After watching the caucus debates, I decided that we are in the "est" decades of America--one after another, the candidates from both sides kept reassuring who ever would listen that we are the biggest, the strongest, richest, smartest, the bravest, freeist, mightyist nation in the world, over and over again. And when on the heels of this triumphalism, some Republican candidates denied that any other country in the world had any reason to hate us, I had to laugh. Do we never hear our own words, do we never catch the steely glint of cause and effect, but mostly do we ever think deeper then deceiving platitudes of self congratulations.
I did rise to hope listening to Obama's victory speech; if the young and the old and the others vote in the Democrats, throwing off political despair, then oh gods, let the victors stand by their words -because the fall from promised grace will be too great, the bait and switch game cut too deeply into the psyches of the young for even the greatist, mightyist, richest democracy to survive.

On January 12th, Women in Black will be holding vigils to protest the siege of Gaza in cities around the world, including Melbourne and New York. In honor of these protests, I offer the words of Nurit Peled-Elhanan, "an Israeli peace activist at Hebrew University and among the founders of the Bereaved Famlies for Peace, an organization of Israeli and Palestinian family members who have lost loved ones to the conflict and who believe that peace, not vengeance is the way. When Nurit Peled-Elhanan's daughter, Smadari Elhanan, was the victim of a suicide bombing attack, she railed against the Israeli government policies which, she said, actually create terrorism, turning both her daughter and the Palestinians into victims. Her son is one of the founders of 'Combatants for Peace.'" (words of Sherry Gorelick who keeps so many of us listening and learning)
"In the State of Israel the Jewish Mother is Disappearing"
Nurit Peled-Elhanan--Women in Black 28/12/2007

I thank Women in Black for inviting me to speak here today. At this hour, I would like to dedicate my words to the children of the Gaza strip, who are withering slowly from hunger and disease, and to their mothers, who continue to bring children into the world, to feed and educate them wonderfully. The rate of literacy in the Gaza strip today stands at 92%--among the highest in the world, and all that in the most terrible concentration camp on earth, the residents of which are being strangled as the civilized world looks on in silence.
I wish we could celebrate today the conclusion of the activities of the Women in Black. But the truth is that their activities are becoming harder every day. In a state in which the gods of death and money rule, in a state where the economy is flourishing while the children are hungry, where the mythological heroes are fearless murderers, where the leaders openly and publicly admit that human life is not worth a fig in their eyes, in a state that sends its sons to be killed without even bothering to invent a reason for it, in a state that imprisons millions of human beings in ghettos and enclosures and kills them slowly, the persistent voice of Women in Black is the strongest conscientious voice of refusal. The Women in black are example and paragon of refusal to worship the god of death, refusal to obey the racist laws of the State of Israel. The action of Women in Black is in itself the rejection of racist education and the routine systematic poisoning of minds that sustains the schools, the media and he speeches of the nation's elected representatives.
In the State of Israel the Jewish mother is facing extinction. The Jewish mother of today is closed off in neighborhoods like Mea Shearim (an ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem where most of the residents do not recognize the State of Israel and most of whom do not serve in the Israeli armed forces), there the mothers protect their children from the army, and outside those neighborhoods the voice of the Jewish mother is not heard except in organizations like Women in Black, which the society in general condemns and vilifies. The State of Israel condemns and vilifies the voice of the Jewish mother, which is the voice of compassion, tolerance and dialogue. The State of Israel does all it can to ensure that that voice will be muted and silenced forever.
Outside the peace organizations that are considered in the general discourse to be marginal sleepwalkers and extreme leftists, the voice of the Jewish mother ceased long ago to be a maternal voice. The Israeli mother as she now exists embodies a motherhood that is distorted, lost, confused, sick. The Jewish mothers like Yochabad, the mother of Moses; like Rachel who wept for her children and refused to be comforted; like Mother Courage, the mother who cannot find solace and healing in the death of the children of another mother, have been replaced by mothers who are nothing but golems that have turned on their creators and are more terrible and cruel then they are, who dedicate their wombs to the apartheid state and to the occupation army, who educate their children in uncompromising racism and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders' megalomania, greed and blood thirstiness. Those mothers are also to be found among the teachers and educators of our day. The only women who stand here week after week, in the rain and the sun, they are the one and only reminder that the voice of the other motherhood, the natural one, has not completely disappeared from the face of this wasteland that had once been the Holy Land.
Few are the parents in Israel who admit to themselves that the murders of children, the destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive groves and poisoners of wells are none other than their own beautiful sons and daughters, their children who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. The children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up to fear Islam--a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers. And not only do those boys and girls kill and torment; they do so with the full support of Mom, with the full appreciation of Dad, encouraged by this entire nation, which does not so much as raise an eyebrow at the deaths of children, of old and disabled people. A nation that rallies around pilots who who do not feel a thing except a small bump on the when they drop bombs on entire families and crush them to death (the reference is to Israeli air force pilot and former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Haluts, who, when asked by a journalist shortly after the Israeli air force dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in the Gaza strip killing several civilians,what he felt as a pilot when he dropped a bomb, replied, 'I feel a slight bump on the wing when the bomb is released.'
In this hell in which we live, in the daily inferno under which stirs and grows the underground kingdom of dead children, the role of Women in Black, the mothers and grandmothers who stand at this Square (Paris Square in Jerusalem) and in similar squares all over the world, is to be the guardian of sane motherhood and to ensure that is voice is not silenced and does not disappear from the face of the earth. To remind a world that has lost its human image that we were all made in His image, consistently and tirelessly to say that still, despite the Apartheid Wall, despite the cruel siege of Gaza, despite the wars without cause, and in the face of the fury of the rulers of this country, all of whom down to the last one are criminals against humanity, the voice of women and mothers, the voice of compassion, justice and hope--will not be silenced.

