Let me tell you about a girl I recently came to know of. Her name is Rachel and she’s from a middle-class American family you could describe as politically liberal and economically conservative. She grew up in Washington with an older brother and sister. Her dad is an insurance executive and her mum an amateur flautist. She studied art after high school and took a year off to serve in the Washington Conservation Corps, a nature conservation program. For three years, she also volunteered weekly visits to patients with mental disorders in a hospital diversion house. Her family has hosted a number of international exchange students and Rachel spent six weeks with a family in Sakhalin, Russia. She is a good writer, likes art, isn’t the most punctual or tidy person in the world and likes to retreat into fantasies of being in Hollywood movies or sitcoms starring Michael J Fox.
In 2003, Rachel proposed an independent-study program which allowed her to fly to Israel and travel to Rafah in the Gaza Strip where she joined the International Solidarity Movement to protest against house demolitions by Israeli armoured bulldozers. One of her projects there was to make Rafah a sister city of Olympia, her hometown.
During this time she wrote emails home about her experiences in Rafah, a city of about 140,000 people, sixty percent of whom are refugees, many twice or three times. She received training on basic rules of harm avoidance such as wear fluorescent jackets, don’t run, don’t frighten the army, try to communicate by megaphone and make your presence known.
Rachel was shocked by the reality of the situation there, which nothing could have prepared her for. She was safe and free as an unarmed US citizen while people were being shot driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank just two days before she arrived.
She wrote… “They know that children in the United States don’t usually have their parents shot and they know they sometimes get to see the ocean. But once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place, where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, and once you have spent an evening when you haven’t wondered if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep, and once you’ve met people who have never lost anyone—once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn’t surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed “settlements” and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing—just existing—in resistance to the constant stranglehold of the world’s fourth largest military—backed by the world’s only superpower—in it’s attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew.”
During her time there, the Israeli army destroyed wells that provided half of Rafah’s water supply. Many of the communities requested internationals to be present at night, she was one of only five or six, to attempt to shield houses from further demolition. After about ten p.m. it was very difficult to move at night because the Israeli army treated anyone in the streets as resistance and shot at them.
She had money to buy water when the army destroyed wells, she could leave whenever she wanted. The greatest risk she faced was of arrest and deportation. She received a lot of tea and food amidst the gunfire and explosions. The woman who kept the key for the well where she slept beside to protect kept asking if she was calling her mum back home. It made her sick to her stomach that she was doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who were facing doom. An explosive detonation broke all the windows in a family’s house where she was being served tea and playing with their two small babies. She was genuinely scared for the locals. She watched as a father led his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded. She was witnessing a chronic, insidious genocide which made her question her belief in the goodness of human nature. It really hurt her to witness how awful we could allow the world to be, that something like this could happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. Then she also learnt about the resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military, which gave her strength and hope.
In spite of her haunting experiences, she is still hopeful of seeing a Palestinian state or a democratic Israeli-Palestinian state within her lifetime. She thinks freedom for Palestine could be an incredible source of hope to people struggling all over the world. That it could also be an incredible inspiration to Arab people in the Middle East, who are struggling under undemocratic regimes, which the US supports. She looks forward to people developing better skills for working in democratic structures and healing our own racism and classism and sexism and heterosexism and ageism and ableism.
Her time in Rafah changed her life. At the end of her time there, she knew that she didn’t want to move back to Olympia, but had to go back to clean her stuff out of the garage and share her experiences. She thought perhaps of getting an English teaching job or buckling down and learning Arabic. Like any twenty three year old girl, she was thinking about what she should do with the rest of her life.
Rachel is an idealist, someone who wants to see an end to the injustice in Gaza, but also just a girl. Someone who is reserved in large crowds but intimate one-on-one, who likes to dance around to Pat Benatar, have boyfriends and make comics for her co-workers.
I would like to meet Rachel but I can’t because she was run over and killed by an armoured bulldozer while trying to protect a stranger’s house in Gaza. I believe in standing and fighting for what you believe in but it makes me sad that Rachel had to die before I, and now you, would even spend a fraction of our busy, important lives to learn about what it is she wanted to live for.
