Tag: Rachel Corrie

5 years on, we remember Rachel Corrie

This article was originally published in The Observer newspaper on the 2nd March 2008

It is impossible to underestimate quite how much life for Rachel Corrie’s family has changed since she was killed by an Israeli army Caterpillar D9 bulldozer in the Gaza Strip on 16 March 2003. As Rachel’s elder sister Sarah puts it: ‘What was normal doesn’t exist for us now.’

‘After Rachel was killed.’ When I meet the Corries, it swiftly becomes clear that there is a great deal they want to speak out about, but it is these four words, heavy with loss, that they have repeated most over the past five years.

Before Rachel was killed trying to prevent a Palestinian home in Rafah from being demolished, they were a pretty ordinary West Coast American family. It has been said in the past that she came from a left-leaning, alternative background, but this is not strictly accurate. Craig Corrie is an insurance executive, who has spent 24 years of his career working for the same firm. Cindy Corrie is a musician and teacher. Since the mid-Seventies they have mostly lived in the same slate-grey house in Olympia, a small town with many coffee shops an hour’s drive out of
Seattle, and it was here that they raised their three children, Chris, Sarah and Rachel. True, the Corries liked to debate politics around the kitchen table. They also liked to talk about the cats and the chickens, going skiing at the weekend, the vegetable plot, the family holiday cottage in Minnesota. Whenever the conversation did turn towards the Palestinian issue, Craig and Cindy’s sympathies would instinctively fall on the Israeli side.

After Rachel was killed, life changed abruptly. Over the past five years they’ve had to deal with the loss of their youngest daughter, at the age of 23. Cindy, a quietly spoken woman not given to over-statement or, indeed, self-pity, describes a period of mourning that will never really end.

Rachel’s parents and sister have not returned to their jobs, although their schedule is relentless. Last week Craig and Cindy were in Vancouver. Next week they’re heading to Alabama. As part of their work for the Rachel Corrie Foundation, an organisation they set up after their daughter died, to promote peace and justice in the Middle East, there are school talks and early-morning radio interviews about the human rights situation in Gaza and the West Bank, lobbying to have her death properly investigated and campaign meetings supporting their bid to fulfil Rachel’s ambition to establish a sister city project between Rafah and Olympia. Twice they have visited the contentious 40km by 10km strip of land where Rachel died.
Before Rachel was killed, Cindy had never been to Europe, let alone the chaotic, squalid, potentially dangerous refugee camp that is Rafah.

The routine of day-to-day life has been cast aside. Their two-acre garden, from where you can see the creek where the children used to swim in the summer and the rushes in which they’d play hide-and-seek, has an elegiac, abandoned feel. They’re away so often the family cat now lives with Sarah. Even if Cindy had the time to cook dinner, she’d have nowhere to serve it up. Every surface of the house is smothered with paperwork.

Rachel had been a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, a
non-violent pro-Palestinian activist group. Within days of her death, the
eloquent and vivid emails that she had sent from Gaza were published, with
the consent of the Corries, in the Guardian. In 2005 they became the inspiration for an acclaimed play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, based on Rachel’s writing. Following two sell-out runs in London and a controversial last-minute cancellation in New York, the dramatic monologue, which follows Rachel’s life from messy teenage bedroom through to Palestinian refugee camp, has been performed across America and Canada.

Later this month, on the fifth anniversary of Rachel’s death, it will be staged in Israel and the Corries will be there to watch the first performance in Arabic. This is a typically frenetic month. Next week sees the publication of Let Me Stand Alone, a collection of Rachel’s writing and drawings from the ages of 10 to 23, the final piece written four days before she was killed.

Craig and Cindy Corrie have become well known in Olympia. This modest middle-aged couple with silver hair and sensible waterproof anoraks – in the winter it rains so much in this part of the world that umbrellas are pointless – are stopped in the street. Teenage girls in skinny jeans hover, wanting to say hello to the parents of Rachel Corrie. Cindy, in particular, lights up, as though caught in the glow from a torch beam. I ask Sarah if her mother and father are often approached.

‘All the time,’ she says. ‘I’ve got used to it.’

‘In the first hour after Rachel was killed,’ Cindy recalls, ‘I remember saying: we have to get her words out.’

I’m sitting with Cindy and Sarah in one of Olympia’s oldest coffee shops, a place where the Corries used to come as a family when the children were growing up. One by one they piece together the events of 16 March 2003. It was a humdrum Sunday. Sarah, not long married to her husband, Kelly, was living in the family home while her parents were based temporarily in North Carolina, where Craig was working.

