident that "it couldn't be. The police is lying and exaggerating. Maybe she was there to make a complaint and got mixed-up."
"The person manning the base gate thinks that anyone wearing a kaffiyeh is a terrorist," the cousin continued. "His friends shot her for no reason. She is involved in a program for exceptional students and active in social projects. It isn't logical that someone could have influenced her. She is in school from the morning until the afternoon and she comes straight home from there. There is no internet, or anything else. Maybe the police made up the gun."
Other family members also had trouble believing the reports. "This is a false claim by the police," said a family member who asked to remain anonymous. "They are looking to cover up their actions. This could not have been a terror attack."
"This was a special and kind child," added another family member. "Why didn't they show the gun on television? They only filmed her bag. They killed her accidentally and we intend to fight this to the end. We will hire lawyers and petition the courts until everyone knows the truth."
Police Commissioner David Cohen held a makeshift press conference at the scene of the attack, in which he urged the public to remain alert.
"This is the third time in a month someone attempts policemen's lives," Cohen said. "In this case as well, police reacted swiftly and efficiently. I'm calling on the public to be alert and inform police about every suspicious occurrence."
Afghan Law About Power, Not Culture
By Mona Eltahawy
April 2, 2009
I thought I was used to seeing politicians bargain with each other. A few concessions here and there to influential voting blocs are part of the elections game.
But Afghan President Hamid Karzai — the “liberal” darling of the international community — surely wins that game by throwing women’s rights like bargaining chips at the feet of religious conservatives he’s courting for Afghanistan’s August presidential election.
In February, he signed a new law that, according to United Nations organizations, legalizes rape within marriage and bars women from leaving their homes without permission from their husbands.
Déjà vu, anyone?
Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the Afghan parliament, told a British paper the law was “worse than during the Taliban,” a government that denied women basic rights such as education when it ruled Afghanistan 1996–2001.
News of the new law broke at an international conference for Afghanistan being held at The Hague. The reports offer both a fortuitous chance to embarrass Karzai for so cheaply selling out women, and a test for the 72 countries and organizations gathered at The Hague on how willing they are to defend Afghan women.
Since the Taliban’s ouster, much has improved for Afghan women. Millions of girls now attend school and women have a 25 per cent quota in parliament. In March, a female lawmaker, Shalah Attah, said she would run for president in August polls.
So what was Karzai thinking?
Despite the reemergence of the Taliban, the law has less to do with its misogyny and more with Karzai’s election manoeuvring.
If it wasn’t enough that millions of Afghan women still face violence at the hands of the Taliban, they now have to watch a president who claimed to be an ally bargain away their rights.
The law covers members of Afghanistan’s Shia minority, who account for about 10 per cent of the population, and was backed by the influential Shia clerics and parties who are objects of the increasingly unpopular Karzai’s affection.
Although the Afghan constitution allows Shia to have a separate family law, that same constitution and international treaties signed by Afghanistan promise women equal rights.
Afghan women parliamentarians and activists have condemned the law and said they’re worried another law being drafted for the country’s majority Sunni women will be equally harsh.
The international community has a perfect opportunity to corner Karzai at The Hague, but it must remain silent out of misguided cultural relativism that shortchanges women.
Afghanistan’s new law has nothing to do with culture or religion and everything to do with power and politics.
Metro Canada
April 2, 2009
I thought I was used to seeing politicians bargain with each other. A few concessions here and there to influential voting blocs are part of the elections game.
But Afghan President Hamid Karzai — the “liberal” darling of the international community — surely wins that game by throwing women’s rights like bargaining chips at the feet of religious conservatives he’s courting for Afghanistan’s August presidential election.
In February, he signed a new law that, according to United Nations organizations, legalizes rape within marriage and bars women from leaving their homes without permission from their husbands.
Déjà vu, anyone?
Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the Afghan parliament, told a British paper the law was “worse than during the Taliban,” a government that denied women basic rights such as education when it ruled Afghanistan 1996–2001.
News of the new law broke at an international conference for Afghanistan being held at The Hague. The reports offer both a fortuitous chance to embarrass Karzai for so cheaply selling out women, and a test for the 72 countries and organizations gathered at The Hague on how willing they are to defend Afghan women.
Since the Taliban’s ouster, much has improved for Afghan women. Millions of girls now attend school and women have a 25 per cent quota in parliament. In March, a female lawmaker, Shalah Attah, said she would run for president in August polls.
