The
Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Of Dignity and Solidarity
By
Edward Said
CounterPunch
26 June, 2003
In early May, I was in Seattle
lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel
Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of
their daughter's murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer.
Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the
one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly
to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton
behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a
far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven.
Two things struck me about
my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their
return to the US with their daughter's body. They had immediately sought
out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats,
told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock,
outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned
to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised
investigation simply didn't materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby
had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off.
An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state
of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur
investigation that had been promised her family.
But the second and far more
important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman's
action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought
up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined
the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with
suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before.
Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her
ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially
when she describes the kindness and concern showed her by all the Palestinians
she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because
she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries,
as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects
on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and
what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt at a kind
of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group
of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an
Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and
tell her, "You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it."
What shines through all the
letters she wrote home and which were subsequently published in the
London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian
people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position
of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We
have heard so much recently about the roadmap and the prospects for
peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that
Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the
collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the
US and Israel. It is that extraordinary fact which is the reason for
the existence of a roadmap and all the numerous so-called peace plans
before them, not at all because the US and Israel and the international
community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that the killing
and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of
Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing,
which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all
its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem
for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially been
proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem. The official
Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word "occupation"
or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two,
has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people
as equals nor ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated
all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years
have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis
and what seems like the majority of American Jews have made every effort
to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there
is no peace.
Moreover, the roadmap says
nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to
the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie's
work in Gaza recognized, however, was precisely the gravity and the
density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national
community, and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That
is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that
kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid
souls here and there, but is recognized the world over. In the past
six months I have lectured in four continents to many thousands of people.
What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian
people which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless
of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.
Whenever the facts are made
known, there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most
profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the
valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary
thing that Palestine was a central issue this year both during the Porto
Alegre anti-globalization meetings as well as during the Davos and Amman
meetings, both poles of the world-wide political spectrum. Just because
our fellow citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased diet
of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media, when the occupation
is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, the apartheid
wall 25 feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometers long that Israel
is building is never even shown on CNN and the networks (or so much
as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the roadmap),
and the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming,
house demolitions, agricultural destruction, and death imposed on Palestinian
civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that
they are, one shouldn't be surprised that Americans in the main have
a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians. After all, please remember
that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal
all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim
and anti-Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during
the buildup to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how
little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society
done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of
the immense world-wide outpouring of opinion against the war. Hardly
a single journalist except Helen Thomas has taken the administration
to task for the outrageous lies and confected "facts" that
were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the US before
the war, just as now the same government propagandists, whose cynically
invented and manipulated "facts" about WMD are now more or
less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant, are let off the hook by
media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable situation
for the people of Iraq that the US has now single-handedly and irresponsibly
created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant,
which he was, he had provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure
of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab
country. None of this is any longer in place.
It is no wonder, then, with
the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel
for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians
or criticizing the US government and being called "anti-American"
for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, that
the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture,
history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and
Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, has cowed far too
many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent
and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development,
Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times,
unmodernized, and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical
historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle
truth from propaganda.
No one would deny that most
Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers
of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to the ruthless forms
of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as the New
York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled,
and that there is no freedom of opinion, no civil institutions, no functioning
social movements for and by the people. Press laws notwithstanding,
you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a communist party newspaper
as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and
journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies
are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with diverse
opinions in a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels
having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates, and research
institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must
be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are
on the way.
In Palestine alone there
are over a 1000 NGO's and it is this vitality and this kind of activity
that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort
made to vilify, stop or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst
possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated
nor has it crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and
nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work,
organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which
seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply
want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military
solution hasn't worked at all, and never will work. Why is that so hard
for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide
bombs, but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, organized
protest, here and everywhere.
The point I am trying to
make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in
particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and
dismissive books like Lewis's What Went Wrong and Paul Wolfowitz's ignorant
statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even
begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an
active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society
with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents in it that can't be easily
caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The Palestinian
struggle for justice is especially something with which one expresses
solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated, frustrating
discouragement, and crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity
here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia,
and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed
themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why?
Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality
and human rights.
I want now to speak about
dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known
to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and humanists. I shall
begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong Orientalist,
and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans,
Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life,
no values that express love, intimacy and understanding that are supposed
to be the property exclusively of cultures like those of Europe and
America that had an Renaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment.
Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has
been peddling this rubbish, which has alas been picked up by equally
ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals I don't need to mention
any names here who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the
Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more diseased and more dysfunctional
than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion that
has occurred in any other culture.