‘I caught the end of a message on the answer machine, someone saying, “I just heard the sad news,”‘ says Sarah, ‘and it dawned on me. It was something to do with Rachel.’ She found out her sister had died by reading the ticker tape along the bottom of the television screen: ‘Olympia woman killed in Gaza.’

‘My first thought was that maybe it wasn’t Rachel. My next was that Mom and Dad didn’t know. I started trying to dial and I remember looking at the handset and thinking, “I don’t know how to punch in the numbers.”‘

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Craig was doing the laundry when the phone rang. Cindy picked it up. It was her son-in-law, Kelly.

‘I could hear that there was something wrong in his voice,’ recalls Cindy. ‘I could hear Sarah crying hysterically in the background. She came onto the phone and said, “It’s Rachel.” And I said, “Is she dead?” I just knew I had to ask about the very worst possibility so that maybe that option would go away.’

While she took the phone to her husband, the news was confirmed on the television screen back in Olympia. ‘It says her name,’ Sarah told her mother. ‘It says her name.’

It would be days before they had a chance to mourn in private. First they flew to Washington DC to be with their son, Chris – ‘He was the only one who could function,’ recalls Craig – from where they began the logistical nightmare of organising the return of their daughter’s body. Craig was in such a hurry to pack he slung a pillowcase into his overnight bag mistaking it for a shirt. A journalist pitched up on their driveway in Olympia. There were more in Washington. A congressman suggested they hold a press conference. The death of an American citizen in Gaza was front page news – all this at a time when the atmosphere in America was already intense. The Iraq war would begin four days after Rachel was killed.

Craig recalls how, at one point, he picked up the telephone to learn that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was on the line. ‘He told me: “She is your daughter but she is also the daughter of all Palestinians. She is ours too now.”‘

‘If someone had told me 10 years ago that this was going to happen to us,’ says Cindy, ‘I’d never have predicted any of the things that we have done. I would have said, “You’re crazy. If anything happened to a child of mine I would not draw another breath.” But, amazingly, you do take the next step.’

For Cindy, as for the rest of the family, that next step seemed to be exploring the words Rachel had written. ‘Immediately I was drawn to the writing,’ she says. ‘Because the writing was what we had, and what we still have, of Rachel. Nobody was thinking of a book back then but, even early on, when we were in such searing pain, we were drawn to what Rachel had written. As a comfort, as a connection.’

Most of Rachel’s words had been kept in plastic tubs in the garage, or the attic. Journals, email printouts, poems, letters, assignments for creative writing classes, scraps written on paper napkins. Sarah, who has painstakingly edited the book over the past year, recites one of the first lines she read after Rachel died: ‘There is something that I’m supposed to do. I know there is something big that I am supposed to do. I just don’t know what it is yet.’

In the early pages of Let Me Stand Alone there is the sense of someone comfortable with the notion of revealing her inner world on the page: the style is uninhibited, experimental, confident. While it’s clear this is a dreamy little girl who likes to dance and to visit her grandmother, she also has an easy relationship with words. Her parents don’t describe themselves as writers but they remember their daughter sitting on the floor with pens and crayons before she went to nursery.

What emerges is someone who could be variously idealistic, knowing, self-deprecating, earnest, quirky, pretentious, fanciful, melodramatic, obsessive, flip and wise. Some of the pieces are uneven – whose private musings wouldn’t be? – but at its best Let Me Stand Alone is a window into the private preoccupations of a singular girl growing up in middle-class America in the Eighties and Nineties, a girl discovering her own lucid and original voice. Some of the passages, particularly her accounts of her intense love affair with a young man called Colin, are breathtakingly vivid and personal.

It is impossible to read about how Rachel lived without thinking about how she died. There are times when her words are chillingly prescient as she describes dreams about falling, fears of tumbling, being out of control. ‘Death smells like homemade apple sauce as it cooks on the stove. It is not the strangling sense of illness. It is not fear. It is freedom,’ she writes on 19 May 1993. Aged just 14.

Early on there is a surprising empathy for outsiders and I realise that in a media obsessed with the Paris Hiltons of this world, we don’t often get to hear about young, politicised American women. ‘Maybe,’ writes Rachel, aged 11, ‘if people stopped thinking of themselves, and started thinking of the other sides of things, people wouldn’t hurt each other.’ But there is a healthy streak of self-obsession too, and a wicked sense of humour. She grows up into a chain-smoking Pat Benatar fan. Some of the most poignant moments are Rachel’s ‘to do’ wish lists. A teenager who imagines there are years and years ahead of her.

