A protest of their own...

    With an IDF* withdrawal from Lebanon edging closer, the Four Mothers protest group has come a long way.
"I'm a proud rag," Ami Katz declares defiantly. "This setting in which you've found me isn't strange at all; the setting in which my son is serving, in Lebanon, is what's strange."
Despite the disclaimer, it is indeed surprising to come across Katz, a stout ultra-Orthodox man draped in unkempt Hasidic clothing, standing atop the "mothers outpost" that Orna Shimoni and the Four Mothers group have set up near the prime minister's house in Jerusalem to protest the IDF's continued presence in South Lebanon. "You know what's not right here?" Katz asks. "It's wrong that my son is sitting up there, not that I'm sitting here."
Katz, 42, a settler in the Gush Etzion bloc and the father of nine children, is accustomed to being unusual. He even seems to enjoy flouting expectations. At the age of 15, as a secular Tel Aviv youth, he met Rabbi Haim Drukman, who was delivering a lecture to the socialist Hashomer Hatzair youth group to which Katz belonged. The teenager was mesmerized by the religious message propagated by the charismatic lecturer. Soon thereafter, he left his secular city high school and took up religious study at the Ponevezh yeshiva; and he traded away a left-wing political outlook, moving to the right. His flirtation with right-wing politics, however, lasted just a few years, and today Katz belongs to Meretz. He continues to live within the Haredi world while marching to the beat of his own drum.
"I don't represent the typical Haredi, and in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox, I'm not a desirable Haredi," Katz reflects, sitting on a stool next to a railing that separates the compound from the street, on which some vehicles passing by toot their horns in support of the compound's pro-withdrawal message. "I don't want to be a stereotypical Haredi because I can't stand them, ideologically. The Hasidic dress I wear is in solidarity with a rich family heritage; it isn't a political statement."
Katz's son Menahem has followed a route opposite of his father's, leaving the religious world at the age of 15. Today the young man serves as a paratrooper. His estrangement from Judaism is acute, as exemplified by requests he has relayed to his father about his military service - for one thing, he has asked to receive neither a religious nor a military burial should he die in the IDF. "He doesn't think that a 21-gun salute will take him to where the dead go," the father says, explicating Menahem's sentiments.
Referring to the dilemmas his son faces while serving today for the second time in the security zone, Ami Katz says, "In the meantime, he's there, and he's not refusing orders. I salute him for that, because I don't know what I'd do in his place."
Katz and a few other men are demonstrating at the Four Mothers compound, and yet this pro-withdrawal protest remains primarily a women's story. Now claiming a central role in a searing political debate, the Four Mothers group has come a long way, overcoming qualms felt by women's movements about the moral and practical proprieties of using gender, and the womb, for protest purposes. Such scruples persisted, even though men in politics have not hesitated to use body symbols - war scars, for instance - for protest. For years, women's movements debated whether they should act in their own separate voice.

A protest of their own

Today the answer to this debate might seem self-evident, as women's demonstrations have become an inseparable element in the country's protest landscape. Yet if they have become common, women's protests continue to bear distinctive characteristics, in terms of their persistence and the spirit that animates their activities, and also with respect to their perspicacious ability to identify borders demarcating the public's endurance levels - to distinguish between pain that must be tolerated and suffering that is entirely unnecessary - before other sectors in the society are fully aware of such threshold levels and breaking points.
This foresight was evident when women organized after the opening of the Western Wall tunnels in Jerusalem and the ensuing bloodshed, and it has manifested itself in the case of Lebanon as well.
With the passage of time, messages propounded in women's protests have changed. In the beginning, somewhat hesitant activities stressed themes such as the sanctity of life and the foolishness of waging wars when other options were available; and Orna Shimoni, the mother of Ayal, a soldier killed in Lebanon, limited her campaigns to the demand that the Lebanon issue become a high priority on the national agenda. Today, the women call in a cogent, unfaltering voice, demanding a withdrawal from Lebanon.
The current round of protests in front of Ehud Barak's house started exactly a week ago, and it's not clear how long it will last. The establishment of the protest tent was preceded by four letters sent to Barak by Orna Shimoni. None of these was answered; the evasive recalcitrance hurt her. She thought that her letters deserved, at the least, a reply of the "I received your letter" variety.
"The impact of these changing circumstances is impossible to miss. Even if one comes without public opinion polls in hand, in a visit to the protest compound it is impossible not to discern the profound change in the attitude taken by "Israeli" society toward the women's protest movement and the situation in Lebanon. Times and attitudes have indeed changed since Deputy Knesset Speaker and Likud MK Meir Cohen-Avidav termed the Mothers Against Silence group "fat women" - the derogatory term was condoned by many for some time, but the recent across-the-board uproar denouncing the "four rags" sneer made by an IDF officer portended a societal change.
Similarly, attitudes concerning "Israel's" presence in Lebanon have changed significantly. About a year ago, Shimoni lingered for a month in front of the President's Residence in Jerusalem, demanding that the mothers group be allowed to meet with the security cabinet. Responses at the time ranged from public apathy to overt displays of a lack of sympathy shown by pedestrian passers-by. Now times have changed. Groups of supporters flock to the protest tent from all parts of the country; drivers passing by roll down their windows to utter sympathetic words. Seen no longer as a group of hysterical women, the mothers now express a mounting public mood.
While I was speaking with Shimoni, a religious woman wearing an elegant hat approached her, explaining that she had been invited to protest against the withdrawal from the Golan Heights. "But," the woman said, "it's more important to be here. When are we going to get out of Lebanon already?" she asked Shimoni, who has come to be regarded as an authority on this question. "When 100,000 people come here," Shimoni replied.

