A dreadful monster assaults the city, kills its brave defenders, and advances
to devour the citizens. At the last moment, a young maiden demurely walks
forward to meet the monster. Her very sight, the sight of feminine innocence,
vulnerability, spirituality, certainty of the right cause, stops the ogre
in its tracks. The beast suffers her to tie her belt to his mighty neck and
walks away, tamed. It is the story of St Genevieve and of other beautiful
and virtuous saints; a part and parcel of human heritage, and the subject
of many gorgeous tapestries and paintings.
Courageous and noble maidens are still with us. They stopped the US Army
trains with soldiers during Vietnam War, and they stopped Russian tanks in
Prague 1968 and in Moscow 1991. Drivers of French, Russian, American and
German tanks and trains knew: even a monster stops when a girl placidly places
herself on his way. It is a biological law that we all are subject to.
Rachel Corrie was murdered by a monster from another tale. This young American
girl, an ISM activist, tried to stop with her fragile body a Zionist bulldozer
from ruining Palestinian homes. She could not imagine that the driver will
look at her and calmly ride his ten-ton steel machine over her body, and
back. Nothing in her life prepared her to the encounter with a monster born
and bred in the Zionist labs, a monster that is totally alien and hostile
to humans. She wrote to her parents: ‘no amount of reading, attendance at
conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me
for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you
see it, tank-shell holes in the walls of their homes and the towers of an
occupying army surveying the [Palestinian children] constantly from the near
horizons’.
Though she saw dead bodies of Palestinian children with their heads split
by the Jewish sharp-shooters, she still had some illusions of ‘the difficulties
the Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen’. She was
mistaken. Her country’s President is about to send the US Army to destroy
Iraq and turn the killers of Rachel into the undisputed supreme power of
the Middle East. If Bush would be guided by America’s interests, he would
demand extradition of Rachel’s killer. But the driver is not exclusion. The
people behind the bullet-proof windshields of Caterpillars are the final
product of Zionism. At the beginning of Zionist movement, its eugenic task
was expressed in a poem:
‘Mi dam umi eza Nakim lanu geza’ - ‘out of blood
and sweat we shall breed a new victorious and cruel race’, sang the Zionists.
With murder of Rachel Corrie the experiment came to its fruition. The ‘cruel
race’ is not a dream anymore, it is a new geopolitical reality. A few months
ago, a Jewish bulldozer driver shared with the world his experiences
[click
here] of razing Jenin:
"I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9,
and I have demolished plenty. I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the
officers, over the radio, to let me knock it all down; from top to bottom.
To level everything. When I was told to bring down a house, I took the opportunity
to bring down some more houses. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed.
The whole area. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible.
I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9.
But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house,
you buried 40 or 50 people. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing
the whole camp down. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin, lots of satisfaction.
No one expressed any reservations against doing it. Who would dare speak?
If anyone would as much as open his mouth, I would have buried him under
the D-9".
Rachel’s dreadful death should open America’s eyes to the real danger to
the world that grew in the Middle East. Her killers possess nuclear weapons,
not only bulldozers. If Bush is so keen on a Middle East intervention and
on removal of WMD, his troops could land here, on the shores of ar-Rafah,
where is a real threat to the world’s peace, and forcibly remove all the
weapons of mass destruction.
P.S. A friend of Rachel, an ISM activist Susan Barclay was deported a few
days ago to the US by Sharon’s regime, and now she is touring the US with
lectures about the unfolding Palestinian tragedy. She can be contacted at
stbarclay@yahoo.com