A trip to a remote part of Russia as a teenager, just after the fall of Communism, is clearly a catalyst. So are stints staffing telephone crisis lines and volunteering for mental health organisations. ‘I know I scare you,’ she writes to her mother when she’s 19. ‘But being on a tightrope, with a safety net and a costume, doesn’t work for me… I have to do things that scare you. I’m sorry I scare you. I hope I’m not ugly in your eyes. But I want to write and I want to see. And what would I write about if I only stayed within the doll’s house, the flower world I grew up in?’

She is a student at Evergreen State College, a famously liberal university
with a tradition of activism, when the two planes fly into the Twin Towers. Rachel Corrie, blonde, skinny, high cheek-boned, carelessly beautiful, is already looking beyond the claustrophobic confines of Olympia and into the world beyond.However, when it emerges that she is saving up to go to Gaza in order to volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) the rest of the family are dead against the idea. Her sister remembers the tension: ‘I didn’t want her to go. It was extremely stressful; I couldn’t talk to her about it.’

Her mother adds: ‘I think all of us hoped that Rachel would not quite get her act together to go.’

Her father: ‘I was concerned. Why not work in a soup kitchen or something like that, I said to her. But if that is what she really wanted to do, you can’t ask your child to do less.’ This quietly thoughtful man, a former Vietnam veteran who masks his sadness with a droll sense of humour, pauses. ‘I was concerned. But not really, really frightened. To be honest, it wasn’t until she got there that I got really, really frightened.’

The writing from Rafah, Gaza, steps up a gear. Her emails home are passionate, articulate and forensic. She’s been criticised for being naive about the dangers. I suspect many people, even seasoned war reporters, might admit to being blindsided by the situation on the ground in Gaza. She researched the region before she got there and attended an ISM training session, but the shock of being in the midst of chaos is immediately apparent. A day after arriving she’s helping someone move the body of a child. She describes a colleague with shrapnel in her shoes.

Gradually Rachel seems to adapt to this new level of anxiety. She makes friends with Palestinian families, looks after their children, learns bits of Arabic. Television footage of Rachel from this time shows her draped in the traditional black and white kaffiyeh, looking drawn. A tank rumbles by in the background. She sounds resolute: ‘I feel like I’m witnessing the systematic destruction of a people’s ability to survive,’ she tells the reporter. ‘It takes a while to get what’s happening here. Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realise there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I’m having dinner with.’

I wonder if the family understood that, along with other ISM volunteers, she was acting as a human shield – or ‘a bulldozer cowgirl’ as she puts it. Cindy says: ‘We knew what she was doing. We knew she was staying at different houses.’ Initially Craig believed that the worst that might happen was that she would be arrested. ‘But then when she started reporting back, I realised that this was a military out of control, where there was no discipline. I said to her brother a week before she was
killed: “She can’t continue to do this sort of thing. Sooner or later it’s not going to work.”‘ Cindy adds, ‘You were just holding your breath.’

It sounds agonising for the family left behind. Sarah agrees. ‘You may not be talking about it every day, but you’re thinking about it. She knew that was what we would be doing. I don’t think it was an easy decision for her to be there knowing how worried we were going to be.’ Has Sarah ever been angry with her sister? ‘People ask that,’ she replies. ‘I never feel angry about Rachel because she didn’t intend to die. There was no part of her that intended to die. I can’t be mad at Rachel for something she didn’t intend to happen. So, no.’

This kind of bereavement, premature and violent, is hard to imagine. Now add the fact that Rachel swiftly became both a worldwide news story and a debating point and it’s difficult to comprehend the amount of stress the family must have been under. Within a few hours, Cindy’s email account had crashed. Absurdly, in the first hours of mourning they were trying to work out how to set up a new computer inbox. They received 10,000 emails in the first fortnight alone. In one of what must have been many dream-like moments, Craig recalls a candlelit vigil held three days after his daughter died: a stranger carried a huge poster-sized picture of Rachel, a photograph he hadn’t even seen before.

Overnight in Rafah there was graffiti dedicated to the young woman who believed there would be a democratic Israeli-Palestinian state in her lifetime – ‘Rachel was a US citizen with Palestinian blood.’ She had become a victim of their intifada, a heroine who had stood up to the mighty Israeli army. New mothers christened their daughters Rachel. A kindergarten was named after her. Palestinians living in America would approach the Corries crying, barely able to speak. ‘It should have been me,’ they told them.

