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- We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most
likely to some degree alone. What if our aloneness isn't a tragedy?
What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being
afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure - to
experience the world as a dynamic presence - as a changeable interactive
theory?
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- Rachel Corrie
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- Can I take you, dear readers, on a journey with me to
the Minetta Lane Theater. It was here that I saw the play My Name Is Rachel
Corrie. It was here, through the magic of Rachel Corrie's journals
and emails and Megan Dodd's mesmerizing portrayal, that I met the
courageous young woman who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer
in Gaza, at the age of 23. At the time of her death, Rachel Corrie
was attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home.
I fell in love with the heart and soul of this young idealist. Perhaps
through her words, I can convey Rachel's mission and the urgency of
the crisis that is occurring today.
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- There are those who appear to be born with purpose and
Rachel's purpose was obvious at a very early age. It is
difficult not to be somewhat stunned by the description of Rachel
as a two year old looking across Capitol Lake in Washington State and announcing,
"This is the wide world and I'm coming to it."
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- When she was a 10 year old child in Olympia
Washington, Rachel delivered a speech at her schools Fifth Grade Press
Conference on World Hunger
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- "I'm here for other children
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- I'm here because I care
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- I'm here because children everywhere are suffering and
because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.
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- I'm here because those people are mostly children.
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- We have got to understand that the poor are all around
us and we are ignoring them.
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- We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.
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- We have got to understand that people in the Third World
countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.
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- We have got to understand that they dream our dreams
and we dream theirs.
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- We have got to understand that they are us. We
are them.
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- My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.
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- My dream is to save the forty thousand people who die
each day.
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- My dream can and will come true if we all look into the
future and see the light that shines there.
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- If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.
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- If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn
free with the potential of tomorrow." As the calendar pages turned,
the little girl with the social conscience grew into an activist and, eventually,
outgrew Olympia. Rachel's political evolution gathered momentum in her
early twenties. Evergreen State College was a very liberal university in
Olympia. Rachel observed loudly, "the highest
level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall".
She became involved in community activism, after September 11th, but she
questioned the relevance of what she was doing. "People
are offering themselves as human shields in Palestine and I am spending
all of my time making dove costumes and giant puppets." Rachel told
her mother:
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- "I've been organizing in Olympia for a little over
a year on anti-war/global justice issues. And it started to feel
like this work is missing a connection to the people who are impacted by
US foreign policies......any government policies, particularly policies
which we're funding. I feel pretty isolated from the world because
of living in Olympia my whole life and my activism at this point has been
extremely tied to Olympia. But I've had this underlying need to go
to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that
goes to fund the US military." And so, Rachel left her home and studies
at Evergreen College and joined the International Solidarity movement
in Gaza on January 25, 2000. The audience embarks on her trip with
her, and through her descriptions, we meet the Palestinian people, experience
their warmth and feel the pain of the injustices that are being foisted
upon them. We experience Rachel's hard hitting experiences in Rafah,
in the Gaza Strip. We can feel her growing fear. In Gaza, Rachel
carried the body of a dead man on a stretcher while the Israeli army shot
in front of her. And yet, most of her activism involved protection, such
as staying overnight in the homes of families on the frontline to
stop their demolition and standing in front of water workers at a
well in Rafah as they came under fire.
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- Shortly before being bulldozed to death, Rachel wrote
the following letter to her mother. Witnessing the occupation inspired
this powerful letter. I ask that you not only to allow the words
to move you emotionally, but more importantly, to allow the words to move
you to action.
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- Mom, I have bad nightmares about
tanks and bulldozers outside our house, and you and me inside. Sometimes
the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks - and then at night it just
hits me again a little bit of the reality of the situation . I am
really scared for the people here. Yesterday I watched a father lead
his two tiny children holding his hand out into the sight of tanks and
a sniper tower and bulldozers because he thought his house was going to
be exploded. It was our mistake in translation that made him think this,
although I'm sure it is only a matter of time. In fact, the Israeli
army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground
nearby. This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded
up outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads, while tanks and
bulldozers destroyed twenty-five greenhouses - the livelihoods of three
hundred people. To think that this man felt it was less of a risk
to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house.
