SermonsPTSD

PALESTINE: Remembering Rachel Corrie and facing the future


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Rachel Corrie bulldozer_1.jpg
Photo by Joe Carr.  Carr worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Gaza and later with CPT in Hebron and At-Tuwani.  His sequence of photos showing the bulldozer running over Corrie was not enough
to convict the driver of her death.

by Kathleen Kern

Note: Our director asked if we were going to remember Corrie in some way, so I wrote this for CPTnet. Not sure if I hit it out of the park, but I don’t necessarily have to do that every time.

In 2003, when the Hebron team heard that the Israeli military had crushed Rachel Corrie to death with a Caterpillar bulldozer, the news hit all of us hard. Some of us had conducted nonviolence trainings for the first waves of International Solidarity Movement volunteers that had poured into Palestine to address violence of the Second Intifada.  These volunteers had included Corrie, and Tom Hurndall who was shot and later disconnected from life support, as well as Brian Avery, also shot and permanently disfigured.  Most of us had at one time or another stood in front of a bulldozer or had friends who had stood in front of bulldozers in an effort to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home.  Israeli soldiers and police had roughed us up, detained us or arrested us.  Until Corrie died, I don’t think we believed that soldiers would run us, our friends or the Palestinian homeowners over.

Sixteen years later, if I heard soldiers had deliberately run over anyone with a bulldozer in Hebron in this current political climate the news would not shock me.  The number of extrajudicial executions that happen in this city simply because Palestinians make soldiers nervous is frightening.  Yet right now, less lethal things chip away at my soul: for example, young Israeli soldiers addressing professional Palestinian men in their forties and fifties as “walid” or “boy” as they walk through the checkpoint.  Also, can you think of anywhere else in the world where elementary schoolchildren are regularly, routinely blanketed with teargas as they walk to and from school? And little children scurrying from teargas aren’t even the images that haunt me.  It’s the faces of soldiers laughing I can’t shake.  They laugh as they load the teargas grenades into their launchers, preparing to shoot them at the children.

Adam Serwer, a writer for the Atlantic, wrote an article last year about the Trump era, entitled “The cruelty is the point.”  Nothing is quite so demoralizing as cruelty for the sake of cruelty, as watching grown men and women in uniform taking pleasure in mistreating children and our other neighbors in the Old City of Hebron.

But while this cruelty can haunt and even paralyze those who care about Palestinians, that’s not the lesson to take away from Corrie’s life.  I remember reading emails to her family after her death and being struck by her optimism and her plans for the future.  Her final email to her father particularly moved me:

Thanks also for stepping up your anti-war work. I know it is not easy to do, and probably much more difficult where you are than where I am. …

Also got an invitation to visit Sweden on my way back – which I think I could do very cheaply. I would like to leave Rafah with a viable plan to return, too. One of the core members of our group has to leave tomorrow – and watching her say goodbye to people is making me realize how difficult it will be. People here can’t leave, so that complicates things. They also are pretty matter-of-fact about the fact that they don’t know if they will be alive when we come back here.

I really don’t want to live with a lot of guilt about this place – being able to come and go so easily – and not going back. I think it is valuable to make commitments to places – so I would like to be able to plan on coming back here within a year or so. Of all of these possibilities I think it’s most likely that I will at least go to Sweden for a few weeks on my way back – I can change tickets and get a plane to from Paris to Sweden and back for a total of around 150 bucks or so. … Let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with the rest of my life

As the cruelty of the Israeli military occupation increases, and internationals find it increasingly difficult to travel to the Occupied Palestinian Territories because the Israeli government denies them entry, Corrie’s words remind us that Palestinian resistance ultimately does not rely on outsiders.  And, that like Corrie’s father, internationals can undertake much of that resistance in their home countries and communities.  Corrie’s words also remind us that while internationals can seriously commit themselves to the cause of Palestinian liberation, they do not have to take themselves so seriously.  We do this work knowing the risks, but assuming there is a future.  And that even if we cannot envision the change that is going to occur, we know that something will change.