Elsewhere the response was more mixed. The death of a young blonde female
American in the Middle East aroused extreme reactions. Angry messages to
pro-Israel websites suggested ‘she should burn in hell for an eternity’. Critics of the Palestinian cause suggested that the houses in Rafah hid tunnels which supplied arms. A picture of Rachel burning a makeshift American flag in front of Gaza schoolchildren was circulated. There was heated debate on the campus at Evergreen. Sarah and her brother Chris began filtering out some of the hate mail that arrived.

‘I don’t think people understand how divisive this issue is, and how much people care,’ says Craig. ‘I don’t think we did.’

Rachel Corrie was both lionised and demonised. ‘In some ways,’ says Cindy, ‘both reactions are threatening. Because Rachel was a very human person. I used to worry about the adulation – what happens when they find out that the real person was as flawed as we all are? On the other hand, I know she has given a lot of people hope and something to aspire to. I think it is important to people to have figures in their lives that provide that for them.’

The Corries take me around Olympia in their car, past the places where Rachel grew up. While Craig drives he recalls descriptive passages from her journals and tries to retrace his daughter’s steps in his mind’s eye. Even on a winter’s day you can see how beautiful it is: noble Douglas firs, a glint of water, secluded wooden houses with verandas.

Two years ago some of the Nasrallah family visited Olympia. They were the owners of the concrete house, pockmarked with tank shell holes, that Rachel had died defending. The two families were invited on a speaking tour to talk about the situation in the Middle East. When Khaled Nasrallah saw where Rachel had grown up he turned to her parents and said, wide-eyed: ‘She gave up this paradise, for us?’

In turn, the Corries have twice visited Gaza since Rachel was killed. ‘My feeling,’ says Craig, ‘was that she wrote about those people with warmth. Going to Gaza was a real need to see who Rachel wrote about and to thank them for the care they took of her while she was there.’ They negotiated the same checkpoints, the same rubble-strewn streets as their daughter had done. Armed men in watchtowers looked down on them. At night they slept through the sound of tracer fire. I imagine how proud, and perhaps astonished, their daughter would have been (on occasion she’d railed against her father for having ‘his head in the sand’ politically). The Corries’ instinct is to play down the danger they were in: gunfire
whistled past Craig and, one evening, dinner with the Nasrallah family was
interrupted by the menacing sound of a bulldozer outside the window. On
their second visit in 2006 they were woken in the middle of the night by
men with Kalashnikovs. Craig and Cindy Corrie would be valuable bargaining
tools in an area that has become even more desperate since Rachel was
killed. As it was, the Nasrallahs managed to persuade the men to go on their way. It was said that they killed two security guards on the Egyptian border instead.

In one of her final emails home Rachel said, ‘This has to stop! I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.’ It’s clear that her parents have taken her at her word. Sarah says, ‘She wanted them to go there. In her writing she says you need to meet these people. Now our lives are intertwined with what goes on in Rafah and Gaza and Israel and Palestine.’ Meanwhile, in the five years since Rachel was killed, the humanitarian situation in Gaza – effectively imprisoned by Israel, with limited fuel, electricity and medical
– has grown worse, not better.

The family is still seeking information about what happened to Rachel and to have her death accounted for. According to former US secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff, the Israeli government’s report was not ‘thorough, credible or transparent’, yet there is no sign that the US government plans to take any further action. Four months ago Sarah discovered distressing reports that Rachel’s autopsy was not carried out according to their stipulations. The Corries, along with four Palestinian families, are waiting for court action against Caterpillar Inc, the
American company that makes the bulldozer that killed Rachel, to be reheard.

Sarah recalls, three weeks after Rachel died, her mother meeting the family of Amy Biehl, an American anti-apartheid campaigner killed in South Africa in 1993. ‘I remember Mom asking Amy’s mother, “Do you ever get the normal back?” She paused for a long while and in the end she said, “No, not really.” I knew then that this is what was going to happen to our family. First you have to mourn Rachel. Then you have to mourn the loss of your family and the life that you had.’

Daily News Egypt: US court dismisses Caterpillar case filed by Rachel Corrie and Palestinian families

By: Jonas Moffat

In September, a US Court of Appeals dismissed a case against Caterpillar, Inc., which alleged seven claims, including aiding and abetting war crimes, extrajudicial killing, wrongful death, and other serious human rights violations.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) took the case on behalf of the family of Rachel Corrie and four Palestinian families.

