Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century

Rachel Corrie

98 Rachel Corrie March 20, 2003 Three isolated men on an isolated island decided to conduct a holocaust, a crime against humanity, a massacre. This will be known as the children’s holocaust because the majority of the victims will be children. Citizens of the United States have been betrayed by a Congress and a President, that are of the corporations, for the corporations and by the corporations. “Fascism,” said Mussolini, “should be more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” And friends, the corporations are paid for the material of war and then they will be paid again for reconstruction of the fifty-first state after the war. We want our country back. We want our hard-earned tax money to go to education, health care and the reestablishment of the public sector, which has been systematically destroyed. Taxation without representation is tyranny. We must not be paralyzed by this act of crass terror that is taking place as we speak. Each of us must engage in the resistance in accord with our ability and our conscience. Our non-violent international revolution for peace and justice has begun. We must vigil, march, protest and picket daily. Our core organization is many million strong. We must be more creative than ever before. Rachel Corrie . . . ¡Presente, Presente, Presente! Here is part of Rachel’s letter to her parents just before she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer: I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tankshell 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 99 like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here. They know that children in the United States don’t usually have their parents shot and they know they sometimes get to see the ocean. But once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place, where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, and once you have spent an evening when you haven’t wondered if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep, and once you’ve met people who have never lost anyone—once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn’t surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed “settlements” and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing—just existing—in resistance to the constant stranglehold of the world’s fourth largest military—backed by the world’s only superpower—in it’s attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew. And a thought from the Talmud (the collection of Jewish law and tradition consisting of the Mishnah and the Gemara): Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. The struggle for peace and justice continues. What follows is a portion of Rachel’s letter that I did not have time to read on the air: As an afterthought to all this rambling, I am in Rafah, a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60 percent of whom are refugees—many of whom are twice or three times refugees. Rafah existed prior to 1948, but most of the people here are themselves or are descendants of people who were relocated here from their homes in historic Palestine—now Israel. Rafah was split in half when the Sinai returned to Egypt. Currently, the Israeli army is building a fourteen-meter-high wall between Rafah in Palestine and the border, carving a no-man’s land from the houses along the border. Six hundred and two homes have been completely bulldozed according to the Rafah Popular Refugee Committee . The number of homes that have been partially destroyed is greater. 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. Followed by...