October 12, 2023
Perhaps I’ve become
terminally jaded, but the blood-curdling bi-partisan calls from American
politicians and pundits to obliterate Gaza–1.1 million children be damned–don’t
surprise me much. Some young lives matter more than others. Others don’t seem
to matter at all.
My mind flashes back to
Rachel Corrie, who I got to know slightly through email correspondence while
she was a student at Evergreen and an environmental activist, leading protests
against industrial clearcuts on near verticle slopes that threatened to bury
small towns in the Washington Cascades under landslides.
What does it say about the
American mentality that this courageous young woman was blamed by many here for
her own murder? After being crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer, while trying
to keep a Palestinian family’s house from being demolished so their land could
be confiscated and auctioned off to Israeli settlers, Rachel was roundly
vilified instead of mourned. Political outrage was directed at her, not the
regime that killed her. She had it coming, they said. She could have just
gotten out of the way. She shouldn’t have been allied with “them.” She had no
business being there.
What is it in the twisted
American psyche that would make her own country turn on a 23-year-old
woman–smart, humane, fearless, and beautiful–who was doing nothing more than
protecting what we’ve been led to believe is the most sacrosanct American
“right”, the right of property, the right to be secure in your home?
It is, of course, the same
mentality that pointed an accusatory finger at the Palestinian-American
journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh for her own death, after being shot in the head by
IDF snipers in Jenin, while wearing a helmet and vest emblazoned with “Press.”
Some American lives matter more than others. Some don’t seem to matter at all.
The government of these two
brave and accomplished American women never pressed for answers about their
killings, never demanded that anyone be held to account. If they had, perhaps,
the real story about what’s been going on in Israel and the Occupied Territories
might have gotten a brief airing in the American media. Instead, the money and
the weapons continued to flow into the hands of a regime that had demonstrated
over and over again its willingness to use them against anyone who stood in its
way, even women from the country that provided them.
Now here we are again,
having to ask ourselves how many children Biden’s shipment of weapons to Israel
will kill? How many tiny limbs will be lost? How many small heads will be
crushed in the rubble? Will we see the bodies our bombs have mutilated? Get a
body count of the deaths our tax dollars have underwritten? What doctrine of
just war decrees that the deaths of children justify the killing of more
children?
Where are the Rachel
Corries and Shireen Abu Aklehs now, at this fraught moment? Voices who could
break through the cacophony of vengeance, stand up against senseless slaughter
and make the case for peace? And not just peace as a ceasefire, but a peace
that rectifies the injustices of an apartheid system that has led to 75 years
of dispossession, impoverishment, torture and killing.
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