Corrie, an American peace activist, was killed on March 16, 2003 by a D9 Caterpillar bulldozer when it ran over her twice while she was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. She was 23. The four Palestinian families are representing 17 family members who were either killed or injured by Caterpillar bulldozers.

In their decision, federal appeals judges claimed that they lacked jurisdiction to hear this case. Judges evoked the “political questions doctrine,” which they said would “require the federal judiciary to ask and answer questions that are committed by the Constitution to the political branches of the US government.”

Furthermore, the political questions doctrine, judges claim, would cause them to examine the role of the US government in financing the sale and purchases of Caterpillar bulldozers to the Israeli Defense Forces.

“We knew that ‘political questions’ might be a factor in the court’s decision,” Cindy Corrie told Daily News Egypt, “but we did not think that it would be applied in this way.”

Gwynne Skinner, one of the lawyers representing Corrie’s family, told Daily News Egypt that the judges calling on the “doctrine of political questions means that they cannot even look at any of the questions or evidence we are presenting, because of the ‘separation of powers’ in the government. They are saying that they ‘constitutionally’ can’t review the case.”

Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, said, “In our view and in our lawyers’ view, there was not enough information at this early stage for the court to truly determine the level of involvement of the US government in the sales. Also, we and our lawyers believe that it has historically been the role of the courts to hear claims for injuries caused by human rights violations, especially where an American company has aided and abetted those violations.”

Skinner added, “This court is a good court because it is based on law and not politics. If the judges decided to hear this case it would not affect the political body’s support of Israel. However, those who blindly support Israel tend to be very vocal, and any decision by the court will most certainly create a firestorm around it.”

She added that the court is the only forum to hold Caterpillar accountable. “If the judges decide not to hear this case, there will be no relief or justice for the lives of Rachel Corrie or the thousands of Palestinian families affected, and this is a tragedy.”

CCR, the Corries, and the Palestinians families are not giving up with this court’s decision, however. A motion for rehearing was filed on Oct. 9. Whether the court will accept the motion, Skinner said, “is a waiting game.” If the court refuses, they could then appeal to the Supreme Court — a move Skinner doubts they will take.

Corrie added, “We believe the court did not have enough information to decide whether this case should be dismissed based on a political question. We have in the petition asked the court to order more discoveries in the case, wherein more information about how the bulldozers are sold and the level of involvement of the US government in actually approving the sales can be better ascertained.”

According to Attorney Skinner, the court relied on an affidavit filed in separate hearings that the Caterpillar bulldozers were paid for by the US government “without giving any chance to see if this was true. There is no bit of scrutiny being used here.”

Corrie added, “There is no evidence that the US government had a policy that these bulldozers were to be sold and used to demolish civilian homes — in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law.” Asked if the Corries believed the court acted in good faith, she responded, “We think the court acted in good faith, but we believe they ruled incorrectly and we hope that they will reconsider this decision and its potential impact.”

In Sept. 2007, an Israeli bulldozer killed 19-year-old Mahmoud Kayid Al Kfafi in the Gaza Strip. According to eyewitnesses, the Caterpillar bulldozer hit Al Kfafi in the head with its razor, killing him immediately. To escape the gunfire being shot from IDF tanks at stone throwers, Al Kfafi sought refuge behind an olive tree.

Doctors said the bulldozer broke his skull wide open and his brain was out of it.

Corrie said that they are currently active with this case as well, stating that “we are involved today with a day of action against Caterpillar, Inc. calling for them to end their role in this occupation and to cease their sales to the Israeli military of equipment repeatedly used to break international humanitarian law.”

Read the original article here:
http://www.dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=9873

Solidarity With Rachel Corrie

By Greta Berlin published in the Washington Post

Saturday, July 28, 2007; Page A17

Jane Horwitz’s article on “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” could have been an example of reporting on the best aspects of the play [” ‘Corrie’ Fears Unrealized; Controversial Play Opens Without Incident in W.Va.,” Style, July 18]. Instead she gave space to the likes of Stanley Marinoff, who spouted off that Corrie was “a human shield for an organization that’s probably a terrorist [front] organization.”

That statement is not only inaccurate, it borders on slandering the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which has twice been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Even the courts in Israel have stated that the ISM is not a terrorist organization.

Corrie was not a “naive young lady” but a passionate advocate for justice for a people who have been forced to live under occupation, brutalized and ignored by the world.

I was honored to work with the ISM twice over two years in the occupied West Bank. The only violence I saw while standing with the Palestinians was perpetuated against us by the Israeli military and the illegal settlers. ISM members have been shot, beaten, tear-gassed and arrested. Corrie and Tom Hurndall were murdered by an occupying force.