I was really scared that they were all going to be shot, and I tried to
stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but this
father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, happened
to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I
felt like it was our translation problems that made him leave. I thought
a lot about what you said about Palestinian violence not helping the situation.
60,000 people from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only
600 can go there for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because
the three checkpoints make a 40-minute drive into a 12-hour or impassable
journey. Sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed - the
airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with
Egypt (now with a sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access
to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years) There used to be
a middle class here - recently. We get reports that in the past,
Gaza flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks for security
inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers,
so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out
vegetable farms and gardens.
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- What is left for people? Tell me if you can think
of anything. I can't. So when someone says that any act of Palestinian
violence justifies Israel's actions not only do I question that logic in
light of international law and the right of people to legitimate armed
struggle in defense of their land and their families, not only do I question
that logic in light of the fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits collective
punishment, prohibits the transfer of an occupying country's population
into an occupied area, prohibits the expropriation of water resources and
the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as farms; not only do I
question that logic in light of the notion that fifty-year-old Russian
guns and homemade explosives can have any impact on the activities of one
of the world's largest militaries, backed by the world's only superpower,
I also question that logic on the basis of common sense. If any of us had
our lives and welfare completely strangled and lived with children in a
shrinking place where we knew that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could
come for us at any moment, with no means of economic survival and
our houses demolished; if they came and destroyed all the greenhouses that
we'd been cultivating for the last however- long ; do you not think, in
a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could?
You asked me about non-violent resistance, and I mentioned the first intifada.
The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are
engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance. Who do you think I'm
staying with, in houses that are going to be demolished amid gunfire?
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- Who do you think are staffing the human-rights centers?
What do you think this Palestinian-led movement is that I joined that engages
in non-violent direct action? Who do you think these families
are that I tell you about, who won't take any money from us even though
they are very, very poor, and who say to us: "We are not a hotel.
We help you because we think maybe you will go and tell people in your
country that you lived with Muslims. We think they will know that
we are good people. We are quiet people. We just want peace".
Do you think I'm hanging out with Hamas fighters? These people are
being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as
best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers.
Isn't that basically the epitome of non-violent resistance? When that
explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family's
house.
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- I was in the process of being served tea and
playing with the two small babies. I'm having a hard time right now.
Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people
who are facing doom. I know that from the United States it all sounds
like hyperbole. A lot of the time the kindness of the people here,
coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal
to me. I can't believe that something like this can happen in
the world without a bigger outcry. It hurts me, again, like
it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world
to be.
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- For a long time I've been operating from a certain core
assumption that we are essentially the same inside, and that our differences
are by and large situational. That goes for everybody - Bush,
Bin Laden, Tony Blair, me, you, Sarah, Chris, Dad, Gram, Palestinians,
everybody of any particular religion. I know there is a good
chance that this assumption actually is false. But it's convenient,
because it always leads to questions about the way privilege shelters people
from the consequences of their actions. It's also convenient because
it leads to some level of forgiveness, whether justified or not. It is
my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even
people with a great deal of privilege don't just idly sit by and watch.
What we are paying for here is truly evil. maybe the general growing
class imbalance in the world and consequent devastation of working people's
lives is a bigger evil. Being here should make me more aware of what
it means to be a farmer in Columbia, for example. Anyway, I'm rambling.
Just want to tell my mom that I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental
belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I
think it is a good idea for all of us to drop everything and devote our
lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing
to do any more. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar
and have boyfriends and make comics for my co-workers. But I also
want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel.
Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of
our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at
all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not what
they are asking for now. This is not the world you and Dad wanted
me to come into when I was two and looked at Capitol Lake and said "This
is the wide world and I'm coming to it." When I come back from Palestine
I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being
here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of
the better things I've ever done.
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- I love you and Dad.
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- Sorry for the diatribe>> Rachel had become
a martyr to the Palestinians by standing up to the Israeli army.
Edward Said praised her actions as "heroic and dignified at the same
time." Though Rachel is dead, do not let her words and her story
die along with her, dear readers. Keep Rachel Corrie alive on in each
one of us. "This has to stop. I think it is a good idea
for all of us to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop."
Rachel Corrie (April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003)
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- Copyright: 2006
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- www.judyandreas.com
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- JUDE10901@AOL.COM
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