So what was Karzai thinking?
Despite the reemergence of the Taliban, the law has less to do with its misogyny and more with Karzai’s election manoeuvring.
If it wasn’t enough that millions of Afghan women still face violence at the hands of the Taliban, they now have to watch a president who claimed to be an ally bargain away their rights.
The law covers members of Afghanistan’s Shia minority, who account for about 10 per cent of the population, and was backed by the influential Shia clerics and parties who are objects of the increasingly unpopular Karzai’s affection.
Although the Afghan constitution allows Shia to have a separate family law, that same constitution and international treaties signed by Afghanistan promise women equal rights.
Afghan women parliamentarians and activists have condemned the law and said they’re worried another law being drafted for the country’s majority Sunni women will be equally harsh.
The international community has a perfect opportunity to corner Karzai at The Hague, but it must remain silent out of misguided cultural relativism that shortchanges women.
Afghanistan’s new law has nothing to do with culture or religion and everything to do with power and politics.
Metro Canada
Happy Muslim Men and Women Who Confuse You
Published in Arabic in Qatar's Al Arab and in English in Metro Canada
There’s something wrong with the pictures coming out of Pakistan these days.
Ever since Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari reinstated the country’s chief justice, I’ve been trying to figure out what it was.
And then it hit me.
Happiness. Joy. Celebration.
How often do we see pictures of happy Muslim men? What a relief too that they were Pakistani.
I’ve developed a theory about the Muslims we see on our television screens and front pages and who are usually from Pakistan.
Angry Bearded Muslim Man is the favorite. Whenever the Muslim world is supposed to be upset or offended, invariably that story is illustrated by images of Angry Bearded Muslim man: marching (usually in Pakistan), shouting (fists raised in the air in righteous anger), and burning something (an American flag, an Israeli flag, preferably both!)
His female counterpart is Covered in Black Muslim Woman. She’s seen, never heard. Visible only in her invisibility under that black chador, burqa, face veil, etc.
In those images you have conveyed all you want to say about Muslims: the men are angry, dangerous and want to hurt us; the women are just covered in black.
While there are indeed some Muslim men and women who fit both such descriptions they are by no means the majority and they are utterly insufficient in describing the diversity of views, appearances and attitudes among Muslims.
As a journalist I am loathe to blame the media for all and any perceived ills. But in the case of Angry Bearded Muslim and Covered in Black Muslim Woman, the media really do have a lot to answer for. Whether it’s the laziness of television producers or the tight and rolling deadlines of the 24-hour news cycle, you can be sure that when it comes to representing Muslims I will always lose out to Angry Bearded Muslim and Covered in Black Muslim Woman.
And it’s quite easy to see why - they make for sexy TV and enticing front page photos. And they are my biggest competitors and nemeses when I give lectures or appear on television here in the U.S.
My first U.S. TV appearance was on the Fox News Network on a show called “The O’Reilly Factor”. The host of the show, Bill O’Reilly is known for his conservative views and his confrontational style which often provokes guests with the result that O’Reilly and the guest shout at each other. It’s more entertainment than news or information.
After my appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor”, some viewers sent me email asking “Are you sure you’re a Muslim? Where’s the headgear?” Others wanted to know why I spoke English so well. Clearly, I did not fit the image of the Covered in Black Muslim Woman that many American viewers are used to. I was confusing them.
People don’t like to be confused. I discovered that during a panel discussion I took part in at a cultural centre in New York City in 2007 in which the questions “What does a Muslim look like? What does a Muslim home look like? And just who exactly makes up the Muslim mainstream?” seemed to be the ones foremost on the audience’s mind.
The panel discussion was meant to highlight the diversity of Muslim voices and experiences in the United States. My fellow speakers and I offered quite different views on a range of subjects that surely were proof of the vibrant debate among Muslims but despite our best efforts, not all were convinced apparently. Two women from the audience were later overheard saying “They’re trying to convince us they’re the mainstream? They’re not the mainstream.”
That, coupled with a question during the question and answer session on “what does a Muslim home look like” (implied was that it can’t possibly look like a home any normal person would recognise), got me wondering against whom my co-panelists and I were being compared.
I’m quite sure it’s Angry Bearded Muslim Man. And Covered in Black Muslim Woman.
