[Back to Starhawk's Home Page]
April 12, 2003
In Rafah another activist from the International
Solidarity Movement was shot. Tom Hurndall was
shot in the head by a sniper from an Israeli guard
tower on the Egyptian border of the Gaza strip.
The guard towers surround Gaza, which has become
a kind of open-air prison overlaid on an idyllic
land of sun and sea and orange groves. Here and
there a few olive groves remain, or a flock of
sheep and goats graze an empty lot. Farmers bring
produce to market in donkey carts, and old women
bake bread in clay ovens. An ancient order survives
under an overlay of concrete, dust and rubble,
menaced by bulldozers, sniper towers, tanks that
shoot at night, acres of razor wire and no-man’s
land now being further extended to border a thirty-foot
high concrete wall which marches across the landscape,
cutting Rafah irrevocably off from Egypt.
The wall is presumably for ‘security’—to prevent
suicide bombers and weapons from entering Israel.
But in reality, the wall is the next move in the
Israeli policy of confiscation and control.
In the West Bank, the route of the wall strolls
out from the Green Line that marks the pre-1967
boundary, rambles all over the countryside and
steals more than half of the remaining land from
the Palestinians. Cities such as Nablus and Jenin
will be encircled and enclosed in isolated Bantustans..
In the Qualquilya area, the first phase of wall
construction took fifty per cent of the villagers’
farmland and nineteen wells that provided a third
of the area’s water. Mas’Ha stands to lose over
ninety per cent of its farmland. A nation of gardeners
and farmers will become a nation of prisoners—the
wall the visible, irrevocable finalization of
a policy that already restricts movement with
hundreds of checkpoints, splits families, makes
daily life an almost impossible gauntlet of delays
and humiliations. The wall will put an end to
any hope of a two-state solution. Once it is complete,
no viable Palestinian state can exist. Palestinians
and their supporters have feared that the Israelis
will forceably remove or ‘transfer’ the Palestinians
out of the West Bank. Instead, the policy now
seems to be to surround, isolate and enclose the
Palestinian population into a giant prison colony
of a greater Israel..
In the Gaza strip, this policy is already well
advanced. Sniper towers and guard stations are
everywhere. Tanks patrol the border areas at
night, and soldiers shoot, sometimes randomly
and sometimes deliberately, down city streets,
into houses, at crowds of children.
To build the wall, in both Gaza and the West Bank,
the Israelis bulldoze olive trees and homes that
stand in the way. Three weeks ago, twenty-three
year old Rachel Corrie was deliberately run over
by a bulldozer while trying to prevent home demolitions.
The Israelis have not seriously investigated her
death, nor held the soldiers responsible accountable.
As far as we know, they have not been disciplined
or punished in any way. Instead, deliberate murder
of internationals seems to have become policy.
I am well aware that thousands, most likely hundreds
of thousands of young men and some women the age
of Brian and Rachel and Tom have died in Iraq
in the last week. That hundreds of Palestinians
have died, unnoticed by the world’s media. In
numbers, the dead become faceless. It’s heard
to fathom the weight of this pain multiplied hundreds
of thousands of times.
Tom and Rachel have faces to me, because they
were part of our group, doing the same work here
of using nonviolent tactics to open some space
for change.Tom and Rachel have faces.
I spent Thursday visiting Brian Avery, who a week
ago was shot in the face by the heavy mounted
gun from an Israeli Armored Personnel Carrier.
Brian and I had done checkpoint watch together
in Nablus. He is a gardener, an organic farmer,
a musician, presently facing a year of major operations
to restore a shattered nose and jaw and cheeks
and a split tongue. Brian’s face is currently
a grotesque and painful mask, but he has one.
He is the lucky one, he will survive, brain intact,
eyes and senses functional. He will even be able
to speak.
Tom was twenty three years old, from Manchester,
England. He was shot trying to protect children,
to snatch them out of the range of sniper fire
coming from an Israeli guard tower, where soldiers
stand hidden and safe, taking aim from at Palestinians
for sport. The soldiers were shooting at a group
of children gathering at a road block. Tom had
grabbed a young boy out of the zone of fire and
brought him to safety. He went back to try and
rescue two young girls who were afraid to move.
The Israeli soldiers shot him in the head.
Tom had gone to Iraq, as a nonviolent peace witness
to do humanitarian aid, but he and his friends
had been forced to leave and had headed across
Jordan to Palestine to join the International
Solidarity Movement. Now he lies on a ventilator,
unconscious and unlikely ever to recover.
Tom
was in the training I helped to give last week,
and all of us are feeling the weight of responsibility. Did
we teach them the right things, the right way
to assess danger and make choices? Did we give
them the information they need to survive?
And yet I can’t quite imagine what else we might
or might not have said to Tom, or to the activists
who were with him, who were also with Rachel when
she died and have not given up or gone home or
abandoned Rafah. Could I say to a young man courageous
enough to brave gunfire to rescue children that
he should have stood aside and let them be shot?
That he should have saved his life over theirs?
"Why?" the Palestinians ask me over and over again,
when I admit to being an American. They never
say, "I hate America," just, "Why? Why bomb Iraq?
Why kill children?"
I’m left in the same blank state of incomprehension.
Why kill children? Why spill more blood in Rafah?
Why order soldiers to shoot unarmed peace activists
in the head?
Call your local Israeli embassy, and ask them
these questions.
If you are British, ask your embassy to pressure
for an investigation into Tom’s shooting.
If you are an American citizen, ask your congressional
representatives to pressure the Israeli’s to investigate
Rachel’s death and Brian’s shooting.
Contact your Member of Congress http://www.house.gov/writerep/
and
ask for support of H. Con. Res. 111 to express
sympathy for the death of Rachel Corrie and demand
an investigation into her death.
Or if you live in Washington DC and have no voting
rights and, therefore, have no voting Representative
in Congress, contact Hon. Eleanor Holmes Norton
and ask for her support:
http://www.norton.house.gov/feedback.cfm?campaign=norton&type=Contact%20Me
(Note: pages will open in a new browser window)
Copyright (c) 2003 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of her work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part of it without permission. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.***