We don’t go to Palestine believing we are on some kind of holiday. We go to bear witness to the daily suffering of the Palestinians. If the Israelis allowed United Nations peacekeepers in to monitor their behavior, there would be no need for us.

It’s telling that despite the uproar the play is not only doing well but is also making money. Thank God, the truth cannot be suppressed forever. Horwitz should have stuck to writing about the play, not making political comments.

— Greta Berlin

Le Bar-sur-Loup, France

The writer is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement.

A replay of tired lies

By Huwaida Arraf and Neta Golan, Seattle Post Intelligencer

It is sad that J.L. Greenberg recycles discredited propaganda to defame the memory of Rachel Corrie and the ongoing, important work of the International Solidarity Movement (“Corrie ignored Muslim atrocities,” May 23). It is shocking that he does so on behalf of the larger Seattle Jewish Committee.

Greenberg repeats tired lies that the ISM is a “Muslim organization” affiliated with the PLO and Hamas, focused on the “annihilation of the Jews” and unconcerned with other conflicts and repression around the world. The ISM is a non-violent resistance movement founded on the principles of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It is not a religious movement and, in fact, a significant number of ISM volunteers are Jewish and Christian. Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, Pagans, Confucians and many other religions have also been represented in the movement. The ISM is totally funded by private donations from civil society around the world. It receives no money from Palestinian political parties or organizations. The ISM is focused on ending Israeli occupation and oppression, a precondition for fair negotiations to end this conflict and secure peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The ISM rejects all forms of racism absolutely, including anti-Semitism.

Greenberg takes specific aim at Corrie’s memory. Again, he repeats ridiculous claims — that Corrie was “supporting terrorists,” uninterested in protecting Israelis from Palestinian attacks (and thus a de facto anti-Semite) and preventing the destruction of weapons-smuggling tunnels.

In the series of e-mails Corrie sent home while in Palestine, she discussed in eloquent prose the anguish she felt about the violence she was witnessing. Corrie instinctively humanized all people involved in the conflict, Palestinian and Israeli.

Seattle P-I readers are well aware that the house Corrie was trying to protect when she was killed was the home of a pharmacist and his family. As the Israeli army was eventually forced to concede, there was no weapons-smuggling tunnel under the house. Had the Israeli soldiers present that day listened to what the non-violent ISM volunteers were telling them, that there were no tunnels, no terrorists, no violence at that house, Corrie would be alive today. Her death was no “tragic accident” as Greenberg wants us to believe. It was the predictable outcome of Israeli occupation, Israel’s wholesale policy of house demolition, and the kind of demonization of Palestinians and Muslims that Greenberg engages in.

Greenberg also attacks Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the Irish Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who was recently wounded by the Israeli army at a non-violent demonstration in Bil’in village in the West Bank. Maguire was participating in the weekly nonviolent protests in Bil’in against the construction of Israel ‘s apartheid wall and the expansion of an illegal settlement onto the village’s farmland. Greenberg, extraordinarily, labels Maguire a “Jew hater” without a single bit of evidence.

Greenberg’s essay overflows with distortions bordering on, if not crossing unabashedly into, racism and Islamophobia. He labels all Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian, as “Muslims” and calls Bili’n’s weekly protests “Muslim demonstrations” though they have no religious character and feature participants of all religions. Greenberg’s laughable claim that Israeli military attacks on non-violent protesters are justified because “guns, grenades or sticks of dynamite might be under the flowing robes” of male and female Palestinian protesters also plays on ugly stereotypes of Palestinians and Muslims.

To achieve real, lasting and just peace for Palestinians and Israelis, extreme voices such as Greenberg’s, which demonize and undermine all those standing for human rights and non-violent change in Israel and Palestine, must be rejected. On the contrary, the non-violent resistance represented by Rachel Corrie in Rafah, and the joint Palestinian, Israeli and international protests in Bil’in are examples deserving respect, praise and support.

Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American living in Washington D.C., and Neta Golan, an Israeli living in Ramallah, Palestine, are co-founders of the International Solidarity Movement.

The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project

Ei: Bringing the discussion home: The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project
Andrew Ford Lyons, 1 May 2007

Possibly noteworthy was that more than 300 people attended the standing-room only public hearing on the project. People waited outside the building to get in to comment and observe. Forty-eight people spoke in support, 24 people expressed opposition. Hundreds of letters and emails flooded the city on the topic. Numerous phone calls also came in, according to council members.

