Missiles of the Peacemakers
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias
Chapter 1: An American Gandhi
“March 16, 2003
In Rafah, Gaza Strip today Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old American woman from Olympia, Washington, who was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, was killed by the Israeli Army. Rachel was standing in the path of the bulldozer as it advanced towards her. When the bulldozer refused to stop or turn aside she climbed up onto the mound of dirt and rubble being gathered in front of it wearing a fluorescent jacket to look directly at the driver who kept on advancing. The bulldozer continued to advance so that she was pulled under the pile of dirt and rubble. After she had disappeared from view the driver kept advancing until the bulldozer was completely on top of her. The driver did not lift the bulldozer blade and so she was crushed beneath it. Then the driver backed up - effectively running over her again. The seven other ISM activists taking part in the action rushed to dig out her body. An ambulance rushed her to Al-Najar Hospital where she died.”
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Stat...rie_031703.htm
Despair is the opium of the weak. Even in victory we despair – of fighting again. Rachel Corrie wasn’t the first civilian to lose her life by putting the strength of her convictions and courage before everything else. In the period around her own little story there have been many stories of so many acts of brutality against journalists, activists and other foot-soldiers of the non-violence movement – reporters not just of Arab or muslim backgrounds but from across the spectrum of the globe’s diverse cultures. These people all knew that they could end up dead – without even choosing a career of violence (a simple example of the latter is an army soldier).
I have often wondered what Rachel’s last thoughts were as the bulldozer blade sliced into her – I wondered what was the outcome of the battle between the conviction in her heart and mind on the one hand and on the other the physical pain she was put through in her final hours or minutes as steel and flesh and blood and the vehicle of an apartheid-pursuing money-worshipping child of destruction all merged with her in one moment of time she surely knew would last far far longer than her entire life could have done if she had instead been destined to have any more time to give up so selflessly.
When I tried to find trivial information on her life before her moment in history, I find the internet rather bare. If it seemed important I’d contact her family and find out more for myself, but I don’t think it is. I think that it is true of all the many workers for peace and the many many honest and everyday civilians they are trying to protect, that the harder they fought against the sword in their life, the more cathartic, to them, their death at the hands of war must have seemed, as they passed on from this world.
“Please document as much as you can and do not embellish anything with creative writing. The media here serves as a very convincing spin control agent through all of this. Pass this on letter to your friends. There are many soldiers among the ranks of those serving in the occupied territories that are sickened by what they see.”
Source…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Sto...916885,00.html
This comes from a letter to Rachel Corrie by a reserve first sergeant in the IDF in February 2003. It is where we must begin to try and bring Rachel’s real contribution into the light, where it belongs. We need not worry about what the press, the Israeli military justice system or anyone else makes of the girl’s death. On the one hand we can accept that it’s a murder but that the authorities don’t want to accept the blame, on the other hand we can accept that one way or another the authorities would have been gladder now if Rachel had not been murdered – but either way thinking about it too much is damaging to your sense of duty to what she stood for – and even with the steel blade cutting her up, even with the hulk of the bulldozer above her, she certainly stood tall, and still stands. Who knows if her spirit has anything to do with it – but Rafah is now free. The Israelis are gone from where they killed her. The settlements closed down for good.
So what do we make of the request to not “embellish anything with creative writing”? Perhaps there’s no reason to suppose the writer put that advice forwards specifically for Rachel Corrie, but even if he didn’t, she was part of the ilk of people that he put it out there for. However it is not the negative side of her creativity that I want to help us visualize but in fact that much more positive side – her presence in Gaza in the first place is, after all, creative for a Western Urbanite! Forget the daily grind of public or private transport to a rat race’s enclave, forget the malls and fast food, forget the ease, the luxury, the comfort of just doing what is your lot… Rachel chose to go off to a desert, to a land of fear and violence, and to preach love. Not a religious nut with a cross or crescent, a girl becoming a woman, a human with a conscience and the ability to recognise the singular lack of other such humans near or far. Let us now consider Rachel’s description of non-violent resistance she offered up to her mother – words to which can be attributed no need for deception.
You asked me about non-violent resistance.
When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family's house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I'm having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be. I felt after talking to you that maybe you didn't completely believe me. I think it's actually good if you don't, because I do believe pretty much above all else in the importance of independent critical thinking. And I also realise that with you I'm much less careful than usual about trying to source every assertion that I make. A lot of the reason for that is I know that you actually do go and do your own research. But it makes me worry about the job I'm doing. All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above - and a lot of other things - constitutes a somewhat gradual - often hidden, but nevertheless massive - removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I'm terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon's possible goals), can't leave. Because they can't even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won't let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can't get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don't remember it right now. I'm going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don't like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. 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.
