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10 ‘Four Mothers’:The Womb

in the Public Sphere

Dafna Lemish and
Inbal Barz el

‘Four Mothers’ is a protest movement calling for Israel’s withdrawal from the
occupied territories of southern Lebanon. Israel invaded south Lebanon on
6 June 1982 in an attempt to solve security problems on its northern border.
While planned as a limited operation, it escalated to a full-scale war and has
culminated in a problematic occupation. The unresolved situation has claimed
many lives: over 1200 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the region, and
numerous (numbers unavailable) soldiers and guerrilla fighters and citizens
have lost their lives on the other side of the border.
The Four Mothers movement was established after a tragic crash involving
two military helicopters on 5 February 1997, resulting in the wasteful death of
73 soldiers on their way to assignments in southern Lebanon.
Originally, four women, all mothers of combat soldiers, residents of the
vulnerable Israeli north, initiated the protest, to be joined by scores of others,
men included. A year later, the movement reported on 600 activists around the
country, and 15,000 supporting signatures on a protest petition (Ringel-Hoffman,
Ma’ariv, 27 March 1998). Moreover, the term ‘Four Mothers’ possesses a symbolic
meaning in Jewish tradition, since it represents the four biblical mothers (Sara,
Lea, Rebecca and Rachel), thus serving as the emblem of ‘motherhood’ of the
nation as a whole.
On 7 February 1997, a mother named Zabarie wrote in a letter to a weekly
paper (Ha’ir):

Woman, mother! Why do you give them your son, so they would sacrifice
him? Your flower is 18, and he is the most important thing for you in the
world – more so than yourself. You won’t eat because of him. You won’t
sleep because of him. And now, you let him go straight to hell, instead of
telling him: ‘My child, they die there! Don’t go there!’ ... Lebanon is a
monstrous altar. Tell him the truth, don’t let him go so easily. Don’t give
them your child. He wants to live.

Motherly love and the instinctive desire to protect one’s child are perceived in
our society as an essential characteristic of femininity. The mythical strength
assigned to motherly love seems to legitimize almost any form of action, including

Source: EJC (2000), vol. 15, no. 2: 147–169.