Which brings me back to the happy Pakistanis – men and women – in our newspapers these days.
While I’m the last person to deny the danger of radicals in the Muslim world - much of my time and effort go into denouncing violence in the name of religion – I am also a proud liberal, secular Muslims.
I love to confuse people by subverting the stereotype of Muslims that they always see and hear from. I believe that breaking the false equation between conservatism and authenticity is the best way to end the monopoly over religious thought by radicals and their supporters.
When we stop equating conservative with authentic, we recognize the diversity of Muslim views and refuse to allow one voice to speak for us all. Only then can we be recognized as human beings, in all our differences.
It is by confusing people that we are allowed to be human beings, not Muslims, not Angry Bearded Muslim Man or Covered in Black Muslim Woman but human beings.
That will become possible when we see more Happy Muslim Men and Women Who Confuse You.
Copyright Mona Eltahawy 2009
Musawah - How Do You Say Equality? By Mona Eltahawy.
Article in March 17 edition of Qatar's Al Arab newspaper and Issue 25, March 30, 2009 of The Jerusalem Report
"I feel like someone opened a window into my mind and let in the fresh air. It feels so good!" The young Egyptian woman and I were among 250 activists and scholars from 47 countries brought together in mid-February in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the launch of Musawah, a global movement for justice and equality in the Muslim family.
How lucky that young woman is, I thought. Just over 20 years ago, I felt as though I had to smash the window into my mind open myself, fists bleeding and bruised, to catch some of that fresh air. She's in her mid-20s, I'm in my early 40s. When I was a little younger than she is now my family lived in Saudi Arabia, where I became a feminist at the age of 19. It was both a survival mechanism and a rebellion. And it was the first step on a journey, equally exciting and painful, toward finding my own Islam.
There were times on that lonely journey when it felt that I needed nothing short of mental somersaults to remain in a religion that discriminated against me, or at the darkest of times, seemed to hate me. What else was I supposed to deduct from centuries of male-dominated and too often misogynistic interpretations of Islam that for every page of a man's obligations and duties wrote two for women. These misinterpretations took the faith far off the path that was set more than 14 centuries ago, when, we are taught, Islam gave women rights that made them the envy of women in Europe's Dark Ages.
Where is the solace in a faith you feel hates you? Why would God create me as a woman and then punish me for it? Nineteen-year-old me was full of those questions which I didn't dare put into words. I was terrified for even thinking them. I was pulling at a string I knew would leave too many taboos naked.
And so I scrambled for spiritual sustenance and found it in three of my earliest heroes - the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the Egyptian-American Islamic scholar Leila Ahmed and the Sudanese-American scholar Abdullahi An-Na'im.
Notice I include a man in there too. For a long time, I flatly refused to read anything written by Muslim men. They'd dominated the conversation for too long. But through the work of scholars like An-Na'im and the Egyptian Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, I learned that some men could be as feminist as the best of us!
Another signpost - attending the United Nations conference on women in Beijing in 1995 where the Iranian-American women's rights activist Mahnaz Afkhami signed my copy of the book she had just edited called "Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World." It brought together in book form many of my heroes in the way that Musawah would later bring them together in Kuala Lumpur.
Those early heroes prepared me well for an event four years ago exactly that I realize now was the last tug at the string of taboos. On March 18, 2005, Amina Wadud, an American scholar of Islam, became the first woman on record to lead a public, mixed-gender Friday prayer. For many of us 50 women and 50 men whom she led, it was one of the most moving moments of our lives.
What a thrill it was to stand before God as the spiritual equal of the male congregants - praying together, not behind the men and not in another room - with a woman leading us. Talking of fists and fresh air - for years I had been engaged in a seemingly endless bout over women's rights with a male-dominated Islam, neither one of us able to deal that knockout blow. Amina Wadud dealt it for me.
So no wonder when I met her again in Kuala Lumpur I was like a star-struck teenager.
And there I was marveling too at the sight of Zainah Anwar, Musawah project manager and former head of Sisters in Islam, the Malaysian organization that hosted the Kuala Lumpur conference that launched Musawah, which means "equality" in Arabic. She joined my constellation of stars when I saw a television profile of her in which she educated Malaysian women about their God-given rights in Islam as a way to empower them to stand up to judges, husbands and any other men who tried to use Islam against them.
