March 16, 2003
"We are now in a period of grieving and still finding out
the details behind
the death of Rachel in the Gaza Strip.
We have raised all our children to appreciate the beauty
of the global
community and family and are proud that Rachel was able
to live her
convictions. Rachel was filled with love and a sense
of duty to her fellow
man, wherever they lived. And, she gave her life
trying to protect those
that are unable to protect themselves.
Rachel wrote to us from the Gaza Strip and we would like
to release to
the media her experience in her own words at this time.
Thank you.
Craig and Cindy Corrie, parents of Rachel Corrie
--
Excerpts from an e-mail from Rachel on February 7, 2003.
I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now,
and I still have
very few words to describe what I see. It is most
difficult for me to think
about what's going on here when I sit down to write back
to the United
States--something about the virtual portal into luxury.
I don't know if
many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell
holes in
their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying
them
constantly from the near horizons. I think, although
I'm not entirely sure,
that even the smallest of these children understand that
life is not like
this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and
killed by an Israeli tank
two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur
his name to
me, ôAliö--or point at the posters of him on
the walls. The children also
love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking
me "Kaif Sharon?"
"Kaif Bush?" and they laugh when I say "Bush Majnoon"
"Sharon
Majnoon" back in my limited Arabic. (How is Sharon?
How is Bush?
Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course
this isn't quite what I
believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct
me: Bush
mish Majnoon... Bush is a businessman. Today I tried
to learn to say
"Bush is a tool", but I don't think it translated quite
right. But anyway,
there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the
workings of the
global power structure than I was just a few years ago--at
least regarding
Israel.
Nevertheless, I think about the fact that no amount of
reading,
attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word
of mouth
could have prepared me for the reality of the situation
here. You just
can't imagine it unless you see it, and even then you
are always well
aware that your experience is not at all the reality:
what with the
difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot
an unarmed US
citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water
when the army
destroys wells, and, of course, the fact that I have the
option of leaving.
Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car,
by a rocket
launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in
my hometown. I
have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean.
Ostensibly it is still
quite difficult for me to be held for months or years
on end without a trial
(this because I am a white US citizen, as opposed to so
many others).
When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain
that there will
not be a heavily armed soldier waiting half way between
Mud Bay and
downtown Olympia at a checkpointùa soldier with
the power to decide
whether I can go about my business, and whether I can
get home again
when I'm done. So, if I feel outrage at arriving
and entering briefly and
incompletely into the world in which these children exist,
I wonder
conversely about how it would be for them to arrive in
my world.
They know that children in the United States don't usually
have their
parents shot and they know they sometimes get to see the
ocean. But
once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place,
where water is
taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers,
and once you
have spent an evening when you havenÆt wondered
if the walls of your
home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep,
and once
youÆve met people who have never lost anyone-- once
you have
experienced the reality of a world that isn't surrounded
by murderous
towers, tanks, armed "settlements" and now a giant metal
wall, I wonder
if you can forgive the world for all the years of your
childhood spent
existing--just existing--in resistance to the constant
stranglehold of the
worldÆs fourth largest military--backed by the worldÆs
only superpower--in
itÆs attempt to erase you from your home.
That is something I wonder
about these children. I wonder what would happen
if they really knew.
As an afterthought to all this rambling, I am in Rafah,
a city of about
140,000 people, approximately 60 percent of whom are refugees--many
of whom are twice or three times refugees. Rafah
existed prior to 1948,
but most of the people here are themselves or are descendants
of people
who were relocated here from their homes in historic Palestine--now
Israel. Rafah was split in half when the Sinai returned
to Egypt.
Currently, the Israeli army is building a fourteen-meter-high
wall between
Rafah in Palestine and the border, carving a no-mans land
from the
houses along the border. Six hundred and two homes
have been
completely bulldozed according to the Rafah Popular Refugee
Committee. The number of homes that have been partially
destroyed is
greater.
Today as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once
stood,
Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of
the border, "Go!
Go!" because a tank was coming. Followed by waving
and "what's your
name?". There is something disturbing about this
friendly curiosity. It
reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids
curious
about other kids: Egyptian kids shouting at strange women
wandering
into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from
the tanks when they
peak out from behind walls to see what's going on.
International kids
standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli
kids in the tanks
anonymously, occasionally shouting-- and also occasionally
waving--
many forced to be here, many just aggressive, shooting
into the houses
as we wander away.
In addition to the constant presence of tanks along the
border and in the
western region between Rafah and settlements along the
coast, there are
more IDF towers here than I can count--along the horizon,at
the end of
streets. Some just army green metal. Others
these strange spiral
staircases draped in some kind of netting to make the
activity within
anonymous. Some hidden,just beneath the horizon
of buildings. A new
one went up the other day in the time it took us to do
laundry and to
cross town twice to hang banners. Despite the fact
that some of the
areas nearest the border are the original Rafah with families
who have
lived on this land for at least a century, only the 1948
camps in the
center of the city are Palestinian controlled areas under
Oslo. But as far
as I can tell, there are few if any places that are not
within the sights of
some tower or another. Certainly there is no place
invulnerable to
apache helicopters or to the cameras of invisible drones
we hear buzzing
over the city for hours at a time.
I've been having trouble accessing news about the outside
world here, but
I hear an escalation of war on Iraq is inevitable.
There is a great deal of
concern here about the "reoccupation of Gaza." Gaza
is reoccupied
every day to various extents, but I think the fear is
that the tanks will
enter all the streets and remain here, instead of entering
some of the
streets and then withdrawing after some hours or days
to observe and
shoot from the edges of the communities. If people
aren't already
thinking about the consequences of this war for the people
of the entire
region then I hope they will start.
I also hope you'll come here. We've been wavering
between five and six
internationals. The neighborhoods that have asked
us for some form of
presence are Yibna, Tel El Sultan, Hi Salam, Brazil, Block
J, Zorob, and
Block O. There is also need for constant night-time
presence at a well
on the outskirts of Rafah since the Israeli army
destroyed the two
largest wells. According to the municipal water
office the wells
destroyed last week provided half of RafahÆs water
supply. Many of the
communities have requested internationals to be present
at night to
attempt to shield houses from further demolition.
After about ten p.m. it
is very difficult to move at night because the Israeli
army treats anyone in
the streets as resistance and shoots at them. So
clearly we are too few.
I continue to believe that my home, Olympia, could gain
a lot and offer a
lot by deciding to make a commitment to Rafah in the form
of a sister-
community relationship. Some teachers and children's
groups have
expressed interest in e-mail exchanges, but this is only
the tip of the
iceberg of solidarity work that might be done. Many
people want their
voices to be heard, and I think we need to use some of
our privilege as
internationals to get those voices heard directly in the
US, rather than
through the filter of well-meaning internationals such
as myself. I am just
beginning to learn, from what I expect to be a very intense
tutelage,
about the ability of people to organize against all odds,
and to resist
against all odds.