What remains worth exploring, examining and scrutinizing was why the city council vote went as it did, and what was said by citizens during the open hearing on the matter. For anyone seriously studying current American popular opinion on the Middle East, a trove has been collected in Olympia during the last couple of months. Collect it, save it, dissect it with a scalpel.

April has been a punishing month in the U.S. for endeavors that recognize Palestinians as human beings. A sister city request failed in Olympia. Eighteen photographs in an exhibit featuring work by children from the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank were stolen from a Boston public library. Meanwhile, scare tactics and overt intimidation were once again employed, this time in South Florida, to coerce a theater company into canceling the play My Name is Rachel Corrie.

As an active participant in the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project nearly since it began in late 2003, I have my own preference as to how things should have gone in Olympia. The scant headlines run by Olympia’s daily newspaper and picked up by the Associated Press and Reuters paint our attempt at official recognition as a failure. Fair enough. But on the other side of the world, in a battered, cramped town where most the inhabitants remain refugees from some other part of Palestine, Khaled Nasrallah saw it differently. “You really succeeded,” he wrote in an email after watching the digital video with others in Rafah. “It was my pleasure to see all of you in the meeting.”

I have to take Khaled’s view. People who live through the kinds of things that have happened in Rafah know something about recognizing the fleeting instances in our lives where some degree of victory can be found. His family’s home was destroyed by an armored and armed Caterpillar D9 bulldozer for the sole reason that the military it represented wanted to expand a buffer zone and was (in violation of international law) demolishing all the houses in the area. In one attempt by the military to destroy Khaled’s home, Olympia native Rachel Corrie was killed.

When people in Rafah have stood up to demand recognition of their right to exist, let alone their humanity, they’ve historically faced guns, bombs, fighter jets, tanks, sniper towers and bulldozers. Considering that, I think we in the U.S. can take a few wagging tongues, each alloted three minutes of microphone time in a city hall. And if it gives our friends in Rafah some sort of comfort to see us confront and grapple with the creeping phobias and racist stereotypes prevalent in our own communities, then he’s right, we found some measure of success.

After the vote against the sister city project we received a few emails. One was from a Eugene, Oregon, resident who said he’d like to know “what was at play when the City of Olympia voted against it,” and asked, “How can that be: in the home area of Rachel Corrie??!!”
In the end … our critics had fewer people in their ranks, but they were scarier

It’s worth mentioning that a group of people in Madison, Wisconsin, tried to take their sister city project with Rafah official a couple of years previously and were met with even more hostility and ultimately a negative vote from their city council. Why does this happen? In the end, and in both cases, our critics had fewer people in their ranks, but they were scarier.

Rather than recapping the play-by-play here, I’ll just tell you where to find the main criticisms and our responses. You can see them at the project’s website (see link at the end of this article). Members of the sister city project authored a document in the form of a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) in response to letters sent to the city council before the vote. As no one speaking against the proposal that evening offered anything new, these responses stand firm. The city council video (link provided below) also contains numerous articulate rebuttals to the critic’s claims at the meeting.

Instead, I’d like to focus on the general perceptions stated by opponents of the project and the resulting vote. What people in Rafah saw, via the Internet, was nothing new. It was yet another example of how there is really no way allowed for them to connect with the outside world. Palestinians are told that they must follow certain rules before they can be apart of the global community. What these rules are seems to shift depending on the situation. The Israeli military also has rules it’s supposed follow vis-a-vis international law, but these folks don’t seem to pay much mind to that.

The rules shifted in Olympia on 17 April. For the last year and a half, project participants in Rafah and Olympia have worked to meet both the letter and spirit of the requirements regarding sister city relationships with both Sister Cities International and city regulations. As Olympia City Management Assistant Diamatris Winston and Sister Cities International pointed out, we met those requirements. Some letter writers and public speakers, without offering any sort of findings to the contrary, simply ruled that we didn’t. With its vote, the Olympia City council sided with these people.

A number of speakers in opposition complained that the project lacked an Israeli component, stating that they’d support one that included an Israeli town as well as some “compatible city in the West Bank or in Gaza,” indicating that they would prefer that this were an Israeli sister city project that could, perhaps, include some token recognition of a Palestinian entity. In short: if we changed the name and entire scope of our project and told our participants in Rafah to help us find a better town than theirs, preferably one in Israel, then they would endorse it. The Olympia City Council sided with these people.