On January 12th, Women in Black vigils will be held in cities around the world. Find one and stand for another world.

Sometimes my body becomes an Australian body; for just brief moments, in the heat of this summer, I let my hips go loose, and I relax into the scene before me--the surroundings of Victoria Market with its huge sheds of family produce stalls, speciality kiosks of long standing, like Dianna's Hot Dips with its salamis, cheeses, marinated octopus and eggplant, small red peppers stuffed with goat cheese. The women look down at us from their stalls, customers who have been returning for their weekly treats for years raise their arms to collect their carefully wrapped aromatic purchases, the meat markets with slabs of lamb and cow and pig, smelling of blood, butchers standing in the packed walk ways, aprons stained with their trade, yelling at the top of their lungs--cheap, cheap, 4 kilos of mince, scotch fillet at prices you wouldn't believe-- particularly if it's close to the end of the trading day--the streams of shoppers, pushing their own Vic Market trolleys or laden down with their green bags, flow around the burly men trying to make a last minute sale; the fish stalls, barrimundi, flake, whole fish snapped up by shoppers planning a BBQ and always, the huge tiger prawns, squid tubes and bay scallops and our oysters-we treat ourselves to a dozen newly shucked oysters and find a quiet spot away from the rivers of shoppers and reverently, tilt our heads back and taste the Northern seas.

I was walking alone past the Andean folk singers who always play their national flute music on a gathering space in the footpath, their brightly colored serapes caught in the bright morning light, their Cd's displayed on the ground before them, week after week, people flock to hear their rhythms before plunging into the cool sheds, children darting forward to toss coins into their open guitar cases, their music filled the air on my morning and I stood, hearing, wondering as I always do, what brought these men and women to this footpath, to this continent so far from their mountain homes. As my body moves, I realize this sound, this scene has become familiar to me, I raise my eyes to the city around me, and I relax in my appreciation of the funky, surprising and at times, gracious, architecture of Melbourne, its 19th century lane ways, lined with cafes, and its new Federation Square, across from its old Flinders Station Victorian train station with its fabled clock. For a few moments, I am of this place, just the way I was of Broadway, a New York gal from the old school unimpressed with the new wealth flooding the old streets.
I remember the first time La Professora took me to Vic's market, the two camels sitting on old rugs to save their shins, waiting to take children on a slow tight walk around the marketplace, how unsurprised I was by the sight so Eastern, so marked by trade routes. The heat and the cries of goods for sale and the different light, camels in the marketplace, the camels who carried their Afghan owners into the vast unknown Australian desert in the early years of the 20th century and who now roam free amidst the emu and the kangas of the interior. If we change places and survive the move, we become time roamers, walking on the grit of another continent's history.

