I can’t resist adding a story about the temerity of some men who simply don’t get the issue of human rights. In Newfoundland, in 2007, an Iranian student doing a PhD in engineering at Memorial University in St. John’s was arrested for kissing a woman on her breast while the two—strangers to each other—were sharing an elevator in a building on the campus. The student, twenty-five-year-old Farhood Azarsina, told the court that he didn’t realize the seriousness of the offence in Canada. “You can’t expect all males to control themselves when the breasts are out,” he said in his defence. The young man, obviously intelligent enough to be doing a PhD in engineering, felt that blaming the victim was appropriate and accepted, and he expressed no remorse. The judge sentenced him to two months in jail.
Figuring out how people arrive at such bizarre notions is one aspect of the story of change. But another aspect is exploring why men are so afraid of women. Many have speculated about the answer, including Louise Arbour, the former high commissioner of Human Rights at the United Nations and now the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. Arbour once said, “The natural response is that women give birth. They can control the future.” Farida Shaheed touches on a similar theme: “In 1939, when Mulana Muduicky, a conservative scholar, was addressing men as to why women should not be educated, should not be allowed to do X, Y and Z, he said, ‘If women really try and strive against their nature, they can do anything. Men can never reproduce, cannot have a child, cannot do what women do.’ ” Shaheed says it’s all about controlling women.
In 2000, a thirteen-year-old Nigerian girl named Bariya who was raped and became pregnant was sentenced in a Zina trial first to a hundred lashes with a cane on her bare back for fornication and then to eighty more lashes for slander: she was unable to prove which of the three men who raped her had fathered her child. The story quickly spread around the world, and the reaction of women was swift and direct. For all the so-called cultural respect that has in the recent past muted criticism of such barbarism, the outcry over Bariya’s sentence quashed the presumption that the world would remain silent. Women lawyers gathered to prepare a defence. The child’s future was debated far and wide. Zina laws were exposed as duplicitous, deceitful and probably illegal. The world was talking. The fundamentalists were furious.
The reaction didn’t prevent her punishment—Bariya was indeed whipped a hundred times with a cane—but her case received so much publicity that the government was shamed into saying that a trial like hers would not happen again in Nigeria. So far it hasn’t.
FOUR
Herstory
It enriches a whole country to have the shackles of inequality removed from half its people.
— MARY EBERTS, human rights lawyer
There’s no shortage of stories about women with the moral courage and intellectual heft to alter previously unjust, unfair and often life-threatening customs. I have been lucky enough to meet them in villages and cities all over the world. Some of them, like Sima Samar from Afghanistan and Shirin Ibadi from Iran, are already international icons of change. Others, like Naomi Chazan from Israel and Mama Darlena from South Africa, are heroes in their own countries. But most women game-changers are best known in their own villages or to the women and girls they serve. They’re valiant and determined; they bide their time, watching for opportunities that will improve the status of women. They’re protective and brave, tenacious and daring. They’re also argumentative and occasionally vengeful. They aren’t beyond gossip, dishing about local big shots—sometimes deliciously. They have been known to overreact. In other words, they are not saints but warriors, and, like women we all know, they are people we can emulate. Their collective effort is what has brought women to the tipping point that we’re heading toward today.
In this chapter, I want to tell three stories: of the Israeli and Palestinian women who are trying to untangle the fractious file that is the Middle East; of Siphiwe Hlophe of Swaziland and her allies, who insisted that if the women in Africa didn’t speak up they’d all be dead from HIV/AIDS; and the story of Hangama Anwari, a human rights commissioner in Afghanistan, and her supporters who started the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation so that Afghan women will know what the laws actually say and which ones are the bogus imaginings of fundamentalists.
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The Middle East
When peace negotiations stall and, worse, collapse, when delaying tactics are employed as a means of staying in power, new actions are required, and it’s women who claim to have them: fresh ideas and the temerity to speak up and demand a seat at the decision-making table. The women I’ve met on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and in Israel, have been struggling with a plan to end the conflict in the Middle East for decades.
Their story begins with two organizations: the Women in Black, a worldwide anti-war movement led by women in Israel who want an end to the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and the Jerusalem Centre for Women, which is the Palestinian counterpart. These women don’t have blood on their own hands, yet they pay a very high price for war. They are fed up with waiting for the men on both sides to do something about the conflict.
It was in 1988, during the First Intifada, that Women in Black decided to stand weekly vigil in public places, such as busy intersections, to demonstrate their abhorrence of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Inspired by women who demonstrated in the streets of South Africa to end apartheid and in Argentina in search of the disappeared, the vigils became a constant in the lives of Israelis: every Friday, women dressed in black held up placards—a black hand with white lettering that read “End the Occupation”—and banners that said the same in Arabic and Hebrew. Some passersby heckled and abused them, yelling “whore” and “traitor,” but many others honked their car horns to show support.
