Jessica and Rachel

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

Globe and Mail

May 21, 2003

Why two women went to war

By Naomi Klein

Jessica Lynch and Rachel Corrie could have passed for sisters. Two
all-American blondes, two destinies forever changed in a Middle East
war zone. Private Jessica Lynch, the soldier, was born in Palestine,
W.Va. Rachel Corrie, the activist, died in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

Ms. Corrie was four years older than 19-year-old Pte. Lynch. Her body
was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza seven days before Pte.
Lynch was taken into Iraqi custody, on March 23.

Before she went to Iraq, Pte. Lynch organized a pen pal program with
a local kindergarten. Before Ms. Corrie left for Gaza, she organized
a pen pal program between kids in her hometown of Olympia, Wash., and
children in Rafah.

Pte. Lynch went to Iraq as a soldier loyal to her government. Ms.
Corrie went to Gaza to oppose the actions of her government. As a
U.S. citizen, she believed she had a special responsibility to defend
Palestinians against U.S.-built weapons, purchased with U.S. aid to
Israel. In letters home, she described how fresh water was being
diverted from Gaza to Israeli settlements, and how death was more
normal than life.

Unlike Pte. Lynch, Ms. Corrie did not set out to engage in combat;
she went to try to thwart it. Along with fellow members of the
International Solidarity Movement, she believed that the Israeli
military's incursions could be slowed by the presence of highly
visible "internationals," that Israel would not want the diplomatic
or media scandals that would result if it started shooting U.S. and
British college students.

In a way, Ms. Corrie was harnessing the very thing she disliked most
about her country -- the belief that American lives are worth more
than any others -- and trying to use it to save a few Palestinian
homes from demolition.

Believing her florescent orange jacket would serve as armour, that
her bullhorn could repel bullets, she stood in front of bulldozers,
slept beside wells, and escorted children to school. If suicide
bombers turn their bodies into weapons of death, Ms. Corrie turned
hers into a weapon of life, a "human shield."

When that Israeli bulldozer driver pressed the accelerator, her
strategy failed. It turns out that the lives of some U.S. citizens --
even beautiful, young, white women -- are valued more than others.
And nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the opposing
responses to Ms. Corrie and Pte. Lynch.

When the Pentagon announced Pte. Lynch's rescue, she became an
overnight hero, complete with "America loves Jessica" fridge magnets,
stickers, T-shirts, mugs, country songs and a made-for-TV movie.
According to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, President George W.
Bush was "full of joy for Jessica Lynch." Her rescue, we were told,
was a testament to a core American value. As Senator Jay Rockefeller
said, "We take care of our people."

Do they? Ms. Corrie's death was met with almost total official
silence, despite the fact that witnesses claim it was a deliberate
act. Mr. Bush has said nothing about a U.S. citizen being killed by a
U.S.-made bulldozer bought with U.S. tax dollars. A congressional
resolution demanding an independent inquiry into Ms. Corrie's death
has been buried in committee, leaving the Israeli military's
investigation -- which conveniently cleared itself of any wrongdoing
-- as the only official probe.

The ISM activists say this non-response sent a dangerous signal.
According to Olivia Jackson, a 25-year-old British citizen still in
Rafah, the Israeli military "waited for the response from the
American government, and the response was pathetic. They have
realized that they can get away with it, and it has encouraged them
to keep on going."

On April 5, Brian Avery, a U.S. citizen, was shot in the face. On
April 11, Tom Hurndall, a British ISM activist, was shot in the head
and left brain dead. Next was James Miller, a British cameraman shot
dead while wearing a vest that read "TV." Witnesses said the shooters
in all three cases were Israeli soldiers.

There is something else Pte. Lynch and Ms. Corrie have in common: the
military's distortion of their stories.

According to the Pentagon, Pte. Lynch was captured in a bloody gun
battle, mistreated by sadistic Iraqi doctors, then rescued in another
storm of bullets by heroic Navy SEALs. But another version has
emerged: The Iraqi doctors who treated her found no evidence of
battle wounds, and they donated their own blood to save her life. And
witnesses have told the BBC that the SEALs already knew there were no
Iraqi fighters in the area.

While Pte. Lynch's story has been distorted to make its protagonists
appear more heroic, Ms. Corrie's has been twisted to make her and her
fellow ISM activists appear sinister.

For months, the Israeli military had been looking for an excuse to
get rid of the ISM "troublemakers." It found it in Asif Mohammed
Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, the two British suicide bombers. It turns
out they had attended a memorial to Ms. Corrie in Rafah, a fact the
Israeli military has seized on to link the ISM to terrorism. ISM
members say that the memorial was open to the public, and that they
knew nothing of the British visitors' intentions. The ISM says it is
opposed to the targeting of civilians, whether by Israeli bulldozers
or Palestinian bombers. And many ISMers believe their work can reduce
terrorist incidents by demonstrating that there are ways to resist
occupation other than the nihilistic revenge offered by suicide
bombing.