When European women were mere chattel, Muslim women gained the right to inherit and own property. But now the descendants of those women who envied Muslim women in the 7th century have moved far ahead. Where is that spirit of the early days of Islam?
Ziba Mir-Husseini - another hero whose name at the top of an essay always signals fresh air - put it simply: There will be no justice for women as long as patriarchy is not separated from Islamic legal texts.
Wadud and Mir-Husseini are just two of many Muslim women scholars who are reinterpreting our religion. Their work throws down the gauntlet to 21st century Islamic legal tradition, which now has to meet the feminist challenge from within. It's not anti-Muslim outsiders who are demanding change, but us women who at Musawah celebrated the years we had worked at baring our taboos.
We are not alone of course. Orthodox Jewish women and Catholic women are also demanding to clear the deck of misogyny and patriarchy. In her new book "Taking Back God: American women rising up for religious equality," Leora Tanenbaum takes you on a tour of that struggle.
One of her interviewees, and another hero of mine, beautifully summed up the efforts of us women who won't stop wrestling with and for our faith. "A pearl is a precious thing. It's created as a result of irritation by sand," Francis Kissling, a longtime activist for reform in the Catholic Church's position on women, sexuality and reproduction, told us at Musawah. "We are all millions of grains of sand that will create pearls of the future."
my comment to Mona:
a) Mona - just over a year ago when i saw you for the first time you looked more like 25...
b) In this Jungle of the Meltdown it is obvious that Women get hurt more than men.
c) I am sorry that you have experienced personally, Male Violence but I do not want to discuss it here.
d) I saw Jerusalem Report this week and it passed thru my mind..
Should I check it for a "Mona" Article!?
e) last weekend there was a long article, the Doctor, who has not lost hope, decided to stay in Israel.
f) More next time...
Uncle Sam
=====================
By Mona Eltahawy Tel Aviv-Yaffo
Metro Canada, Jan. 20, 2009
I live in Harlem, New York City, which on election night was the centre of the universe. I have never seen people so happy.
Four days later, I went to the Axis of Evil, or at least that’s how former (doesn’t it feel good to say that!) U.S. President George W. Bush described Syria. And there in the Damascus market I bought a T-shirt that said simply “Obama.” One line in Arabic. Another in English.
Two very different cities. One simple joy at the mere idea of Obama.
Three months later, I am back in the Middle East and there is little joy. But Obama isn’t the reason the region is heartsick and wary. Rather, it is the absence of an Obama in the region that has sucked all joy out of it.
This morning in Doha, Qatar, the main photo on the front page of one of the national dailies was of Palestinians in Gaza lifting the decomposing body of a man onto the back of a pickup truck.
I am writing this from Tel Aviv, Israel, where at the airport an Israeli friend told me she is finally smiling again because with the ceasefire in place, she no longer has to worry her son will be sent to Gaza to fight.
So, how do we become audaciously hopeful in the Mideast?
Forget our audaciously awful leaders — and when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict they are evenly spread on both sides. Focus instead on young people, who form the majority in the region.
That’s where U.S. President Barack Obama (doesn’t it feel good to say that?) comes in.
The realist in me reminds the foolish optimist that Obama will be preoccupied with the U.S.economy and won’t be as focused on the Middle East as those of us from the region would wish. The poor man, trim and fit physique notwithstanding, must be weighed down by a burden of expectations from everyone.
But he can be the leader the region lacks. He can be the leader that tells our young people — Arab, Israeli, Iranian and Kurdish, take your pick — “Yes you can!”
A young Egyptian blogger I met in Doha told me that while listening to Obama’s acceptance speech he felt he was listening to the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, known for his mesmerizing presence. The latter died long before the blogger was born, but that’s how far he must go back to point to an Arab leader with a charismatic ability to galvanize the public.
“The old leaders in the Middle East have stopped dreaming,” Prof. Mira Tzoreff told me as she and her husband drove me to my hotel. “That’s a tragedy. Young people still dream.”
President Obama you still dream. Talk to the young people here and tell them their dreams matter.
Copyright 2009 Mona Eltahawy
Finding Gaza in Tel Aviv
Finding Gaza in Tel Aviv
By Mona Eltahawy
Feb. 4, 2009
TEL AVIV – “Are you proud of yourself for visiting Israel? Especially now?”