While the Women in Black never shouted back since it was their policy to maintain silence and dignity, people who opposed them at regular Friday rallies that soon sprang up were not so restrained. On one trip I talked to Lizaz, sixteen, who belonged to the Kahane Party, which wanted to transfer all Arabs out of Israel to create a pure Jewish state. “Israel belongs to the Jews,” she told me. “We can’t live with the Arabs. This is our land. The Bible says that.” To underline her point she added, “Most people in Israel agree with me, but they can’t admit it because they think it’s too violent.” The man standing beside her, who refused to give me his name, said, “Destroy these Arabs. They’re human garbage.”
The Women in Black weren’t the first to speak on behalf of women for peace—the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed in 1915, holds that distinction. Women in Black became part of an extraordinary international call for action when they held a vigil attended by three thousand women at the United Nations World Conference in Beijing in 1995 and called for “a world safer for women.” In November 2000, the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace brought the Women in Black, the Jerusalem Center for Women and nine other Israeli and Palestinian women’s peace organizations together to push ahead with the only peace agenda they thought would work: two states, an end to the occupation, a shared city of Jerusalem and a cessation of violence.
The idea of “fighting for peace” is contradictory to these women, who approach peace negotiations from a different angle. They use compromise and embrace persuasion. And over the years they’ve made some progress. In 1997, only 20 percent of Israelis felt that a Palestinian state was viable, and only 3 percent believed that Jerusalem must be shared. In 2002, partly due to the work the women had done, 80 percent of Israelis said that a Palestinian state was inevitable, and almost 30 percent agreed that Jerusalem had to be shared.
The women’s groups on both sides of the conflict soon attracted more than a hundred peace and anti-occupation initiatives from around the world that had mobilized in response to the insufferable situation in the region. One was Machsom Watch, a women’s human rights organization that monitored checkpoints to try to prevent Israeli
soldiers from abusing Palestinians who needed or wanted to cross into Israel. I travelled with Ronnee Jaeger, one of the founders of Machsom Watch, to see conditions for myself. She said that when she was on duty she had witnessed more than twenty women who’d had to give birth while stopped at the checkpoints. At least four of the babies and two of the women had died because they were not permitted to get to a hospital. “Just by acting as observers we stop a lot of harassment,” she said. “But still we see people being lined up face to the wall and waiting as long as three hours for no apparent reason before going through the checkpoint.”
The women’s groups saw their work as critical: some observers said Hamas (the Palestinian Islamist organization that has formed the elected government in Gaza since 2006 and whose military wing claimed responsibility for most of the suicide bombings in Israel) was attracting a hundred new members a day who wanted revenge for the harassment and humiliation they faced at the checkpoints. (The Israelis claimed such humiliation was a small price to pay if it stopped even a single suicide bomber.)
The polarization of right-wing and left-wing attitudes defied reconciliation on my trip a decade ago, just as it does today. The right says that Israel would be a sitting duck if the occupation ended. The left says that the violence won’t stop until Palestine is a sovereign state. The right says, “Our army is in the occupied territory, so we have to support it.” The left regards the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as bones in the throats of the Palestinians. Many blame the deeply held belief among Israelis that God wants Jews to have this land as the underlying barrier to peace. Samia Khoury, a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa in 1933 and has lived all her life here in this ancient land, says, “There is too much injustice based on biblical interpretation.”
Khoury comes from a long line of community leaders that includes the founders of Birzeit University, the Palestinian school chartered in 1953. She remembers being chased out of her home in Jerusalem, where she was a student in 1948. “There’s not a single family who hasn’t been hurt by this,” she says. Her brother, who was president of Birzeit University, was expelled from the Palestinian Territories for almost twenty years and only permitted to return as a goodwill gesture by the Israeli government. “In every family, someone has been killed, deported or humiliated,” she says, but she says the real danger lies in the fact that the new generation of Palestinian kids has never known Israelis as anything but occupiers, whereas she knew them as friends and neighbours.
Speaking to me at her home in East Jerusalem, Khoury said she was living in “sorrowful painful times.” Like almost everyone in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, she thought the situation had never been as bad as it was during the Second Intifada. She feared the future, especially for her five grandchildren. “When the children go to school, they have to cross checkpoints. Families can’t even visit each other. Our lives are consumed with fear. We are constantly asking, did they cross, did they reach, did they arrive?”
The women on the front lines of the peace process think women on both sides understand each other. Gila Svirsky, who has been a Woman in Black since the organization began, accuses the politicians of being the obstacle to peace. “The leaders are driven by power needs and conflict,” she said. “Militarism is pervasive in both societies: glorification of the fighter, giving one’s life for the homeland, a hero’s halo around the martyr or fighter pilot—this has to stop.”
If it were up to the women, Palestine and Israel would have signed a peace accord in the late 1980s, Svirsky says. Women from both sides met in Belgium in 1988 to find a path to peace. They had to meet offshore because there was a law that said Israeli citizens could not meet members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on Israeli territory. At the time, Svirsky says, “Every Palestinian with self-respect belonged to the PLO.” In her opinion, the ongoing meetings by women’s groups at that time built up a pro-peace attitude on both sides.