I’m very good at saying I’m going to explain something and then writing two long paragraphs full of thirty or so ideas which don’t seem to explain it at all. You need to move away from the explicit and over to the implicit, where Rachel and people who think and write like her tend to spend more of their time. She starts by saying she is going to explain non-violent resistance – then she merely gives a description of a bomb shattering some windows of a family house – an army detonation nearby, presumably. She then describes how the family treat her so well that it upsets her – “the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me”.
It is the coupling of those two things which forms the backbone of the non-violence movement. Having quickly dispensed with what the non-violent movement really is, knowingly or not, she then talks entirely about how much these people suffer – implicitly explaining only WHY there is any such movement – her explanations continue to bounce around through the few other things she then says: she moves quickly into a fear of not being understood by her mother, let alone by the world, into anger at herself for not being as good as she wants to be and finally to a clear cut definition of what that would entail: “I'm going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don't like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.” Then she tries all over again.
“More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside,” she says suddenly after finishing her second attempt – the same time she wrote it more explosions perhaps happened in the distance – the world around her echoing every thought she had – “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”.
In no particular order now, and with no real knowledge of how small a drop in the ocean this is, and with no prejudice towards or against any system or government or religion over and above any others, and allowing for the fact that on top of everything else my perspective also plays a part in limiting how much of the picture I can paint, even if I try my hardest, I shall therefore make a list, as long as I can, of people who have died just as undeservedly as Rachel Corrie, at the hands of men and indeed women who find some reason or other to justify the use of force and, indeed, of deadly force.
61-year-old Shinsuke Hashida, his nephew: 33-year-old Kotaro Ogawa, their unnamed (by the Guardian article naming those two) Iraqi interpreter; 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka, founder of the non-governmental Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), killed by a suicide bomber while travelling on the Baghdad Airport road along with colleague, Faiz Ali Salim, 43, also killed; veteran British ITV News correspondent Terry Lloyd; motorcyclist who was hit
by a shell fired at him by bullets from American troops near the Rashid Hotel, the 50- year-old female civil servant, her long dark hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her body pock-marked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb; one little boy in the Kindi, his mother and father and three brothers all shot dead
when they approached an American checkpoint outside Baghdad; the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb; at least 20 civilians killed by two American missiles; Davao City photojournalist Gene Boyd Lumawag and Bombo Radyo Aklan station manager Heherson Hinolan; 21-year-old American mother, who was killed by Israeli soldiers who ambushed her car; Weedad Safran, a grandmother who had been shot by an Israeli sniper as she walked from the hospital gates; A Palestinian woman and her son were killed by Israeli machine guns mounted on tanks that fired into their home in Bethlehem; like many others, they bled to death because Israeli forces blocked ambulances.
This is nothing, really nothing. A handful of names of the dead anyone can find with just a few minutes of searching on a big search engine. Now for something which I admit is a copy and paste, but a hell of one. Even then, when you consider that some estimates of the civilian casualties in Iraq exceed 100,000 the list of 2000 below which seems gargantuan may only be one fiftieth of the full picture – just in that one country.
I hope, like me, you will quickly be drawn into this list, reading how so many people died, some so young, some so old, all so innocent. Here, then, are 2081 Dead Iraqis: Aaboola Razak Katraan 19 M (1) -- Missile Kefell Tofayel 3/26/2003 -- Aadel Akgaal Bastaan 65 M M Military 100000 (10) -- Missile Al-Aumaraa 3/24/2003 -- Aadheam Ali 45 M M Merchant 250000 (5) -- Missile Al-Kabalaa Al-Muhandiseen H410/S 3/30/2003 -- Aahlam Jallal Nasser 25 F Teacher (8) -- Missile Hafaara Mamaal Tabook Al-Salaam 3/29/2003 -- Aajel Jabayer ? M -- Shrapnel Burn In All Body 3/24/2003 -- Aajel Jaber Hassef 55 M Merchant 70000 (9) -- Missile Anwaar Taj Al-Iraq School 3/23/2003 -- Aamaed Mustafa Hameed 7 M Child Student -- Bomb Al-Bassra/Mazaraa Al-Salma 3/21/2003 -- Aamarya Naaser Ghatanee ? F -- Shrapnel Burn In All Body 3/24/2003 -- Aameer Hady Majeed Maleky 16 M Student -- Sliver In Head & Left Hand Hai Al Nedaa 4/12/2003 -- Aamena Khalaf Radhy 14 F -- Fall From Bridge Al-Kuat 4/7/2003 -- Aamer Mahmood Faris 31 M Teacher 18000 (7) -- Al-Yosfeia 4/4/2003 -- Aamr Tlal Rhmn 23 M S Employee (15) -- Tank Attack Krblaa-Negef 3/20/2003 -- Aayat Faares Zawbaa ? F -- Shrapnel Burn In All Body 3/24/2003 -- Aaysa Thamer Falah 57 M M Employee 40000 (5) -- Missile Al-Mafaal Street Nadei Al-Meenaa 3/22/2003....
(etc - the list goes on for many more names, even in my shortened version)
