Tag: Rachel Corrie

by Cindy and Craig Corrie
Originally published in The Guardian

When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians’ situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.

After Rachel died we realised that her words were having a similar effect on others whose lives were being changed, as ours have been – not just by Rachel’s death, but by the window her writing provided on the Palestinian experience and by her call to action.

Earlier this year, when a play created entirely from Rachel’s emails and journals first opened in London, we saw in a very immediate way the impact that Rachel’s words can have on others. Theatre can reach people in a different and deeper place than reading a news article or listening to a speech: there is an emotional aspect that for some people can be more long-lasting and motivating.

Theatre humanises; all art humanises. It takes us away from the merely logical and rational. In the Israel-Palestine conflict there is often a very logical calculus of death and war – and you must step out of the constructs of that logic in order to construct a logic for peace.

The play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, is not just about how Rachel died, even if that is why she is known and remembered. It also illuminates her humanity, tracing her evolution from typical teenage self-exploration through to her search for a political voice. The play includes some of her writing that might be considered uncomplimentary to us, and even to her. Far better that, though, than being a symbol of one dimension.

It is disconcerting, but also comforting, to watch an actor who looks much like Rachel – Megan Dodds – play our daughter on stage. In the opening scene, when Rachel awakens in her messy bedroom, the resemblance is almost too much. But Megan lives Rachel’s words in ways that are sometimes familiar but also sometimes surprising, so that we learn from her what Rachel may have been thinking. At several points in the play, Megan enacts receiving emails from us – real emails that we actually sent to Rachel. We had never before imagined our daughter’s reactions to receiving our messages until we saw them on stage.

Rachel was a real human being. Sometimes, when people idealise her, we feel vulnerable for her. Knowing the complete human being, would they feel the same? Through My Name is Rachel Corrie, people can know a more complete Rachel.

Clearly, our daughter has become a positive symbol for people. Her story and her words seem to motivate others to do something, not just sit and talk about the world’s situation in their living rooms and feel unhappy. The weekend after Rachel was killed, we discussed with old friends what we should do. We needed to find a response. In some ways we may have been more fortunate than other parents who have lost children, for the response in our situation was apparent. With her efforts to educate and to build permanent connections with Palestinians in Rafah, Rachel provided us with a path.

In an email from Rachel to her friend Todd, she tells him 10 times over that he must come to Gaza. “Come here!”, she repeats over and over. That is what Rachel would have wanted us to do, too: to try to carry on what she started.

We recently spent time in the US with members of the family who were behind the wall of the home Rachel stood to protect. For a month we ate, played and travelled with 15-month-old Sama. What future does she have, living in what now amounts to a mass prison in Gaza?

The recent disengagement may provide some relief for Gazans at the most obvious level. But it is hard not to contrast the media coverage afforded to the Israeli settlers’ leaving, with that given to the many Palestinian families who have lost their homes to demolition in Gaza. What has been happening in the West Bank under cover of the disengagement – the building of the wall and the expansion of settlements – is also very worrying.

And when the Israeli prime minister’s close aide Dov Weisglass said that the real intent of the Gaza disengagement was to place the peace process in formaldehyde, we have to take him at his word. We must keep insisting on a peace process and work towards a viable Palestinian state that will benefit Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, we are still asking our government for a US-led investigation into Rachel’s killing. The US state department is on record saying that the report of the Israeli military police does not reflect an investigation that was “thorough, credible and transparent”, despite that being promised to President Bush by Ariel Sharon. In March we initiated a lawsuit against the Israel Defence Force and the government of Israel, to seek justice for Rachel and also information. We still would like to know what happened on March 16 2003, and why the international eyewitness reports differ so radically from the statements of the soldiers involved.

Unfortunately, the Israeli parliament, counter to international law, has passed retroactive legislation making it impossible for most Palestinians and others to file suit against the IDF for injury that occurred in the occupied territories after September 2000.

In the US we have taken legal action against Caterpillar Inc, which manufactured the D-9R bulldozer which killed Rachel. Under existing US law, corporations can be, and are being, held responsible when they knowingly continue to provide goods and services that are used in a pattern of human-rights violations.

The month before she was killed, Rachel wrote the following in an email to us: “I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.” Action has already flowed from her words.