But despite the much-heralded, U.S.-sponsored peace talks in subsequent years, the women have not been invited to the table. Even after the United Nations adopted Resolution 1325 in 2000, which called for “equal participation and full involvement of women in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution,” the negotiations were left to the male warriors, the seekers of power, turf and control: precisely the people that women peace activists see as part of the problem.
On May 7, 2002, Israeli and Palestinian women took their plea to the UN Security Council, where Terry Greenblatt of Bat Shalom (part of the Jerusalem Center for Women) spoke on behalf of the women’s peace movement: “We envision a settlement based on international law, which would endorse sharing the whole city of Jerusalem, the dismantling of the settlements and a just solution to the question of refugees according to relevant UN resolutions,” she said.
Approximately two thousand people had been killed and countless more wounded since the Second Intifada began on September 29, 2000. An Israeli military action, presumably to rout the terrorists in the Palestinians’ midst, had precipitated both that intifada and the rash of suicide bombings that followed. Suicide bombers started vaporizing themselves and innocent Israeli citizens in the name of God, and although the Quran does not sanction suicide, many clerics in the Middle East supported the violence and declared the bombers martyrs.
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I met the Israeli and Palestinian women in 2002, when my editor sent me to Israel and the West Bank to find out what women were doing about the peace process. The Second Intifada was raging. Suicide bombings had increased in frequency. Israeli army incursions into the West Bank and Gaza Strip had become more brutal. Everyone was in harm’s way.
Remarkably, these Israeli and Palestinian women were working together to try to turn the intifada into peace talks. Even an Israeli mother who had lost a child to a suicide bomber spoke of the need to stop the occupation. Her name—Nurit Peled Elhanan—had become synonymous with the double-edged sword in the Middle East. Her heartbreaking story was made even more so by her sense of justice and fairness.
As I climbed the stairs to her house in West Jerusalem, the scent of flowers spilling out of pots on every step leading to the family’s apartment caught my attention. At the top of the stairs, the entrance to the house was under a canopy of vines and blossoms that suggested a paradise off the beaten path. But a bold sign on the door—Free Palestine—and the intertwined Israeli and Palestinian flags stuck underneath it suggested that there was more to this Israeli home than the aromatic stairway.
Inside, I came face to face with an almost life-size photo of Smadar Elhanan. Her big brown eyes were happy, trusting, twinkling back at me, the essence of innocent childhood. Smadar was just two weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself and this beautiful little girl to bits on September 4, 1997. Four others died in the same attack, as well as the three suicide bombers. Two hundred were wounded, mostly young people who had flocked to Ben Yehuda, a popular pedestrian street, to meet their friends.
A few hours after the tragedy, Smader’s mother, Nurit, received a phone call from Benjamin Netanyahu, then the prime minister of Israel; she’d known him since high school, when they were classmates. But his condolences were of little consolation to a woman who believed the government was complicit in the violence. She told him his government was responsible for her daughter’s death and hung up the phone.
Nurit and her family had paid an unspeakable price for the fifty-year struggle between two peoples. By 2002, suicide bombing had created an air of near panic in Israel and the attacks by the Israeli army on the West Bank only fuelled the fires of revenge. Palestinians and Israelis alike claimed the tension and terror had never been as bad. Together, they were perched like birds on the branch of a burning bush.
Nurit Elhanan, a lecturer in language education at Hebrew University, was part of the groundswell of Israeli
and Palestinian women who were furious with the politically intractable positions on both sides of the conflict. Although Elhanan didn’t belong to any one group, she spoke at their rallies and told me, “The women’s peace movement is the only one that’s active, serious, doing something about this.”
She believed it was her insistence that her children needed to make up their own minds that led her daughter into harm’s way. Elhanan knew the dangers of the streets, and on the day Smadar was killed, Nurit had told her that she couldn’t go downtown alone. Smadar replied, “This is my city. I must be able to walk in it. If you say no, then I will have to go without your permission.”
Her mother was still consumed by every detail of the day her daughter went downtown to sign up for jazz-dancing lessons and instead met death. We sat in the garden below the flower-filled staircase while Elhanan told me about Smadar’s growing independence. “My husband and I had taken the kids on a vacation to the Sea of Galilee some weeks before, and my older sons had asked if they could bring along a couple of friends. One of them made quite an impression on Smadar. Although he was several years older than she was, she had sort of a crush on him.”
He was the one who called Elhanan to say there’d been an explosion and that he’d seen her daughter in the area. Smadar had approached the young man on Ben Yehuda Street, but he’d waved her off because he was talking to a friend. Elhanan told me he’s now consumed with guilt, wishing he’d talked with her, even for a moment, so she might have lingered where he was and not walked on into the path of the suicide bomber. “I raced to the street and looked and looked for my little girl,” Elhanan said. But she did not find her.
Grapefruit trees were laden with fruit, and songbirds were feeding from the nut-bearing bushes as the sun was starting to set. A woman who had suffered too much and too long, Elhanan didn’t seem to realize that her right eye twitched when she talked about her child. The twitching stopped only when the conversation turned to the politicians she was enraged with.
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