Was this house worth her Life? (Rachel Corrie backgrounder)

RAFAH, GAZA STRIP--At first, the doctor did not want to see me. I had come by dirt road to his small pharmacy in this dingy town along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt because I wanted to ask about the young woman from America--the one who died defending his house. He did not want to talk about her. He was tired of talking to journalists. He now required appointments to be made in advance.
...
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the ISM is that it manages to contain so many contradictions while still functioning.

The group claims to operate completely independent of the Palestinian Authority and its various internal factions, but it also claims to be "Palestinian led." The group is dedicated to nonviolent direct action in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but it is using that nonviolent direct action in the service of a liberation movement whose favored direct-action tactic in recent years has been suicide bombings. And here is the most glaring contradiction: Virtually all of the foreign activists currently in Rafah characterize themselves as anarchists. They reject notions of hierarchy and even the very idea of a political state. Stefan, Rachel's boyfriend at the time of her death, is an anarchist and says that although Rachel didn't like labels, she could fairly be described as an anarchist too.

Yet the sole reason that Rachel, Stefan, and the other ISM anarchists go to Rafah is to aid a people whose driving aim for four decades now has been the creation of a state. In other words, the big dream of the Palestinians is antithetical to the big dream of the Rafah activists. This puts the foreign anarchists in a curious position as they work long hours in their nonhierarchical "affinity groups," helping the Palestinians pursue their nationalist aspirations.

One day I ask Joe, one of the three Evergreen students still in Rafah, about this as we are sitting around the cluttered ISM office on the third floor of a Rafah apartment building. The place looks like a college dorm--cushions, empty teacups, a laptop, sleeping bags--except that there are no empty beer bottles, no crumpled cigarette packets, no bong; the ISM members abstain from such indulgences in Rafah out of respect for their Muslim hosts. Joe is wearing smart eyeglasses and talking at a breakneck speed. Tom, who happens to be walking by at the moment, hears my question. He nods and gives me a thumbs-up. Apparently he has also considered the strangeness of the ideological landscape here.

"Yes, this is the difficult thing," Joe says of my question. And then he launches into a long and convoluted answer that is worth listening to for the glimpse it provides into the mind of an American ISMer: "The way I think about it," Joe says, "is that I feel that I want to support the Palestinians as innocent individuals who have the right to live their lives and have the right to self-determination. And I'm doing work on the ground to directly serve these citizens.... This is their land, this is their lives that they're determining, and if [a state is] what they feel that they want, then I'll support that because that's what I'm here to do. And I don't judge them and try to say that a state is inherently oppressive."

However: "If it was up to me, I wouldn't create a Palestinian state," he says. And if it were up to him, what would he recommend the Palestinians create instead?

"Well, I don't know. It's kind of complicated because I'm an anarchist," Joe says. "I believe in autonomy for all peoples and I believe in self-determination and I believe that states inherently take that away and are designed to rule and control people. I believe in kind of a world community made up of autonomous individual communities. And Palestine and Palestinian culture is clearly a distinguished ethnic/cultural identity. And Israeli Judaism is clearly an ethnic/cultural identity. And I would never want to do anything to try and say that they had to abandon either of them."

In his own anarchist way, Joe has now arrived at the heart of the problem, which will be familiar to anyone who has paid any attention to this conflict: Joe believes in the right to self-determination, but he can't figure out what to do when two "autonomous individual communities" self-determine that they both deserve the same piece of land. He can't figure it out because the anarchist logic can't deal with such a situation, which requires someone in charge, a willingness to make difficult decisions, and leaders to convince people to abide by new rules.

Bringing anarchy to this terrible conflict is like offering famine to starving people in Africa--people here have already had enough; they don't want any more. What they need--as they will tell anyone who will listen--is a political solution. What Joe offers is a wildly impractical dream that makes no sense.

Later, Tom tries his hand at answering the question: "I agree with you that it's a huge irony that we're helping, or at least ostensibly helping, build a state--that a lot of anarchists are doing that. They would reply, and to some extent I would reply, that what we are really here for isn't a state. We're here for the people, and as soon as they get a Palestinian state, we'll be against that one, too."

The Palestinians in Rafah have embraced the foreigners, despite their confusing ideology. This is probably because it is not grand political theories that the people of Rafah really care about. Half-baked, freshman-level political rhetoric is far less important here than daily survival. And what the people of Rafah know is that the foreigners care about them, and that the foreigners' white skin--at least until recently--has the power to turn around a tank, stop the shooting, stall the march of a bulldozer.

Surprisingly good (and long) article in The Stranger, the local Seattle Weekly that makes the Village Voice look like National Review.
The author travelled to Rafah to write about the Rachel Corrie incident and came away with a pretty balanced story. The Evergreen College (Olympia, WA) students going over there have no idea about life outside their Marxist classrooms and think that anarchy will save the day.
The author, Eli Sanders, was interviewed on the John Carlson show, KVI 570AM, the local 24x7 conservative talk radio show. Maybe there's an audio archive of it.
Brought up a good point that while eating dinner with a Pallie family he was wondering if he was succumbing to Stockholm syndrome. I'm sure the Evergreen students don't have a clue what that is.

Was Yassar Arafat the man that held hotage and killed a Belguim Ambassador in an attempt to free Sir Han Sir han (the murderer of Robert Kennedy) - worth it?

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