<
snip>
"Today is the sixth anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, she was run over by an armor-plated Caterpillar bulldozer, a machine sold by the U.S. to Israel, the armor put in place for the purpose of knocking down homes without damage to the machine. Rachel Corrie was 23 years old, from Seattle; a sane, articulate, and dedicated American who had studied with care the methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. At the time that she was run over, and then backed over again, she was wearing a luminous orange jacket and holding a megaphone. There is a photograph of her talking to the soldier of the Israel Defense Forces, in the cabin of his bulldozer, not long before he did it. None of the eyewitnesses believed that the killing was accidental. Perhaps the soldier was tired of the peace workers; it was that kind of day. Perhaps, in some part of himself, he guessed that he was living at the beginning of a period of impunity.
The Israeli government never produced the investigation it promised into the death of Rachel Corrie
(as her parents indicate in a statement published today). The inquiry urged by her congressional
representative, Adam Smith, brought no result from the American state
department under Condoleezza Rice. Her story was lost for a while in
the grand narrative of the American launching of the war against Iraq.
Thoroughly lost, and for a reason. The rules of engagement America
employed in Iraq were taught to our soldiers, as Dexter Filkins revealed,
by officers of the IDF; the U.S. owed a debt to Israel for knowledge
of the methods of destruction; and we were using the same Caterpillar
machines against Iraqi homes. An inquiry into the killing of Rachel
Corrie was hardly likely, given the burden of that debt and that association.
Less than a month later, on April 5, 2003, the American peace worker Brian Avery
was shot in the face and seriously disfigured by IDF soldiers in Jenin.
The group he was with were wearing red reflector vests with the word
"doctor" written in English and Arabic. As Avery later described
it, they "weren't two blocks from our apartment when an Israeli
convoy of two vehicles, a tank and an armored personnel carrier, drove
up the street from the direction that we were walking from. And so as
we heard them coming closer, we stepped off to the side of the road
to let them pass by....We stood to the side of the road, we put our
hands out to show we didn't have any weapons and weren't, you know,
threatening them in any way....And once they drove within about 30 meters
of where we were standing, they opened fire with their machine guns
and continued shooting for a very long time, probably shooting about,
you know, 30 rounds of ammunition, which is quite a lot when you see
them in action. And I was struck in the face with one of the bullets."
Three days ago another American peace worker, Tristan Anderson,
who was protesting the new security fence in the West Bank town of
Ni'lin, was shot by another Israeli soldier. It now appears that Tristan
Anderson will live; if so, it will be the life that follows having a portion of his
right frontal lobe cut out, and a major trauma to the bone surrounding his right eye.
The hole in his face was blasted by a tear-gas canister that struck him
face-on. The canister was fired into the crowd by an IDF soldier from
an emplacement high above. There had been sporadic rock-throwing earlier,
but at the time of the incident, as more than one witness attests, the
crowd was doing nothing; the canister could not have been fired in
self-defense. But whether by reckless whim or premeditation, it came
from a soldier in the knowledge that it does not greatly matter now
if you kill a Palestinian or the occasional European or American
who was working to defend the Palestinians. IDF soldiers who commit
arbitrary acts of violence enjoy a presumption of innocence that approaches
official immunity granted by the state. Where all of the violence performed
by the state is justified by self-defense, everything is permitted.
What drives these Americans to risk their lives against Israeli soldiers on behalf
of a subject people half the world away? The answer is a passion for justice,
and a commitment to civil rights. Why should any of this be of interest
to Americans? For a general reason and a particular one. The general:
this is a passion and a commitment that we Americans at our best have
been supposed to share; it is the largest single reason we have received
the admiration of other people around the world. The particular reason
is as obvious but more immediate. Barack Obama, our first black president,
and a man who has identified himself as a beneficiary and successor
of the tradition of Martin Luther King, has promised $30 billion of
military aid to Israel over the next ten years -- with no conditions, no
budget-items specified, no limitations spoken of. Barack Obama is known
to be a moderate politician, and so we may deduce that the moderate
plan, with Israel, is to keep increasing the leviathan-bulk of the American
subsidy and not to ask questions."
more
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
