Ruminating how and why the world remains as apathetic to plight of Palestinians as ever nearly a decade after Corrie's death
"All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above - and a lot of other things - constitutes a somewhat gradual - often hidden, but nevertheless massive - removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I'm terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon's possible goals), can't leave. Because they can't even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won't let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can't get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don't remember it right now. I'm going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don't like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions."
This is how Rachel Corrie describes her predicament after a short but eventful stay at Gaza strip in an email to her mother sent on Feb 27, 2003. That was 17 days before her death in a blatant act of aggression by Israeli forces on a rampage of demolition. The world has seen many things since. Babies have been born and elderly people have died. More significantly, large number of children, teenagers and youth have also died the unnatural death. Most of them have lost their lives in violence of one kind or the other. Even more people have been languishing their lives in extremely miserable conditions, sometimes even worse than death itself.
While violence in mass scale is not the monopoly of West Asia, it definitely epitomizes the phenomenon of sustained and systemic violence dictated by indulgent powers rendering the rest of the world the hapless witness of the butchery. This is indeed one thing that helps explain why so many violent periods were thrust upon the human history despite the fact that the ordinary men and women always detested the suffering that accompanied them. While innumerable conflicts, many of them major, rage throughout the world, the mass killing and displacement of the Palestinians is perhaps one of very few instances where a narrative of rectifying a historical injustice to one population with criminal injustice to another in the present is successfully sold to a large number of people.
When I first read about the death of Corrie, an American student, fighting for the Palestinian cause I was a teenager and I was suddenly filled with an enormous sense of guilt. What Corrie did was perfectly understandable and reasonable under the circumstances. The realization that I was among the billions of mute spectators of one of the worst injustices in history made me restless. Then, I had not even been to Kathmandu, the capital, and knew very little about the machinations of the international power game. With time, that sense of guilt evolved into a sense of frustration and helplessness and as I entered the youth, I came to adjust to that reality in a way that is 'normal' to most of us. Regardless of what I wrote, said, shouted or objected in any other way, the world would proceed as usual; I would be the sole audience of what I had to say or express. Mentioning name of Corrie to friends would draw blank expressions and writing about her was also unlikely to get any reader other than myself. This was how the news of Corrie's life and death impacted my teenage and early youth days.
