[Peace-discuss] (no subject)

[David Green]

Armed with principles

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 22 April 2003

In February, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old college
student from Olympia, Wash., wrote an e-mail from Gaza
to her family back home. Corrie observed, "I don't
know if many of the children here have ever existed
without tank-shell 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 like this everywhere."
Corrie wanted to change those children's reality. On
March 16, she was crushed to death by an Israeli army
bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction
of a Palestinian family's home.

 
The Israeli army investigated itself and exonerated
its personnel of any responsibility in Rachel Corrie's
death. But photographs and eyewitness accounts show
Corrie was clearly visible, wearing the bright red
vest worn by all members of the International
Solidarity Movement, the peace group that uses such
non-violent means as positioning activists as "human
shields" around the occupied territories to protect
Palestinian civilians.

On April 5, Israeli troops in the West Bank town of
Jenin, shot Brian Avery, 24, of Albequerque. Avery
suffered serious wounds to his head and face, from a
heavy caliber machine gun, at a time when no clashes
were reported in the area.

And on April 11, Thomas Hurndall, 21, a British
citizen, was shot by Israeli forces near Rafah, in
Gaza, as he escorted a group of Palestinian children
out of the line of fire. Hurndall is on life support
in an Israeli hospital, with a gunshot wound to the
head and there is almost no hope of recovery. Again,
there was no fighting reported in the area, and like
Corrie, photographs show that Hurndall wore a bright
red vest.

Many activists fear these shootings are part of a
pattern, and that Israel is deliberately targeting
internationals, so that it can carry out human-rights
abuses unobserved. Whatever the truth, Americans and
other foreign citizens are falling victim to Israeli
tactics that have killed and injured thousands of
Palestinians. A lack of accountability means that such
incidents could increase.

Repeatedly, the international community has caved when
faced with Israeli defiance. The difference between
the docile international community, on the one hand,
and individuals like Corrie, Hurndall and Avery, on
the other, is that these individuals refused to be
turned back. They left the safety of their lives to go
unarmed, except with their principles, into harm's
way, because they believed someone had to act where
governments refused to do so.

When you look at their ages and backgrounds, Corrie,
Hurndall and Avery are similar to the American and
British men and women fighting in Iraq. Although
Corrie served this country's highest ideals as
faithfully as any soldier, the U.S. has not insisted
that those who killed her be held accountable. For
Avery and Hurndall, there is no 24-hour news coverage,
and no special airlift to bring them home to an
appreciative nation. Their families and friends are
left to cope with these devastating tragedies alone.

At the beginning of Israel's crackdown on the
Palestinians, we could anguish at the deaths of
strangers, like 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durra, or the
innocent Israeli teenagers murdered in 2001 by a
Palestinian suicide bomber at a Tel Aviv discotheque.
Almost three years later, with victims mounting, no
one has the emotional capacity to mourn for so many.
But the killing of Corrie, and the shooting of Avery
and Hurndall, renew for me the sense of personal
anguish at the fate of strangers. This is not because
the victims are American or British, but because their
presence in one of the world's most dangerous places
was not an accident of birth. They came for love of
humanity and with a thirst for justice, and paid an
unbearable price. 

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of electronicIntifada.net.
This article was first published in the Chicago
Tribune on 22 April 2003. 



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