My Name is Rachel Corrie: (Young Vic edition) (NHB Modern Plays)

by Rachel Corrie

Is that how life is, a new draft for every day, a new view for each hour?

I just think we all have the right to be critical of government policies . . . any government policies, particularly policies which we're funding.

I think about how many of us doing any kind of progressive work in this region swim beneath the surface combing for what was here before, and taking inventory of what is now. There's the chance that you will be changed by what you're looking for.

We can look at that history and then choose which side we want to be on now, and how willing we are to fight. We are not outside.

I'm going to give The Olympian your number. Please think about your language when you talk to them. I think it was smart that you're wary of using the word ‘terrorism’, and if you talk about the cycle of violence, or ‘an eye for an eye’, you could be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world. These are the kind of things it's important to think about before talking to reporters.

I know I scare you, Mom. I'm sorry I scare you. But I want to write and I want to see. And what would I write about if I only stayed within the doll's house, the flower-world I grew up in? You gave me a potential. I love you but I'm growing out of what you gave me. I'm saving it inside me and growing outwards. Let me fight my monsters. You made me. You made me.

Leaving Olympia. We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. What if our aloneness isn't a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?

The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic.

but I think it's important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.

I try to ask myself, whose interest does it serve to identify Israeli policy with all Jewish people?

We started into the field: five internationals plus Jehan. Jenny spoke over the bullhorn saying, ‘Do not shoot. We are unarmed civilians,’ naming the countries we came from and letting the IDF know our intention to retrieve this man's body. The first response from the IDF was shouting, ‘Go back.’ Then they shot about 20 meters in front of us.

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls. I think even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. They love to get me to practise my limited Arabic. Today I tried to learn to say, ‘Bush is a tool’, but I don't think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago – at least regarding Israel.

Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, 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. I am allowed to see the ocean.

I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years spent existing – just existing – in resistance to the constant attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew.

I am in Rafah. A city of 140,000 people, 60% of whom are refugees – many twice or three times over. Currently, the Israeli army is building a twelve-meter-high wall between Rafah and the border. 602 homes have been completely bulldozed and the number partially destroyed is greater.

I went to a rally a few days ago in Khan Younis in solidarity with the people of Iraq. Many analogies were made about the continuing suffering of the Palestinian people and the upcoming occupation of Iraq by the United States – not the war itself, but the certain aftermath of the war.

I'm just beginning to learn from what I expect to be a very intense tutelage in the ability of people to organize against all odds, and to resist against all odds.

The lightness – between life and death, there are no dimensions at all. There are no rulers or mile-markers. It's just a shrug – the difference between Hitler and my mother, the difference between Whitney Houston and a Russian mother watching her son fall through the sidewalk and boil to death. There are no rules. There is no fairness. There are no guarantees. No warranties on anything. It's all just a shrug, the difference between ecstasy and misery is just a shrug. And with that enormous shrug there, the shrug between being and not being – how could I be a poet? How could I believe in a truth?

Both of the major checkpoints are closed. This means that Palestinians who want to go and register for their next quarter at university can't. People can't get to their jobs; those who are trapped on the other side can't get home; and internationals, who have a meeting tomorrow in the West Bank, won't make it. We could if we made serious use of our international white-person privilege, but that would also mean some risk of arrest and deportation, even though none of us have done anything illegal.

I am amazed at their strength in defending such a large degree of their humanity against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death. I think the word is dignity.

If the international media and our government are not going to tell us that we are effective, valuable, we have to do that for each other, and one way we can do that is by continuing our work, visibly.

Despite guarantees of safety and presence of banners and megaphones, activists and workers were fired on several times over a period of one hour, close enough to spray debris in their faces.

To think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house.

So when someone says that any act of Palestinian violence justifies Israel's actions not only do I question that logic in light of international law and the right of people to legitimate armed struggle in defence of their land and their families; not only do I question that logic in light of the fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits collective punishment, prohibits the transfer of an occupying country's population into an occupied area, prohibits the expropriation of water resources and the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as farms; not only do I question that logic in light of the notion that fifty-year-old Russian guns and homemade explosives can have any impact on the activities of one of the world's largest militaries, backed by the world's only superpower, I also question that logic on the basis of common sense.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled and lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment, with no means of economic survival and our houses demolished; if they came and destroyed all the greenhouses that we'd been cultivating for the last however long do you not think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could?

These people are being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn't that basically the epitome of non-violent resistance?

I'm having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States it all sounds like hyperbole. A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry. It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.

It is my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even people with a great deal of privilege don't just idly sit by and watch. What we are paying for here is truly evil.

I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do any more.

If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.’