What I’ve been doing for the last nine months

Yeah, my synopsis is pretty much crap

I took a leave of absence from Christian Peacemaker Teams beginning in January 2017, having a long list of goals to accomplish in mind. I knew from the experience of my sabbatical four years ago that I would not accomplish all or most of these goals. Still, despite the fact I have played way too much Plants vs. Zombies and have been dealing (gladly) with unexpected health crises of elderly relatives, here are some things I have accomplished:

 

I wanted to finish my novel, working title Don’t Call Me Buffy, and I did. I don’t have the perfect pitch yet, but here’s a summary:

 

Jubilee McVey, brought up in an evangelical purity culture, deals with the shames heaped on her by her family and church by brutally restricting calories and indulging in mutilation fantasies. Then Rania Khalidi, an energetic social justice activist and Lior Artzi—who views the world through the lens of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, approach her one day to tell her that she has been called by the Council of Huldah to convince her father to stop building his dream church on land belonging to the Seneca Indian Nation. She assumes that what they are asking her to do is impossible, but the encounter pulls her into a world where she discovers abilities she had not imagined.

 

What Rania, Jubilee and Lior do not know is that the Prophet Huldah, briefly mentioned in the book of II Kings, is alive and grumpy and teaching Biochemistry in western NY. She has little interest in God or prophecy. Mostly, she wants to support her talented student Jayce, a member of the Seneca Nation who is investigating medical waste dumping on the Allegeny reservation. But as she sees a prophetic movement beginning to emerge in Western NY the way it did in Israel and Judah, and as Jubilee flees to Jerusalem to escape her prophetic obligations, Huldah wonders if the land belonging to the Keepers of the Western Door has been chosen to change history.

 

Currently, my beta readers say it reads very fast, so that’s always good news.

 

I also cleaned out boxes that had been sitting in the upstairs alcove of our house pretty much since we had moved in, as well as some that came my way after Mom moved into the nursing home. I found recycling my mother’s stuff emotionally wrenching as well as other keepsakes, so I dealt with it by posting about it on Twitter:

 

Today I recycled my mother’s proofreading notes on my second novel.

Today I recycled a handwritten coupon good for “1 hour of sewing help from Sylvia D. Klassen exp. 12/25/04” @SylviaDHook  

Today I recycled my 1984 college commencement program and dozens of Christmas letters from people I love.

 

A more amorphous “success” for the year was that I generally said “yes” to my husband Michael when he suggested an activity for the evening or weekend instead of telling him I was too tired or had too much work to do and that felt good.

 

When I think of what I did not achieve around the house and yard, well, it’s a pretty long list, and I won’t go into it; besides, I’ve still got two months, right? Probably of most concern was not just my neglect of spiritual growth, but my inability to focus on spiritual growth.   I found sustained attention on prayer, meditation, or anything remotely spiritual almost impossible. Coming along with this acknowledgement of my deficit is that I realized I have for some time been dealing with low-grade PTSD, and I’m not sure what to do about it. After serving in Palestine since 1995, and seeing small victories, friendships built all get swept away, seeing the relentless cruelty of occupation get more and more entrenched—I think it has broken something in me. And I am reluctant to use the word “trauma” in relationship to myself when I’ve been coming over just once a year, because the people of the Old City are living with this brutality every day. It seems like whining, or attention-seeking behavior.

But this year, for the first time I had to walk out of a movie at the Palestine Film festival after eight minutes. I had already seen those faces at home demolitions. I had seen those terrified children being dragged away by soldiers. I didn’t need to watch them on the screen. And I had to stop watching a documentary about Israeli women soldiers on our local public television station for the same reason. I acknowledged it was a good thing they were coming clean about their abuses of Palestinians, but I kept seeing the faces of those Palestinians they had abused.

 

So I probably won’t be going back to Hebron when I return to work in January. Perhaps I will work on another team, or perhaps I will just take a year off to work with Christian Peacemaker Teams’ new Communications Director. And maybe I’ll figure out how to classify my stupid trauma. Maybe I just did.