I am an Egyptian whose country has been at peace with Israel for almost 30 years but my decision to come to Tel Aviv a day after the ceasefire ended the war between Israel and Hamas did not go down well on Facebook, where I have almost 4,000 “friends”, most of whom I’ve never met but who form an invaluable and instant polling pool to current events.
For one Egyptian, I was in cahoots with the “Zionists, the Jews, the Unbelievers and Islam haters”.
“Don’t forget to take a few lovely flowers along with your sweet smile to Uncle (Ariel) Sharon, your godfather,” he wrote to me.
A Jordanian was a bit more measured in his criticism.
“I'm one of the few people remaining in the Arab world who still believes that a fair and just peace with Israel can be achieved,” he told me. “But…it's not right to visit the Jewish state at this time when you can smell the charred Palestinian flesh from the terrace of your hotel in Tel Aviv!”
Heavy-handed imagery aside, by coming to Tel Aviv I found Gaza itself, its heartbreak, its misery and all its complexity when I met Dr. Izzeldine Abouelaish and his family, or what is left of it.
A Palestinian doctor who lost three daughters when Israeli shells struck their home in Gaza two days before the ceasefire, he seems to be the only person left in this small slice of the Middle East with its supersized servings of “us” and “them” who refuses to hate.
“I hope this is the last tragedy,” he told me when we met at the hospital near Tel Aviv where he works part time but where that day he was not the healer but the father of a patient – his 17-year old daughter Shadha whose eye was blown out of its socket and who lost several fingers in the shelling. Four months earlier, his wife died of leukemia, leaving him with eight children.
.“We need to immunize both sides with love, respect, dignity and equality.”
Ever the doctor, he is the talisman for those of us who refuse to be silenced by tribal allegiance. I lost track of the number of times Israeli friends whispered to me they had to keep their views to themselves during the war in Gaza; Arab friends emailed me the same sentiments.
I was here to speak at a Tel Aviv University conference on Middle East youth and had no idea that I would meet Dr. Abouelaish but hearing him, crying with him as he recalled the horror of finding the shattered bodies of his daughters – one was beheaded in the shelling – the physician and his confusing life story became the raison d’etre of my visit.
I am a huge fan of confusion as the antidote to stereotypes. I was born shortly after one war with Israel, two of my uncles fought in another one and I was the first Egyptian to work in Israel for a western news agency. I am a proud Muslim who rejects everything Hamas represents and who believes Palestinians deserve better than their Islamist agenda, especially its obsession with Israel.
Dr. Abouelaish is the antithesis of the lazy lines drawn by too many in this too bloody conflict.
A Palestinian who met Israelis on an equal footing - not as the laborer, gardener or cleaner – he is a gynecologist who trained in two Israeli hospitals and who treated infertile Israeli women and delivered their babies. He is a known peace activist whose deceased daughters had attended a peace camp for Israeli and Palestinian children. And he is an academic who studied the effects of war on Gazan and Israeli children and whose own heartbreak has now ironically enriched his research.
A Hebrew speaker whose wails announcing the deaths of his girls on live television moved the presenters to tears, his grief marked the moment Al Jazeera and its unblinking and often overbearing war coverage entered Israeli living rooms. Up until then, most Israelis had been watching a very different war whose narrative - focused on soldiers as the nation’s sons sent to stem an eight-year tide of Hamas rocket attacks on southern towns - was largely free of Palestinian civilian suffering in Gaza.
But surrounded by Israeli friends, one of whom he calls the “surrogate mother” of Shadha he upends the Al Jazeera narrative with its fondness for using Palestinian misery as both advertisement and fuel for the angry masses.
It is a privilege and a curse to be able to move among all sides. Dr. Abouelaish could be the loneliest man on earth but he is the role model for those of us who believe Israelis and Palestinians need more than crocodile tears and fiery rhetoric.
As both sides declare victory in the Gaza war, its most obvious losers are Palestinian civilians and those on all sides who feel they must whisper their objection to violence by Hamas and the onslaught of the Israeli Defense Forces.
I came to Israel because I didn’t want to whisper, I wanted to talk, loudly and in the open, to Israelis and Palestinians who are fed up with war. In Dr. Abouelaish’s heartbreak and grace, I found the clearest message.
Copyright 2009 Mona Eltahawy
By Mona Eltahawy
Feb. 4, 2009
TEL AVIV – “Are you proud of yourself for visiting Israel? Especially now?”
