Rachel Corrie

No doubt some of the humanitarian activists out there have heard of Rachel Corrie, a young woman who died blocking a Palestinian home from demolition when an IDF bulldozer ran over her. I have to admit that although I'd known about Rachel for a while--one of those newstories that register in the recesses of your brain for a bit, maybe that come to the fore when someone mentions a pertinent detail or story--I just didn't care that much. Sure, I cared that a brave young woman was callously killed by the Israeli army, and I cared about both the Israelis and the Palestinians caught in the crossfire between two enemy states, but to me Rachel was just another idealistic, pig-headed, uncritical liberal arts advocate of the Palestinian cause, one who gave no thought to the Israeli side of things. To which I do give some thought, perhaps because they're Jews like me, and I feel the tug and strain of an eons-long diaspora. Rachel--what I thought I knew of Rachel--reminded me of girls I knew at Reed who wore their PC vocabularies both like self-righteous armor and a hair shirt, flagellating themselves each time they said, "black" or "affirmative action is flawed" or "sometimes gay men are effeminate." I never liked those girls. For all their good-heartedness I hated their rules and stridency. I don't know that life, and its attendant problems, are best approached with a battle plan.

But I don't know. Despite my good intentions I think I probably fit into MLK's loathed "white moderate majority." So I give to the Darfur Coalition, and I give to Green Peace and the ACLU, and I read the NYT and Salon.com and listen to the BBC's The World. I try within the bubble of my comfortable home with my sheepskin slippers and free-trade organic coffee to do good, but I know it all amounts to very little. And this troubles me.

So this week I took the opportunity to play Rachel Corrie in the play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie." We've split the one-woman show into three parts: Girl, Warrior, Poet. It's beautiful. She writes--because it's all Rachel's writings--about awakening to the world's problems, and of watching cartoons with babies in a warzone, and of standing, alone, with a megaphone and a peace flag trying as one little person to make people see the illogic of racial and territorial violence.

Her words aren't about opposing Palestine and Israel; she doesn't want to be martyred for a cause; she doesn't wear her beliefs like armor or a hair shirt. She just wanted the world to be good. Oh how beautiful, very very beautiful, is that sentiment?