A mother's red lines

Atalyah Baumel

"I will never know for sure because of whom and because of what the Camp David summit failed, just like I will never know for sure if the Yom Kippur war had been inevitable. What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that it is a mother's duty to protect her children. Life is precious. I never yet heard of a dead person coming back. It was not proven to me that there is any other existence except the one we know, or that there is a Next World where one who shed blood may find a reward.
    From the statements by leaders of both sides I gather that the summit failed because both sideshad contradictory "Red Lines", lines which they could not cross because of religious fanaticism and selfish nationalism. History has taught us that Red Lines of this kind can become Green Lines after one more bloody war had been fought - too late for those who had fallen or for those whose life had been permanently ruined.
    I am the mother of four children, two boys and two girls. As a mother, I have my own sacred values, my own Red Lines. The life of my children is sacred for me. I will no longer send them off to war. Once, I was a good citizen and a bad mother. I had been a mother who let her son be put in danger of paying with his life for the refusal of others to make peace. No more!
    I call upon Ehud Barak to go back to the negotiating table, and not to get off until he achieves a comprehensive agreement making an end, once and for all, to the Israeli-Arab conflict. And if he is incapable of that, if he can only lead us to war, let him ask those who believe in a Greater Israel to send their own children."

Atalya Baumel - inhabitant of the small community of Yuvalim in Galilee - was one of the most outspoken of the militant soldiers' mothers who struggled to get Israeli troops out of Lebanon. With the failure of the Camp David summit making the danger of new war palpable, Baumel burst into renewed activity, sending out a constant stream of furious letters and statements. This is one of these, as published in Ha'aretz on 27 July 2000.
Via The Other Israel, pob 2542, Holon 58125, Israel (tel/fax +972 3 556 5804; email otherisr@actcom.co.il;http://members.tripod.com/~otherIsrael/).