I am an Egyptian whose country has been at peace with Israel for almost 30 years but my decision to come to Tel Aviv a day after the ceasefire ended the war between Israel and Hamas did not go down well on Facebook, where I have almost 4,000 “friends”, most of whom I’ve never met but who form an invaluable and instant polling pool to current events.
For one Egyptian, I was in cahoots with the “Zionists, the Jews, the Unbelievers and Islam haters”.
“Don’t forget to take a few lovely flowers along with your sweet smile to Uncle (Ariel) Sharon, your godfather,” he wrote to me.
A Jordanian was a bit more measured in his criticism.
“I'm one of the few people remaining in the Arab world who still believes that a fair and just peace with Israel can be achieved,” he told me. “But…it's not right to visit the Jewish state at this time when you can smell the charred Palestinian flesh from the terrace of your hotel in Tel Aviv!”
Heavy-handed imagery aside, by coming to Tel Aviv I found Gaza itself, its heartbreak, its misery and all its complexity when I met Dr. Izzeldine Abouelaish and his family, or what is left of it.
A Palestinian doctor who lost three daughters when Israeli shells struck their home in Gaza two days before the ceasefire, he seems to be the only person left in this small slice of the Middle East with its supersized servings of “us” and “them” who refuses to hate.
“I hope this is the last tragedy,” he told me when we met at the hospital near Tel Aviv where he works part time but where that day he was not the healer but the father of a patient – his 17-year old daughter Shadha whose eye was blown out of its socket and who lost several fingers in the shelling. Four months earlier, his wife died of leukemia, leaving him with eight children.
.“We need to immunize both sides with love, respect, dignity and equality.”
Ever the doctor, he is the talisman for those of us who refuse to be silenced by tribal allegiance. I lost track of the number of times Israeli friends whispered to me they had to keep their views to themselves during the war in Gaza; Arab friends emailed me the same sentiments.
I was here to speak at a Tel Aviv University conference on Middle East youth and had no idea that I would meet Dr. Abouelaish but hearing him, crying with him as he recalled the horror of finding the shattered bodies of his daughters – one was beheaded in the shelling – the physician and his confusing life story became the raison d’etre of my visit.
I am a huge fan of confusion as the antidote to stereotypes. I was born shortly after one war with Israel, two of my uncles fought in another one and I was the first Egyptian to work in Israel for a western news agency. I am a proud Muslim who rejects everything Hamas represents and who believes Palestinians deserve better than their Islamist agenda, especially its obsession with Israel.
Dr. Abouelaish is the antithesis of the lazy lines drawn by too many in this too bloody conflict.
A Palestinian who met Israelis on an equal footing - not as the laborer, gardener or cleaner – he is a gynecologist who trained in two Israeli hospitals and who treated infertile Israeli women and delivered their babies. He is a known peace activist whose deceased daughters had attended a peace camp for Israeli and Palestinian children. And he is an academic who studied the effects of war on Gazan and Israeli children and whose own heartbreak has now ironically enriched his research.
A Hebrew speaker whose wails announcing the deaths of his girls on live television moved the presenters to tears, his grief marked the moment Al Jazeera and its unblinking and often overbearing war coverage entered Israeli living rooms. Up until then, most Israelis had been watching a very different war whose narrative - focused on soldiers as the nation’s sons sent to stem an eight-year tide of Hamas rocket attacks on southern towns - was largely free of Palestinian civilian suffering in Gaza.
But surrounded by Israeli friends, one of whom he calls the “surrogate mother” of Shadha he upends the Al Jazeera narrative with its fondness for using Palestinian misery as both advertisement and fuel for the angry masses.
It is a privilege and a curse to be able to move among all sides. Dr. Abouelaish could be the loneliest man on earth but he is the role model for those of us who believe Israelis and Palestinians need more than crocodile tears and fiery rhetoric.
As both sides declare victory in the Gaza war, its most obvious losers are Palestinian civilians and those on all sides who feel they must whisper their objection to violence by Hamas and the onslaught of the Israeli Defense Forces.
I came to Israel because I didn’t want to whisper, I wanted to talk, loudly and in the open, to Israelis and Palestinians who are fed up with war. In Dr. Abouelaish’s heartbreak and grace, I found the clearest message.
Copyright 2009 Mona Eltahawy