There are currently three officially recognized sister city relationships between U.S. and Palestinian communities. In one instance, the partners in a project to bind the West Bank town of Bethlehem with Burlington, Vermont, worked to include a relationship with Arad, Israel. There are about 40 official sister city relationships in all between Israeli and American cities. No one is demanding in these circumstances that a Palestinian component must be required. But in Olympia, critics declared that official recognition of any Palestinian community is entirely dependent trilateral relationship with an Israeli community. We offered to help out and lend our knowledge of the process to anyone interested in organizing a sister city relationship with an Israeli town, and that our projects could work on several joint events once they got up and running. This wasn’t enough. Again, double standards are nothing new for Palestinians who attempt to play by our rules.

Aside from the fact that no one in the entire span of our project’s existence has ever approached us about establishing an Israeli sister city (and no one has since the council meeting), there is an offensive element to this notion. It insinuates that Palestinians must only be considered in light of their Israeli neighbors in every aspect of life, as though they are not deserving of the same rights of identity and self-determination as anyone else. That’s what our critics brought to the table and to which the Oympia City Council agreed.

In the public hearing, speakers used the word “divisive” even more often than they dropped “terrorists” or “Hamas.” After four years of open, public existence in the community, either organizing, sponsoring or cosponsoring events that have attracted hundreds of individuals, the sister city project suddenly became a divisive issue in the last month and a half, mostly by people who hadn’t given our project a single thought one month before, and really won’t one month later.

I’ve been giving this notion of divisiveness some thought in recent days. Like my friend Khaled in Rafah, I wasn’t able to be at the city council meeting in person. I watched it via the little three-by-two-inch video screen on the city’s website. I’m working on a contract with an organization in Morocco that encourages cross-cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Middle East and North African nations. It was weird watching people I knew in my hometown make their cases on that small screen, but it gave me some idea of how the rest of the world would see the debate that took place there.

It’s been a tense couple of weeks here in Morocco. During the weekend before last a suicide bombing shook Casablanca. These bombers — alleged to be loosely tied with an organization calling itself “Al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb” in nearby Algeria — tend to target local community centers, secular organizations, internet cafés, places where men and women and boys and girls of any background can congregate.

Another like-minded group seems to have emerged in Gaza, emboldened by the chaos, increased poverty and isolation that U.S. and Israeli sanctions and the confiscation of public funds have brought. This other group, “The Sword of Islam,” seems to be targeting Palestinian community centers, secular organizations, Internet cafés, places where men and women and boys and girls of any background can congregate. The goal these groups seem to be striving for is isolationism and segregation, to make people fearful of places that connect them to the outside world or to one another. Through fear, it is sometimes said, control can be exerted.

In Rafah, the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project fosters communication and people-to-people bonds among men and women of all faiths in an open manner. Our organization supports the Rachel Corrie Youth and Cultural Center and a number of other community centers in Rafah where men and women and boys and girls of any background can congregate, use the Internet to reach the world outside the prison-like conditions of Gaza, study, create art and connect.
Yet I still agree with Khaled; a degree of success was achieved.

The people in Olympia speaking out against official status for this sister city relationship chimed in on some familiar themes. They warned against open communications between people and in favor of mistrust, which ultimately leads toward the same path: isolation, segregation and fear. And the Olympia City Council sided with these people.

Over the years I’ve developed a sort of inkling that if the road map to any sort of lasting peace in the Middle East actually did include a detour through the United States, it would find a more suitable route through Olympia, Washington, rather than Washington, D.C. There’s nothing peaceful about the latter. Spend a day on D.C.’s Capitol Hill and another amid dense thickets of pine trees of Olympia’s Capitol Forest and then tell me which one gave you a greater sense of peace.

But the road map should wind through more towns than Olympia. The conversation that took place was too important. It needs to happen elsewhere and it needs to be archived. In readily available public records and video now sits a time capsule from 17 April 2007, of public sentiment in Olympia, Wash., on the Middle East. It’s there for anyone to study one year, five years or fifty years from now. The process should be repeated everywhere. I would encourage people in towns across the United States to find connections with Palestinian communities. Develop the bonds and personal connections. Visit their homes and invite them to yours. Then, when the paperwork and documentation has all been laid out, take it to your city council for official recognition and see who shows up and says what. The results will say far more about the citizens in our country than they will about those in Palestine.

Andrew Ford Lyons is president of the Board of Directors in Olympia for The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project and a former media coordinator for the International Solidarity Movement. His opinions are his own. He maintains a blog and can be reached at andy@orscp.org.