Corries to speak on their family’s journey in Columbus tonight Activism

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/corries-journey-columbus

“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 of it 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 the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving.”

Rachel Corrie — Rafah

February 7, 2003

Twelve years ago in that letter above, Rachel Corrie with her usual extraordinary insight posed the paradox for Americans trying to comprehend the Israeli Occupation. If we haven’t been there, we can’t know its “horror”–no matter how much we’ve read, listened, watched–and when we do come, we can’t fully understand, because we can’t fully share the “doom” faced by the people of Palestine. Americans can buy bottled water for a few days, leave, and, most important, be protected by U.S. citizenship.

Yet, more than a decade later, such protection has been betrayed; there has been no accountability for Rachel Corrie’s killing in March 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer. The U.S. government pusillanimously let the Israeli government investigate its own crime and did nothing even after Dan Shapiro, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, admitted to the Corries that our government “did not believe the Israeli military investigation had been ‘thorough, credible and transparent.” When the Corries described their quest for justice for both Rachel and Palestine to about 40 of us at OSU in November 2013, they said that Judge Oded Gershon’s verdict rejecting the their family’s wrongful death lawsuit had been most disappointing because it read “as if there had been no trial”: it merely parroted the army testimony that Rafah was a “closed military zone.”

[azurnoir]

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