E. Said on Rachel Corrie, Pal. resistance

[John M Cox <coxj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

zmag.org, counterpunch

The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Of Dignity and Solidarity

Edward Said
June 26, 2003

In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I
had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were
still reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder on March 16 in
Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself
driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately
because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah
from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar
for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen
or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One
was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter's
body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and
Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the
expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of
investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never
heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn't
materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to
them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully
murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an
official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised
her family.



But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story
for me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the
same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of
Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to
Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any
contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable
documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving
reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her
by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of
their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their
lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and
its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate
of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt
at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular
group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires
an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and
tell her, "You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it."



What shines through all the letters she wrote home and which were
subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance
put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in
the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to
survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the roadmap
and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of
all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender
even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined
might of the US and Israel. It is that extraordinary fact which is the
reason for the existence of a roadmap and all the numerous so-called peace
plans before them, not at all because the US and Israel and the
international community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that
the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the
power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide
bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings
and all its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a
problem for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially
been proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem. The official
Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word "occupation"
or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has
always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals
nor ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along
by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to
deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like
the majority of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or
negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace.



Moreover, the roadmap says nothing about justice or about the historical
punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to
count. What Rachel Corrie's work in Gaza recognized, however, was
precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the
Palestinian people as a national community, and not merely as a collection
of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need
to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small
number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognized the world over.
In the past six months I have lectured in four continents to many
thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the
struggle of the Palestinian people which is now a byword for emancipation
and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by
their enemies.



Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an
expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the
Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on
its behalf....


full: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3830

----------------------------
John Cox
Chapel Hill, NC
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"The world only goes forward because of those who oppose it."
Goethe