Another ship that was delayed in joining the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is 24 hours from Gaza's shore. The MV Rachel Corrie is an jointly registered ship of Ireland and Malaysia. Carrying 10 civilian peace activists including Nobel laureate Maireád Corrigan-Maguire and former UN assistant secretary general Denis Halliday, the boat continues the struggle to end the inhumane blockade of more than 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
This boat is named after Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on 16 March 2003, while undertaking nonviolent direct action to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition in Gaza.
In solidarity with those killed by Israeli commandos in the early dawn hours of Monday in international waters of the Mediterranean Sea, I offer this video of Palestinian-American poet, Suheir Hammad. She expresses our collective shock and hope for future in this beautiful tribute to Rachel Corrie and all who risk their lives for those screaming in anguish in our world.
This is not a poem. This is not a threat.
This is a promise.
God has a better imagination
than all of us combined and I do not
know what form retribution will take, but
I have seen karma happen and it will
again, and when it does I will chant
the names of the innocent and I will stand
with those who have kept their hands clean of blood
and their hearts clear of hate.
It is hard not to hate right now. But I
have been loved, I have loved and I know
that those who de-humanize their enemy are
only doing so to themselves.
Peace work is justice work is God's work.
Rachel Corrie wrote,
"Nevertheless, I think about the fact that 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, and even
then you are always well aware that your experience
is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the
Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed US
citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water
when the army destroys wells, and, of course, the fact
that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family
has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher
from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown.
I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean."
She is dead now. And the ocean
will miss her gaze. Palestine will miss
her heart, but mostly her family will
miss her breath.
And the president of the United States of America
(when did that happen again?) has all
but declared war on Iraq, and so more deaths are
promised.
What do I tell young people about any thing?
Especially humanity and morality.
Slightly a month before her murder Rachel wrote home,
"Many people want their voices to be heard, and I
think we need to use some of our privilege as
internationals to get those voices heard directly in
the US, rather than through the filter of well-meaning
internationals such as myself. I am just beginning to
learn, from what I expect to be a very intense tutelage,
about the ability of people to organize against all odds,
and to resist against all odds."
More words I reclaim: Hero, Brave, Soldier.
This young woman did the un-thinkable,
she did not blink, did not half-step, did not back
down in the face of death. What greater odds than
one lone female frame against a destructive
machine?
What greater story to tell?
On the brink of war, may our power
come from the people Rachel Corrie was murdered
defending. On the brink of war, may our hope
come from one another. On the
brink of -- wait -- this is not a war.
On the brink of whatever new-fangled
imperialist project this is, may Rachel Corrie
live in our resistance, in our pursuit
of justice, and in the spirit of sisterhood.
On the brink of war, may we remember how divine
human beings can be.
-Suheir Hammad
Pay attention to the voices of anguish and despair in Palestine. Support the call for boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel. This must stop. We must demand it.
Update
We can make choices on how to spend our money. We can demand that our churches, unions and organizations divest from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation, companies like General Electric, Caterpillar and Motorola.
We can demand that our government stop all military aid to Israel.