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June
23, 2003
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Of Dignity and
Solidarity
By
EDWARD SAID
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.
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