Status: U
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 08:10:42 -0500
Subject: FW: [starhawk] A bone from Raffah
From: Jane Sherry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Allan Balliett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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A Bone from Rafah
By Starhawk
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 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 ShahidsÐthe 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, angryÐall 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, courageousÐwhich 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 cmpassion 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 themÐonly 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 disappearÐshe 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 SchoolÐthe 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 Gideon 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 paeons 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 hateÐ Barak
offered them everything but they don't want peace--they don't love
their childrenÐthey are animalsÐthere 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, unmistakeable..
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.
www.starhawk.org
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of Webs of Power:
Notes from the Global Uprising and eight other books on feminism,
politics and earth-based spirituality. She works with the RANT
trainer's collective, www.rantcollective.org that offers training
and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.
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