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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...22&ItemID=3830
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Of Dignity and Solidarity


In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days.

While there,
I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister,
who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder
on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer.

Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers,
although the one that killed his daughter deliberately
because she was trying valiantly to protect a
Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition
was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed
by Caterpillar for house demolitions,
a far bigger machine than anything
he had ever seen or driven.

Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries.

One was the story they told about their
return to the US with their daughter's body.

They had immediately sought out their US Senators,
Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats,
told them their story and received the expected
expressions of shock, outrage, anger and
promises of investigations.

After both women returned to Washington,
the Corries never heard from them again,
and the promised investigation simply
didn't materialize.

As expected,
the Israeli lobby had explained the
realities to them, and both women
simply begged off.

An American citizen willfully murdered by the
soldiers of a client state of the US without so
much as an official peep or even the de rigeur
investigation that had been promised her family.


But the second and far more important aspect
of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young
woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the
same time.

Born and brought up in Olympia,
a small city 60 miles south of Seattle,
she had joined the International Solidarity
Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with
suffering human beings with whom she had
never had any contact before.

Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable
documents of her ordinary humanity that make for
very difficult and moving reading, especially when
she describes the kindness and concern showed
her by all the Palestinians she encounters who
clearly welcome her as one of their own,
because she lives with them exactly as they do,
sharing their lives and worries,
as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation
and its terrible effects on even the smallest child.

She understands the fate of refugees,
and what she calls the Israeli government's
insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by
making it almost impossible for this particular
group of people to survive.

So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an
Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused
service to write her and tell her,

"You are doing a good thing.

I thank you for it."


What shines through all the letters she wrote home
and which were subsequently published in the
London Guardian,

is the amazing resistance put up by
the Palestinian people themselves,

average human beings stuck in the most terrible
position of suffering and despair but continuing
to survive just the same.

We have heard so much recently about the roadmap
and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked
the most basic fact of all,

which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate
or surrender even under the collective punishment
meted out to them by the combined might of the
US and Israel.

It is that extraordinary fact which is the reason for
the existence of a roadmap and all the numerous
so-called peace plans before them,
not at all because the US and Israel
and the international community have
been convinced for humanitarian reasons
that the killing and the violence must stop.

If we miss that truth about the
power of Palestinian resistance

(by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing,
which does much more harm than good),
despite all its failings and all its mistakes,
we miss everything.

Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project,
and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that
minimize, rather than solve, the problem.

The official Israeli policy,
no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word
"occupation" or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty,
unused tower or two,

has always been not to accept the reality of the
Palestinian people as equals nor ever to admit
that their rights were scandalously violated all
along by Israel.

Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the
years have tried to deal with this other concealed history,
most Israelis and what seems like the majority of
American Jews have made every effort to deny,
avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality.

This is why there is no peace.


Moreover, the roadmap says nothing about justice
or about the historical punishment meted out to the
Palestinian people for too many decades to count.

What Rachel Corrie's work in Gaza recognized,
however, was precisely the gravity and the density
of the living history of the Palestinian people as
a national community, and not merely as a
collection of deprived refugees.

That is what she was in solidarity with.

And we need to remember that that kind of
solidarity is no longer confined to a small
number of intrepid souls here and there,
but is recognized the world over.

In the past six months I have lectured in four
continents to many thousands of people.

What brings them together is Palestine and
the struggle of the Palestinian people which
is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment,
regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.

Edward Said is a professor of literature at Columbia university.

His book Orientalism (1979) revolutionized the literary field.
He has written extensively on the Middle East,
and his writings can be found in a number of
publications such as Z Magazine,
the Nation, the Progressive,
In These Times, Counterpunch,
Al Ahram and more

More articles by Edward Said
http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/edward_said.htm