· My Name Is Rachel Corrie is at the Royal Court Theatre in London from October 11 to 29. Box office 020 7565 5000

rachelsmessage@the-corries.com

By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent

The family of Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Rafah two years ago, sued the State of Israel and the IDF for damages in the Haifa District Court on Tuesday.

The 24-year-old Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003 when she tried to block an IDF bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian house near the Philadelphi Route, the strip of land in the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt.

An IDF investigation ruled the incident was an accident and that the driver did not see Corrie, and the military prosecutor’s office decided not to press charges in connection with Corrie’s death.

Corrie’s parents, brother, and sister, who are represented by Umm al-Fahm attorney Hussein Abu-Hussein, argue Corrie was killed despite the fact that she was wearing bright clothing and had identified herself as an activist with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement.

Corrie’s family argues that the bulldozer driver intentionally used unreasonable force. According to the family, there was no fighting in the area at the time and there was no threat to soldiers’ lives.

The family has asked for roughly $324 thousand in direct damages, as well as punitive damages. They also said they have yet to receive all of the material from the IDF investigation into the matter.

by Adam Shapiro
Originally published in The Nation

On March 7, 2004, an Associated Press photographer in the West Bank village of Beit Dukou captured an image of a Palestinian woman during a protest against the wall Israel is constructing in her village. The image is simple, but it evokes a power beyond words.

This woman, dressed in a headscarf, long peasant dress and sweater, stands with her arms folded in front of her as if she is slightly cold or perhaps waiting for a tardy child. Her head is tilted slightly downward but her presence dominates the scene. What is particularly striking about this woman is that she is standing between the two treads, and directly in front of the cab, of an Israeli army D-9 bulldozer–the kind that has destroyed homes, uprooted trees and even killed an American woman. After a moment of disbelief over the image of a “covered” woman confronting this huge machine, you might then look again and realize that she stands there in defiance with her back to the machine, as if to say, “I will remain here on my land and will not acknowledge your brute force.”

The image of this woman immediately reminded me of Rachel Corrie. Rachel is the American woman who was crushed to death by an Israeli D-9 bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza Strip, on March 16, 2003. The bulldozer, like all the bulldozers used by the Israeli army, is manufactured by Caterpillar–an American company–and sold to the Israeli government as part of its military aid package. Rachel was defending the home of a Palestinian physician, with just her body and her defiance, when the driver put the lever into gear and drove forward and then backward, crushing Rachel beneath the blade not once, but twice. Immediately, allegations of tunnels under the home were used to malign Rachel’s extraordinary courage. However, no tunnels were ever located. These facts did not stop the Israeli army from demolishing this house two months ago, along with dozens of other homes in Rafah, in the latest wave of home demolitions carried out by US-built Caterpillar bulldozers.

Following Rachel’s death, many of us expected the US government to investigate what happened and to work to bring those responsible to justice. After all, just a day after Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping in Pakistan, FBI agents were dispatched to Karachi to help with that investigation. But the US government remains silent, as neither the FBI nor the State Department nor Congress has mandated an independent investigation. This despite the more recent deaths of three American security agents in another part of Gaza when their car ran over a roadside bomb, prompting the State Department to threaten to withhold money from the Palestinian Authority until those responsible are brought to justice.

In the case of Tom Hurndall, the British civilian shot by an Israeli sniper in Gaza a couple weeks after Rachel was killed, the British government has pushed for an investigation and a soldier is already being prepared for trial. The initial story about Tom’s killing by the Israeli army was that he was an armed terrorist. The soldier who shot him has now admitted to lying about the incident. British pressure undoubtedly has played a part in generating this mea culpa and reversal of narrative. Why have there not been similar efforts by the US government, upon which Israel is dependent for more than $6 billion per year in total aid? Why has Rachel’s killing gone unchallenged? Why has such a tremendous act of courage and defiance been ignored by much of the media in the United States?

Like Rachel’s family and friends, we at the International Solidarity Movement wonder about the answers to these questions. And we have to wonder what lessons are learned from allowing the Israeli army to bulldoze and kill a young woman without reprisal.

However, I do know that acts of courage like this Palestinian woman in the village of Beit Dukou and the brutal toll the occupation takes on Palestinians every day are what inspired and outraged Rachel to refuse to be intimidated on that fateful day last March.

Adam Shapiro is an organizer with the International Solidarity Movement.