Wanted: 100,000 protesters

One hundred thousand protesters are not to be found in the compound, but public support for the cause is surging. On Sunday, a group of merchants from the Karmel Casbah visited the mothers tent, bringing crates of fruit and vegetables. Residents from buildings nearby furnish food and drink as well; the owner of a Jerusalem hotel has made a room available to Shimoni.
The protest compound is reviving scenes known at this site only once before in the past, during the stormy protests opposing the Lebanon War that were staged in front of the house when Menachem Begin lived in it. After almost 20 years, the circle has closed. Nadia Klein, a left-wing English teacher from Jerusalem, took part in the previous demonstrations. In 1982, her son was two years old; today, Eran Klein serves in the Nahal infantry corps, and his unit is scheduled for Lebanon duty in another month.
"It would have been unfathomable at the time to imagine that I would come here again when Eran was in the army," she says, "but here I am, not only because our sons are falling as casualties, but because I think it's immoral that we're there."
Klein's personal story encapsulates not only the continuing trauma in Lebanon, but also the complexity of the protest that the mothers group promotes. While Klein protests in favor of withdrawal from the security zone, her son feels guilt-stricken due to the fact that he won't go up to Lebanon with his unit mates because of his participation in an officers' training course. "There is a phenomenon among our children - some cut themselves off from our activity," Klein says, as other mothers in the protest compound nod in wan assent. "They don't speak with us about our activity, even if they support it. My son only asked that I don't embarrass him," she says.
The women's group copes with delicate family wrinkles of this sort and other poignant dilemmas. In general, it's hard to protest in a small country, where everyone seems to be connected with one another, either by social, familial or other bonds.
The notorious "rags" remark made by Brigade Commander Shmuel Zakai has already been forgiven; yet comments made by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh that "the Four Mothers don't tell the whole truth" (in other words, that they lie) will be harder to forget. "I'm very angry with him," says Bruria Sharon, a member of the group.
Sharon comes across as a walking multimedia show in the protest tent. She's hooked up to radio and telephones and covered with slogans and stickers. "If we're not telling the whole truth, let's talk about what he [Sneh] is concealing, the fact that Hizbullah hasn't once tried to infiltrate "Israeli" territory, and the fact that nothing catastrophic happened after the withdrawal from Jezzine. The truths he isn't telling are surely more important than ours," she exclaims in a defiant tone.
Orna Shimoni is also furious about Sneh's comment, though she isn't angry with him personally. Sneh was a close friend of her late husband, a Labor Party stalwart. "Ephraim gave me a lot of support during the period of mourning," she relates. "In fact, during the Shiva [mourning period] for Ayal, we gave him a platform to persuade those present that his death wasn't in vain, that the children are really being killed in defense of the settlements in the north. But now I can't forgive him. If the brigade commander's remark was a stupid slip of the tongue, Ephraim's comment was well-considered, and it was a blow below the belt."
Relating tales of the past, criticizing rough responses to still ruder realities, receiving well-wishers and curious passers-by and responding to world media that have come to document their activities, the mothers spend their days in the protest compound. Sometimes politicians stop by - Yael Dayan came on Sunday, and Minister Binyamin Ben-Elizer came accompanied by journalists ("He wanted to sound off and not listen," the protesters complain). From the protesters' point of view, more moving was the visit made by a cab driver, who brought a pizza.

1- Ha'aretz, 22-2-2000.
* This term is absolutely unacceptable. ""Israel's"" Army is that of war and aggression for it protects land gained by force, confiscation and war in contradiction with the simplest rights of human confessed by the international laws and conventions.