No matter. In the past two weeks, half a dozen ISM activists have
been arrested, several have been deported, and the organization's
offices have been raided. The crackdown is now spreading to all
"internationals." On Monday, the United Nations special co-ordinator
for the Middle East peace process told the Security Council that
dozens of UN aid workers had been prevented from getting in and out
of Gaza.

On June 5, the 36th anniversary of the Israeli occupation, there will
be an internationally co-ordinated day of action for Palestinian
rights. One of the key demands is for the UN to send a monitoring
force into the occupied territories. Until that happens, many
activists are determined to continue Ms. Corrie's work. More than 40
students at Ms. Corrie's college, Evergreen State in Olympia, have
already signed up to go to Gaza with the ISM this summer.

So who is a hero? During the war on Iraq, some of Ms. Corrie's
friends e-mailed her picture to MSNBC asking that it be included on
the station's "wall of heroes," along with Pte. Lynch. The station
didn't comply, but Ms. Corrie is being honoured in other ways. Her
family has received more than 10,000 letters of support, communities
across the country have organized dozens of memorials, and children
all over the occupied territories are being named Rachel. It's not a
made-for-TV kind of tribute, but perhaps that's for the best.


Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows.

***

Haaretz May 4, 2003

A License to Kill Civilians

Despite international laws against the killing of civilians, the
Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that the use of flechette shells is
permissible within urban areas

by Shulamit Aloni (former Meretz member of Knesset and cabinet minister)

In its decision of April 27, Israel's highest court has essentially
issued a license to kill civilians by determining that the use of
flechette shells fired from tanks is not prohibited by international
law. The court has thereby done its duty by the occupation army,
which uses flechette rounds in densely populated areas. The High
Court of Justice (?)* knows that the killing of civilians is banned
by international law and every other human law; that, evidently,
didn't bother the court.

Flechette shells, in regular use by the IDF in densely populated
Palestinian residential areas, spread out over an area with an
average radius of 200 meters and cause mortal injury to civilians --
to women, men, children and old people, with no distinction whatever
-- by scattering small, lethal metal darts. The supreme court, which
at first scorned even to hear the petition on the grounds that it
amounted to a demand to dictate to the IDF the means it could employ,
forgot that its task is to protect human life.

In relying on the idea that flechette rounds fired from tanks are not
prohibited by international law, the court has entirely ignored the
spirit of the law. The judges found grounds to permit, or more
precisely did not find grounds to forbid [use of this weapon in this
manner], as if the impermissible could be made permissible. The fact
that these shells have killed women sitting in a tent, or in another
instance killed three young people, made no impression on the High
Court of Justice. Just as the court was not impressed when one-ton
bombs fell out of the sky over a crowded residential area because the
army sought to exterminate a wanted man and, in the process, killed
"only" his wife along with him.

The president of the supreme court, Justice Aharon Barak, once
declared that everything is justiciable; except [the behavior of] the
IDF, apparently. So the lives, dignity, property and rights of
Palestinians may be trampled. Palestinians can be abused, robbed,
tortured and killed, and there's no court to offer justice to these
people or to rein in the killing and the horror: not the supreme
court, and certainly not the judge advocate general's office, which
knows just what to ignore, where to bestow immunity and whom to hound
to the bitter end.

I don't think the supreme court justices have become jaded, but it
appears to me that they feel themselves menaced by certain reckless
members of Knesset who are trying to gnaw away at the authority of
the court, as well as by a regime headed by three generals (the prime
minister, the former chief of staff who is now defense minister, and
the current chief of staff), all of them battle-happy right-wingers
who are close to the settlers and the advocates of ethnic cleansing,
if not their active partners.

I write these words with great sadness and shame, because it's not
the case that our army is "the most moral army in the world." In the
name of the war against terror, acts of terror, acts of intolerable
piracy and humiliation, are being committed. For a society with
pretensions to democracy and humanism, when there's no court with the
courage to stand firm under fire, the next stop is the International
Court at The Hague.

The nonsense that any criticism of us is anti-Semitism, and the
perverted use of references to the Holocaust, while it and its
victims are cheapened, cannot help us when it comes to indefensible
deeds. No justification is to be found there for permitting the
firing of flechette shells from tanks against a civilian population.

It doesn't strike me as coincidental that the justices of the supreme
court, before sitting in judgment on petitions like these, try to
persuade the petitioners to withdraw their plea. They simply want
nothing to do with the subject, given the popularity of the IDF, the
populism of the present government, and the attacks on the court by
right-wing members of Knesset. The courage has all run dry,
apparently, and the implications demand that we take a very long,
hard look at ourselves.


* Translator's note: The full Hebrew name for Israel's supreme court
is "The High Court of Justice"; the question mark appears in the
original text.