A-Infos (en) Palestine, Rafa, Starhawk: A Bone from Rafah (Cuppied from www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php)

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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 Shahids--the 
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, angry<all 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, courageous--which 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 life 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. Iıve been 
having ongoing dialogues with various friends about 
compassion, and I admit that I just canıt get there with 
the bulldozer operator. The closest I can come to 
compassion 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 peopleıs 
relationship to the Palestinians. I was never taught to 
hate them--only 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 disappear<she 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 werenıt 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 School--the 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 
Gibeah 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 
hate--Barak offered them everything but they donıt 
want peace--they don't love their children--they are 
animals--there 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 
Rachelıs 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

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