We can leave to one side
that, between them, Europe and the US account for by far the largest
number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the Islamic world
hardly a fraction of it. And behind all of that specious unscientific
nonsense about wrong and right civilizations, there is the grotesque
shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington who has led a lot
of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilizations
battling against each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is
dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists
by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment
that are completely exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic
human attributes of community, love, value for life and all the others.
To suggest otherwise as he does is the purest invidious racism of the
same stripe as people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior
brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans
are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian
science directed uniquely today against Arab and Muslims, and we must
be very firm as to not even go through the motions of arguing against
it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there is the much more
credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of
humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity which
are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and
those expressions needn't resemble or be a copy of one approved model
suitable for everyone to follow.
The whole point about human
diversity is that it is in the end a form of deep co-existence between
very different styles of individuality and experience that can't all
be reduced to one superior form: this is the spurious argument foisted
on us by pundits who bewail the lack of development and knowledge in
the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of
literature, cinema, theater, painting, music and popular culture produced
by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be assessed
as an indication of whether or not Arabs are developed, and not just
how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either
indicate an appropriate level of development or they show failure.
The more important point
I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today
between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who
now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated
in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans, and presidents
who preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group,
almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of
their people. This is not just a matter of no democracy. It is that
they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in
ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change,
frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified
most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States.
Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation,
they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler's power.
This is the real failure,
how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader
had the self-dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging
and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries.
Fine, it was an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's appalling regime
is no more, but who appointed the US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked
the US to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of it citizens
and bring it something called "democracy," especially at a
time when the school system, the health system, and the whole economy
in America are degenerating into the worst levels since the 1929 Depression.
Why was the collective Arab voice NOT raised against the US's flagrantly
illegal intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation
upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve,
in dignity, in self-solidarity.
With all the Bush administration's
talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn't one Arab leader have
the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our
own lights and traditions and religion? But nothing, not a word, as
the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and
the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified
that his country may be next. How unfortunate the embrace of George
Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the
combined leadership of the major Arab countries last week. Was there
no one there who had the guts to remind George W. what he has done to
humiliate and bring more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before
him, and must he always be greeted with hugs, smiles, kisses and low
bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and economic support necessary
to sustain an anti-occupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza? Instead
all one hears is that foreign ministers preach to the Palestinians to
mind their ways, avoid violence, and keep at the peace negotiations,
even though it has been so obvious that Sharon's interest in peace is
just about zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the separation
wall, or to the assassinations, or to collective punishment, only a
bunch of tired clichés repeating the well-worn formulas authorized
by the State Department.
Perhaps the one thing that
strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of
the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian
Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support
among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and
the US precisely because he has no constituency, is not an orator or
a great organizer, or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasir
Arafat, and because I am afraid they see in him a man who will do Israel's
bidding, how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce
words written for him, like a ventriloquist's puppet, by some State
Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish
suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people's
suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified
and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity
as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically
for its rights for over a century just because the US and Israel have
told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a "provisional"
Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount
of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic
systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, child,
I must confess to a complete lack of understanding. As to why a leader
or representative of that long-suffering people doesn't so much as take
note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity?
Has he forgotten that since
he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people's fate
at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was not bitterly
disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand
with dignity the dignity of his people's experience and cause and testify
to it with pride, and without compromise, without ambiguity, without
the half embarrassed, half apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders
take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy
white father?
But that has been the behavior
of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination
of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth
do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written
for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in
Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, is that we
are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition and above
all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing
our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience
of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian
since 1948. Not one of our political spokespeople the same is true of
the Arabs since Abdel Nasser's time ever speaks with self-respect and
dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we
want to go.
Slowly, however, the situation
is changing, and the old regime made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars
of this world, is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set
of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising is made
up of the members of the National Palestinian Initiative; they are grass
roots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk,
nor juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay attention
to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working
classes, and young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors,
lawyers, working people who have kept society going while also fending
off daily Israeli attacks. Second, these are people committed to the
kind of democracy and popular participation undreamt of by the Authority,
whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly,
they offer social services to the unemployed, health to the uninsured
and the poor, proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians
who must be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary
worth of the old one. For such programs, the NPI stipulates that getting
rid of the occupation is the only way forward, and that in order to
do that, a representative national unified leadership be elected freely
to replace the cronies, the outdated, and the ineffectiveness that have
plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves
as Arabs and Americans, and understand the true dignity and justice
of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves,
so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two
young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery,
have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.
I conclude with one last
irony. Isn't it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity
that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of
solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect
us more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with our own
status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere
realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble
cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be
embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their
people have done and proud also to represent them.