| Allowed
to See the Ocean:
The
Letters of Human Rights Activist Rachel Corrie
Remembering Rachel
At the age of 23, Olympia, Washington native Rachel Corrie traveled
to the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a human rights observer
with the International Solidarity Movement. Along with other volunteers,
Rachel spent her time in conflict zones, documenting abuses, doing
media work, and engaging in efforts to support the daily life
of Palestinians.
On March 16, 2003, Rachel and her friends were determined to
prevent the Israeli Defense Forces from bulldozing the home of
a Palestinian doctor and his family in the Gaza Strip. After two
hours of attempts to hamper the demolition, Rachel was pulled
under a massive bulldozer which reversed and ran over her body
once again, crushing her spine and skull. According to photographic
evidence and numerous eye witness accounts, Rachel was killed
intentionally.
The U.S. Government has yet to condemn Rachel’s death and
continues to send Israel 10 million dollars per day in military
aid. What follows are excerpts of emails Rachel sent home to her
family and friends while she was in Palestine.
February 7, 2003
Hi friends and family, and others,
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 - Ali - or point at the posters of him on the walls…
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. When
I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there
will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway between Mud
Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint with the power to decide
whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home
again when I'm done.
I am in Rafah: a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60%
of whom are refugees. 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. And then waving and "What's your name?". 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.
-Rachel
February 27 2003
(To her mother)
Love you. Really miss you. I have bad nightmares about tanks and
bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes
the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the
evening or at night it just hits me again - a little bit of the
reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here.
Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding
his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and
bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to
be exploded. Jenny and I stayed in the house with several women
and two small babies. It was our mistake in translation that caused
him to think it was his house that was being exploded.
This is in the area where about 150 men were rounded up and contained
outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads and around
them, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses - the
livelihoods for 300 people. The explosive was right in front of
the greenhouses - right in the point of entry for tanks that might
come back again. I was terrified to think that this man felt it
was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids
than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were
all going to be shot and I tried to stand between them and the
tank.
I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian
violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from
Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel
for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints
between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what
used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey.
In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic
growth are all completely destroyed - the Gaza international airport
(runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with
Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of
the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the
last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement).
The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this
intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection
to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think
it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the
world… The bulldozers come and take out people's vegetable
farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can
think of anything. I can't.
If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived
with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous
experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come
for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had
been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of
us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several
hours - do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means
to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially
when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed
- just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how
long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it
is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would
defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would.
I think probably Grandma would. I think I would.
This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop
everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think
it's an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to
dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics
for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop.
Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed
that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact,
participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I
came into this world. This is not at all what the people here
asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world
you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me.
This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said:
"This is the wide world and I'm coming to it." I did
not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable
life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness
of my participation in genocide. (More big explosions somewhere
in the distance outside.)
OK, some strange men next to me just gave me some peas, so I need
to eat and thank them.
-Rachel
Rachel's last email
Hi papa,
One of the core members of our group has to leave tomorrow - and
watching her say goodbye to people is making me realize how difficult
it will be. People here can't leave, so that complicates things.
They also are pretty matter-of-fact about the fact that they don't
know if they will be alive when we come back here.
Let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with
the rest of my life. I love you very much. If you want you can
write to me as if I was on vacation at a camp on the big island
of Hawaii learning to weave. One thing I do to make things easier
here is to utterly retreat into fantasies that I am in a Hollywood
movie or a sitcom starring Michael J Fox. So feel free to make
something up and I'll be happy to play along. Much love Poppy.
-Rachel
www.rachelcorrie.org
Compiled
by Holly Wren-Spaulding |
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