The power of mothers!!!!

I made a quick reference in a recent post here to the Israeli “Four Mothers” peace movement. This movement, founded by four mothers of Israeli soldiers serving in the IDF’s occupation force in neighboring Lebanon, succeeded, in the years right after its founding in early 1997, in pushing the issue of a speedy Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, unilaterally if need be to the very top of the national agenda.
Two years later, in the Israeli general election of 1999, Ehud Barak adopted the idea of this withdrawal as one of his key election promises. He won the election handily. In May 2000, the IDF did finally withdraw from all (or very nearly all) of Lebanon, as promised. Many of those parts of Lebanon they had been in for 22 years by then.
That withdrawal was unilateral– i.e., no negotiating its modalities with any other party. despite that, Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has experienced an unprecedented level of stability ever since, to the delight of the people living both north and south of it.
To find out more about the 4Ms, check out the links on this portal, and then explore the whole of that site a little more. The 4Ms disbanded after the withdrawal.
Today, I read this piece in the NYT. It’s G.I. families united in grief, but split by war, by Monica Davey. She’s writing mainly about the moms but also about the other close family members of some of the 1,300 US service members killed in Iraq so far.
Davey writes that while all the moms have been thrown into deep grief by their losses, some of them have remained as strong believers in the essential rectitude of the conflict that killed their menfolk, while others have been driven by their bereavement into a much deeper questioning of the whole war effort. She writes in a very fair-minded way, representing the views of mothers on each side of this divide.
Here is one of them:

Karen Hilsendager, of Philomath, Ore., said she found herself struggling with her doubts about the war and what they meant for the death of her son, Specialist Eric S. McKinley, who was killed in June. Ms. Hilsendager said she was irked by a comment people often made about her son. “They tell me: ‘Thank you so much for his service. He’s a hero,’ ” she said. “And I want to say back, ‘He’s not a hero, he’s a victim.’ ”
… Ms. Hilsendager said her feelings against the war were no blemish on her son, his service or his memory. “My son was following orders, and I’m proud of him for doing that,” she said. “But I am not proud of the administration that sent them. They did it wrong. They should not have gone over there yet. I’m not saying never, but not this way.”

Davey writes that while there is now a whole, loose, nationwide network of families who have lost loved ones in the war, many of the bereaved people tend to gravitate towards people who share their own interpretation of the broader meaning of their loss, and even have a hard time dealing with bereaved family members espousing the other point of view.
One example:

This fall, on a conference call of mothers who shared their experiences for a book project (“A Mother’s Tears: Mothers Remember Their Sons Lost in Iraq,” by Elliot Michael Gold) several hung up in anger after disagreeing about whether the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had made the war in Iraq necessary.

(I’ll be looking for that book, with great interest.)
Anyway, this got me to thinking once again about the huge power that mothers today have to do energetic work for good in our society. On a historical scale, it’s quite amazing that a woman like me can be, okay, 52 years old; have raised three healthy, lovely, and productive children; not have died in childbirth; still have plenty to eat; have been blessed with a good education; and– that I should should still have the energy and verve to work for another, say, 30 or so years in peace and justice movement!
What an amazing lessing!
I should note that I did play one teeny, teeny part in the Four Mothers movement. Sometime there, maybe 1999, in my regular column in the Arabic-language daily al-Hayat I wrote an “Open Letter to the Four Mothers from the Mother of a Lebanese”. After Hayat ran it, I got a call from the Israeli daily Ha’Aretz who asked permission to run it in Hebrew in their Op-Ed column.
I said yes.
So okay, I don’t know that it played any role at all. But actually, right now, I think I’ll have to dive into the horrendous mess ironically known as “Helena’s filing system” (hah!) and dig it out. Heck, I could even upload the text onto here if I succeed.
Anyway, my broader point here is that clearly we need to think about the potential power of a “Mother Building Bridges” movement or something, to help get the US occupation troops out of Iraq.
I am also, I should add, the owner of a small bank account in the name of a group called “Mothers and Others Connecting” that a group of us founded last year here in Charlottesville, to start selling Palestinian embroideries as a way of generating income for women in the refugee camps. I like the concept– as well as the sound– of “Mother and Others” (though so far we haven’t had any non-mothers sign up onto out embroidery-project committee). But maybe our group would be prepared to license that concept to a broad, international group of “Mothers and Others Against the War”…
Ideas?