When one makes lists, like I did of those who have fallen to assassins' bullets, foolish things can be implied. Bhutto was no saint, and her PPP is far from a democratic ideal--but still, I had grown accustomed to her voice, to her sensual face, her carefully aligned head scarf, to the adoring older women who seemed to accompany her every where and even to her vanity. No one should leave this world in a puff of smoke created by dissension. And then I saw the eyes of Condoleeza Rice on the Lehrer Report, where I see my American news, and thought I saw sorrow, tiredness, perhaps the thought of what have I done, it all seemed so easy, to push this woman, a woman like me, who puts herself in men-held spaces, who likes to hold power in her carefully manicured hands, who like me, in meetings where the fate of the world is being discussed, always sits demurely, with legs in proper positions, so no flash of flesh will interrupt the discourse of control, what I have done at my boss' bidding, to help seduce this woman to return to her death, oh just another political maneuver, we have done so many, and sometimes we get caught--but that is only in the pages of newspapers--I fly in and I fly out, I leave the demands, both hidden and spoken, on the table and get back on my jet, serving my belief, serving the Chief of State, a small man, yes, but I can live with what I have to do--not like Colin who could not swallow after a while. A puff of smoke and this woman, so unlike me, so like me in her public face, composed, well done up, this woman is blown off the face of the earth. It was just a ploy, it was just a foreign policy scheme and we needed something, it's all falling apart, and that's my job, to push at the cracks, to carry on my well groomed back, the latest device of saving face even if its creates mayhem--but this woman, whose voice still rings in my ear, this woman who somehow thought she was heads and shoulders above the fractured men, this woman with whom I laughed as I so gently shoved, his woman to whom I promised just enough, had her half her head blown off. Like me, that head, so filled with unusual education for a woman, so they say, blown off, dust to dust and I look with tired eyes out on the Washington world, speak in a strained voice about our next move in the region and I wonder, when my time here is done, will be I able to swallow, to think, to play my beloved sonatas, to touch another body and not see her face, sheared from all her life.

I write in a new year, for some, of life. And today the searing heat has withdrawn back to its desert lair, and a cool breeze brings an aching beauty. My Professora has long returned from her journey to Goa and Mumbai, and there I was waiting for her at 6 in the morning, waiting at the waist high barrier facing the international arrival doors at Melbourne's International airport. A particular Australian ritual, I always feel this is, waiting for the landing of the big planes from London, Shanghai, Singapore, Malaysia, Beijing. Friends and lovers, children with balloons sitting on their fathers' shoulders, all looking up at the board of arrivals, and then settling in for the long wait as their expected one makes her way through customs, baggage retrieval. Four doors slide open first slowly as the first class passengers make their way through, perhaps looking a little less tired then the others to follow. For close to 21 hours most of the passengers have been sitting in cramped seats, breathing stale air, pushing the little plane on the seat screen in front of them over the international date line, through the Pacific skies. We do not know out of which door our expected one will come and so we watch each, heads turning, reunion dramas picking up speed. Young families with new babies, grandparents reaching over the barricade to touch their grandchild for the first time, children too impatient to wait for their parents to push the over laden baggage trolleys run ahead, stretching their legs and lungs on this their firm ground. This is no five hour Paris to New York trip, this is the arrival of the modern day clipper ships of the air--the big bellied Quantas life lines of Australia. I am pushed against the barrier, straining to catch sight of La Professora's hennaed head and after throngs have pushed through, I see her coming through the left hand door, and I squeal my delight like all the rest, she has made it home, she has endured. I push my way out to give someone else the room to wait and quickly get to her as she emerges into the main cavern of the airport. We run towards each other, and laughing, give each other a big wonderful lesbian kiss. She is tired, but she is home.