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A Bone from Rafah
March 26, 2003
While bombs are falling on Baghdad, killing uncounted
numbers, and my friends around the world are marching,
blockading, shutting down corporations and roadways
and cities in protest, I find myself in Rafah, at
the southern border of the Gaza strip, dealing intimately
with one woman's death.
A week ago Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by
a bulldozer as she tried to prevent it from demolishing
Palestinian homes. I've come down here to
support her friends and the activists who were with
her and saw the murder. Their accounts leave
no doubt that the soldier who drove the bulldozer
saw her and chose to kill her.
Rachel has become a "shahid," a Palestinian
martyr. She is, in fact, one of over a thousand
shahids from this intifada. Their posters
adorn walls all over Palestine. They are the
fighters who are killed in battle and the children
shot on their way to school. They are the suicide
bombers and the boys who throw stones at tanks in
a gesture of defiance, and the "collateral
damage" every time the Israelis blow up a political
leader in a crowded tenement with missiles. And
now they include Rachel, with her all-American blond
beauty. On one poster: she looks earnest and
sweet as any graduating student in a high school
yearbook. In another, she is giving a speech,
hair tied back, mouth open, her whole face ablaze
with passion.
I'm listening to her friends describe her death
and holding their hands as they cry, and thinking
about how all of this pain and grief and sorrow
is being multiplied over and over again right now,
in Baghdad, on people who are nameless and faceless
and not reported on by our media. As Rachel's
death would have gone unremarked had she been Palestinian.
You didn't hear, I imagine, about the death of Ahmed,
a fifty year old street cleaner from Rafah, who
heard about Rachel's death and stepped outside to
smoke a cigarette. He was gunned down on his
doorstep, for no particular reason anyone can fathom.
He has his own Shahid poster, which is up
on the wall next to Rachel's, and we mourn him,
too.
The Palestinians have traditions about Shahids--the
poster is one. The Shahid's body is not touched
with water: the blood on the body is sacred, and
bloody the body is laid into the grave.
These traditions are of some comfort to the Palestinians
but are difficult for her friends who cannot escape
her face and their loss anywhere in this city, and
who struggle to remember her not as a saint but
as the real woman that she was: sometimes strong,
sometimes weak, sometimes loving, sometimes irritable,
funny, annoying, angry--all the things human beings
are. Rachel was a courageous woman but no
more so, really, than any of these others who have
come here on their school breaks or in the midst
of their life changes to stand in front of tanks
and walk kids to school and sleep in a different,
threatened house each night. They are all
remarkable, courageous--which doesn't mean noble
and saintly but just that at some point in their
lives they decided not to let fear stop them from
doing something they hope will make some slight
positive impact on an unendurable situation. What
is remarkable about them is that they are not so
remarkable, not really so different than anyone
else. A laid-off dot commer, a football player,
a website designer, a student, a sweet young man
who drives a horse and carriage in the park: some
are deeply political, involved in actions for many
years. Some just somehow found themselves
drawn to come here.
I am drinking coffee with Chris, who was Rachel's
friend and encouraged her to come to Gaza, and Mohammed,
who has lived his whole live in the Gaza strip and
works with a human rights agency. Mohammed is telling
us how he felt on his trip to Japan when he took
the train from Tokyo to Osaka.
"I had never before been such a long way
without a single checkpoint, without having to show
a passport or an ID card, without seeing a soldier,"
he says. "That was when I knew what freedom
felt like."
We are talking about sadness and death and what
we believe. I've been having ongoing dialogues with
various friends about compassion, and I admit that
I just can't get there with the bulldozer operator.
The closest I can come to compassion is a
kind of blank incomprehension. Chris suggests
that Rachel died because the soldier didn't see
her. Not that he didn't see her physically, for
it is only too clear that he did, but that in some
larger sense he didn't See her, see her as a human
being, see her as a precious life to be valued.
That Unseeing is the root of my own people's relationship
to the Palestinians. I was never taught to
hate them--only to discount them. When they
taught me the story of Israel's founding in Hebrew
School, the Palestinians were brushed aside, either
not mentioned or dismissed as somehow not mattering.
I can understand how, to my grandmother raised in
abject poverty in a Russian shtetl and living in
slightly-less-abject poverty in Duluth, the Palestinians
could disappear--she never came to this land, never
met one of its people. I can comprehend how
Jews from the concentration camps and refugees fleeing
Nazi Europe could long for a state of their own,
and how from Hitler's Germany Palestinians weren't
much of a visible presence in the consciousness
of terrified people needing a refuge.
But those who were actually there on the land, creating
the "facts on the ground" of their time,
must have noticed and deliberately chosen to unsee
that there was another people standing in the way,
doing their best not to be bulldozed into oblivion.
As Sharon and Bush and all their supporters
and all who stand by silently and justify the current
murders don't see. As we are not shown the
victims of the bombs of Baghdad.
There's a Bible story haunting me that seems tangled
up with this all. It's one they never focused
on in Hebrew School--the story of the Levite and
the Concubine. It goes like this:
A Levite was travelling with his concubine
and is given shelter for the night by an old man
in the town of Gibeah in the territory of the
tribe of Benjamin. During the night a pack
of men demand to have sex with him. Instead,
the host and the Levite send out the concubine,
who is gang-raped and left for dead on the doorstep.
When the traveller reaches home, he cuts
up her body into twelve pieces and sends one to
each tribe, to call them to war.
The war is bloody and involves several rounds
of smiting and killing sixteen thousand here,
twenty thousand there, in a frenzy almost as senseless
as our current assault on Iraq, until Benjamin
is defeated and all the other tribes swear not
to give their daughters to wife with Benjamin.
Whereupon they realize they have committed
genocide, wiped out a tribe of their own. Repenting
of this ethnic cleansing, they find some innocent
town which has not participated in this oath and
simply kill all the men and all the women who
have known men, and give all the virgins to Benjamin.
I am thinking about this as I try to fathom what
has been done to the mind of the bulldozer operator
to make him capable of deliberately crushing a beautiful
young woman under his machine, and trying to comprehend
the hatemail and diatribes her death has evoked
along with the paeans of praise and the martyr posters.
And I conclude that the soldier was only doing what
colonization makes necessary. To be a colonizer,
we cannot afford to see the colonized as fully human.
So when you tell me, "The Palestinians are
taught to hate-- Barak offered them everything but
they don't want peace--they don't love their children--they
are animals--there is no one to talk to," I
say, "That is what colonization requires you
to believe."
It diminishes you, as the driver of that bulldozer
is diminished by his act far, far more than the
crushing of Rachel's body can ever diminish her.
And if I could, I would send you a bone. Not
to call you to war, but away from it. Something
you cannot avoid seeing, touching. Something
to make the blood on our hands visible, unmistakable.
A limb, a shoulder, a hunk of flesh dripping
real blood, from the rubble beneath the bulldozer,
the doorstep, from the child shot dead in the gunfight
or buried under the house, from the bomb shelters
of Baghdad and from the bloody busses of Tel Aviv.
A bone red with blood to say:
This is what colonization requires: blood soaked
sand, holy earth defiled with death, human sacrifice.
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.***
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