The nucleus of this diary was published on this day last year.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, on Sunday March 16th, 2003, Rachel Corrie received a phone call from a comrade from the International Solidarity Movement. Saying that the Israelis were heading to Dr. Samir’s house.
Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children yards from the Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah, and had befriended many of the activists, young people that came from a dozen countries from around the world.
Many were Jewish.
Rachel and other activists had frequently spent the night in Samir’s home, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure had been knocked down. Samir’s home now stood alone.
It wasn’t just homes that she and her comrades protected. They acted as human shields as municipal construction workers were rebuilding a well that was vital to the area, and destroyed by the IDF. Municipal workers were killed by IDF snipers...so,hence the need for a human shield.
Wearing a bright orange jacket and with a megaphone in her hand, she was killed whilst standing in the path of a bulldozer that was about to demolish the Nasrallah home. She was run over...twice...by the bulldozer.
Fractured skull. Punctured lungs. Shattered ribs. She died in pain. Surrounded by her stunned comrades and numb locals.
And found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?’
A dozen witnesses from four countries insisted that the driver, a Russian immigrant, smiled as he came for her, with deliberation. When he ran over her for a second time, he turned his head and, through the rear view window, gave the horrified spectators a thumbs-up.
Her parents filed a civil lawsuit in 2005 against the state of Israel, charging Israel with not conducting a full and credible investigation into the case. That she was intentionally killed or that the soldiers had acted with reckless neglect. For a symbolic one dollar.
No one was surprised when the court upheld the military investigation’s decision.
Judge Oded Gershon called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident.”"She (Corrie) did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done. She consciously put herself in harm's way. The accident had been self inflicted”, he added.
He also mentioned that the US had issued an Israel travel advisory warning to its citizens to avoid Gaza and the West Bank.
In my perspective, the travel advisory warning was issued for, among other reasons, so Americans and Europeans could not see the incredible injustice. Same warnings were placed in Soweto in my time there. I ignored both warnings and witnessed what i will never forget. In Israel. In South Africa.
Rachel went to Rafah to connect it with her home town of Olympia, Washington. In a sister-cities project as part of her senior- year college assignment.
She witnessed injustice on a scale unknown to her.
I can relate.
As an American Jew, my initial visits to my ancestral homeland sobered me entirely. As i witnessed brutality and disrespect time and again. But...it went further than that. I was right there when an IDF sniper shot the arm of a seven year old boy. I was right there when his parents looked at each other the moment after it happened.
The disbelief. The horror. From them. From me.
I still occasionally wonder about that sniper. What was he aiming at? Why was he aiming at it? Did he not have a little brother? Was he human? Was he a demon masquerading in the flesh of a human? Why? WHY?
All based on ethnicity? You’re kidding, right?
That the perps where fellow Jews shook me to my core.
And it still does.
I started venturing into the Strip.
There was understandable mistrust of me in the beginning. The yarmulke and all. But when i put myself as shield and advocate time and again against young Israeli soldiers....getting manhandled by my brethren… spit on….that sealed the deal with most. They too, have been manhandled and spit on. Sleeping in the homes of members of the community, i was there when tanks came. When explosions shook the home. When awoken by screams. I saw the terror in the eyes of the old and young alike.
Eventually, i was befriended and met brothers and sisters in a great plight.
I knew what Rachel was feeling, all to potently.
To be a witness. To render whatever service your heart and circumstances lead you to do…..and then, the luxury of returning back home to la la land.
It was then that i met Rachel. On a handful of occasions, and in each time, i made her laugh. Which considering the inner trials we all were going through, especially those that had witnessed death and murder, didn’t come so freely. Once we laughed so hard, that afterwards she thanked me for the “….oasis in the desert. The tonic.”
And when I got the call that day...and was told of her death...I screamed in grief and anger.
And I cried, oh I cried.
I cried for the pain she must have felt. For her stolen future, for her parents, for her friends and family. For those she won’t be there to help protect. For the world that she will no longer be in to render aid. And I cried for the people... my people... who killed her. Innocence lost once and for all.
Do you know the feeling that you have when you feel shock or surprise at an act, yet at the very same moment...you aren't shocked or surprised in the least?
As a mutual friend of ours wrote….
“I wish i had been closer to her, because from her writing an intelligent, compassionate and complex figure emerges. Within a short time she was aware of the complexity, the nuance, the conflicts of the situation. Please do as she did. And put the humanity back into how you think about other people. We are all individuals with families, hopes, dreams, loves, fears,..and the abilities to do amazing things in the world.”
I haven’t returned to Israel since 2003, and have no intention of ever doing so. At least, not until the militaristic Likud party is ousted from power, and the mindset of a large populace that choose them as their representatives, anyway.
Where did they learn this dehumanization of others? Where did they learn the arrogance and smugness of a jut-jawed bully? And efficiency? And from whom? The realization of that answer chills me to my marrow.
I know many will disagree with the comparison, because of some vast differences between the two countries….but it reminded me in many ways with apartheid-era South Africa, where and when i also spent valuable time. I can’t reconcile the attitudes, with what i have learned from my teachings of Judaism.
I was raised what it was to be a Jew. To crave and fight for social justice and equality, wherever that may lead, including one’s own backyard..or one’s own heart. To live the words of the Prophets..’You shall not oppress a stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’, and ‘Let your neighbors property be as dear as your own, and let your neighbors honor be as dear as your own’, and ‘You shall not rejoice as your enemy falls, you shall not exult when your enemy stumbles, you shall not hate another in your heart, but love your neighbor as yourself’.
When i spoke these words to more than one IDF soldier, i got in return other quotes from the Torah which, when quoted, gave them permission, in their mind, to continue their behavior. So i guess that in any holy book, one can always find words that will back-up your actions, if you look long and hard and not be hesitant to sometimes take them out of context.
These fellow Jews that have felt the lash of oppression themselves. At least their grandparents did. And in so many times and places. My father’s lineage dealt with the Czars Kossacks, and my mother’s lineage disappeared in the Shoah. What i experienced proved to me that what i witnessed went way beyond self-defense...it veered straight into mass collective punishment.
It was a large-scale version of the Stanford prison experiment.
And the injustice that entails.
But, with these words that i have quoted,..this was personified in dear Rachel. She remains for me an emblem of righteousness. Her presence would have have done so much to enrich the world. In many ways it already has. To be a clear example for all of us. To follow your heart….inner principles... and let that be your guiding light.
We both have/had a form of survivors guilt, as do most activists and aid workers that have the, again, luxury to return from a physical war zone, and move beyond it.
She has come to be known as a great diarist, as she never, never, never stopped writing. She told me that she had never had the words come out and express themselves so effortlessly as her time here.
Her most powerful work, for me, came out in a book of her essays titled ‘Let Me Stand Alone.’ Indeed.
In her own words, two months before her death….
“We are all born and someday we’ll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. But 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 thing?
If i lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who knows where else, needless death wouldn’t be a distant symbol to me, it wouldn’t be a metaphor. It would be reality.
And i have no right to this metaphor. But i use it to console myself. To give a fraction of meaning to something enormous and needless.
This realization. This realization that i will live my life in this world where i have privileges. I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly.
I can wash dishes. Fetch water.
And do my part.”
Rachel was 23.
"I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me - Ali - or point at the posters of him on the walls."
This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world.
This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me.
This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: "This is the wide world and I'm coming to it."
I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide.
More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside."
