Starhark: IN NABLUS, ON THE EVE OF WAR

2003-03-23

Richard Moore

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From: "Boudewijn Wegerif" <•••@••.•••>
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: WHAT MATTERS-127: Starhark  - In Nablus, on the Eve of '
  War'
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 10:54:46 +0100

Starhark - In Nablus, on the Eve of 'War'

________________________

Dear List Members,

"Rachel was killed three nights ago, standing in front
of a bulldozer down in Rafah, in Gaza. She was trying
to prevent the Israeli forces from destroying a home.
The bulldozer operator saw her: she had been talking to
him earlier, negotiating, trying to use the power of
non-violent persuasion to get him to back off. Finally
she simply stood in front of him, on a mound of dirt,
in a red vest, talking through a bullhorn. She made the
same gamble we all make here or anywhere when we choose
non-violent resistance: we bet our lives on the
possibility of some humanity in our opponents, some
spark of conscience that would prevent, say, a soldier
from running over a twenty-three-year-old woman with a
bulldozer."

Thus writes Starhawk about the tragic death of peace
activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza on March 16 - in an
E-letter posted from Nablus on the eve of the US/UK
assault on Iraq.

I acknowledge Starhawk as an Earth being activist for
love. She here writes from the heart about what she is
experiencing as a human shield in occupied Palestine.

I first heard of Starhawk from reports of the Seattle,
anti-corporate capitalist street demonstration, and in
E-letter WM-26 of November 20, 2001, I cited from her
article 'Only Poetry Can Address Grief' in which she
writes that there is now nowhere for non-violent
activists to go, but forward.  "We don't have the
luxury of defraying action to a more favorable moment.
We need the movement to keep moving forward. That is
the way it is in the poem that is lived experience. One
stands one's ground in the move forward to freedom."

At Starhawk's web site, I read: "Beginning as an
organizer in her high school during the days of the
Vietnam War, Starhawk has been active in social change
movements for over thirty years. She has organized,
trained protestors, and been on the front lines of
antinuclear actions - - - She continues to be a witness
for peace on the front lines of the Palestine/Israel
war, working with Palestinian and Israeli peace
activists, as well as teaching nonviolence workshops in
the region.

"Her focus for the last several years has been the
global justice movement, training participants and
taking part in many of the major actions, including
those in Seattle, Washington DC, Quebec City, Genoa,
and New York City, and doing direct action trainings
for groups all over the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and
South America. Together with Penny Livingston-Stark,
she also co-teaches intensive seminars that combine
permaculture design, political organizing and activism,
and earth-based spirituality. Known as EAT, Earth
Activist Training, this seminar is now held both in
Europe and in the US. (EAT page will open in a new
browser window).

"Starhawk is the author of The Spiral Dance, The Fifth
Sacred Thing, and other books that link an earth-based
spirituality to action to change the world."

Bless you, Starhawk -
for Love's revolution.

In friendship,

Boudewijn (Wegerif)
What Matters Programme*
Folkhogskola Vardingeby
150 21 Molnby, Sweden.
Telephone: +46.158.10411

_________________________
IN NABLUS, ON THE EVE OF WAR
by Starhawk - March 19, 2003

Posted at http://www.starhawk.org

I am writing from Nablus on the eve of war. Everyone
expects the war to start tonight, but no one is sealing
their windows here, or buying duct tape. The Israeli
government has not issued gas masks to the
Palestinians, nor to us, the internationals who are
here as witnesses and non-violent interveners between
the Israeli forces and the Palestinian civilians.

Today was a day of rainstorms, cloudbursts, sudden
claps of thunder. My friend Jean, who has joined me
here, says they sound like explosions. She wonders if
they scare people.

I assure her that the people here know the sound of
explosions well, recognize the subtle differences
between live ammunition and rubber bullets being fired,
the thunder of shells and the shock of houses being
blown up.

In fact, the people here seem calm, though sad. They
are, perhaps, less anxious about the war because they
are already at war. They know well that the U.S. attack
on Iraq could trigger massive repression here, or even
transfer, but they don't seem to waste energy in
anxiety about it. Some stock up on food. Tanks have
already rolled into town tonight--people avoid them and
hurry home, but here in the Balata refugee camp the
shops stay open, the TV's on. "Bush"-thumbs down, a
shopkeeper smiles at me. "War tonight--Bush bad!" we
hear from people on the street. Some, who speak
English, offer condolences on Rachel Corrie's death.
They know who we are: there are no tourists here.

Rachel was killed three nights ago, on the 16th of
March, standing in front of a bulldozer down in Rafah,
in Gaza. She was trying to prevent the Israeli FORCES
from destroying a home. The bulldozer operator saw her:
she had been talking to him earlier, negotiating,
trying to use the power of non-violent persuasion to
get him to back off. Finally she simply stood in front
of him, on a mound of dirt, in a red vest, talking
through a bullhorn. She made the same gamble we all
make here or anywhere when we choose non-violent
resistance: we bet our lives on the possibility of some
humanity in our opponents, some spark of conscience
that would prevent, say, a soldier from running over a
twenty-three-year-old woman with a bulldozer.

Every bone in Rachel's body was broken. Her skull was
cracked open. Nevertheless she was conscious, as her
friends ran to hold her head, as the bulldozer and
tanks drove away, leaving the activists to call an
ambulance.

A grim version of hit and run.

Rachel died, you could say, because six weeks in the
occupied territories had not erased some deep belief
she still held in the ultimate decency of human beings.
Perhaps she died because her parents loved her enough
that she never learned to imagine such callousness
could dwell in a human heart. Her death was not an
accident. She was deliberately murdered, by a soldier
who made a choice. That choice seemed reasonable to him
because a regime of repression requires the oppressors
to become callous, to dehumanize the people they
control, to refuse to see them, acknowledge their
suffering, respect their humanity. Having practiced
that callousness for so long on the Palestinians, he
apparently simply transferred it to Rachel despite the
fact that she was an American.

I find myself in the exquisitely painful position of
being a Jew and an American in the occupied
territories, here to offer support and solidarity to
the nonviolent resistance and the civilians of
Palestine. Painful because too many of the people who
are my own, my family, my culture, my heritage, have
turned into someone who could crush a young woman's
body with a bulldozer. Painful too because that machine
was paid for by my tax dollars to enforce policies
promoted by my government. Exquisite because I have
found much warmth and friendship and love coming from
those I was taught to see as my enemy. But painful
because I can't simply say, "Oh, now I'll just shift
allegiances--Palestinians all good, Israelis all bad."
I can't abandon my heritage as Jew or as American. And
I cannot dehumanize the Palestinians by turning them
into one monolithic image of noble suffering any more
than I want to see them as one monolith of hate and
terrorism. I have to open my eyes and see them as full
human beings, capable of love and hate, creation and
destruction, choice. Above all, if I stand for justice
for Palestine or anywhere, I have to open my eyes and
let The Other become visible to me in all the fullness
of their complexity.

I am sitting in the home of the family of a suicide
bomber, which over here they call a martyr. We are here
because the Israeli policy of collective punishment
means that they arrest the families of suicide bombers
and blow up their homes. This policy has not prevented
suicide bombers: in fact, one could argue that is has
increased them, increased the pool of rage and despair
that leads to choices that have also taken the lives of
innocent young women and men and children, spilled
their blood and bodies on the streets. From where I
sit, I can't forget or overlook that. And yet I also
can't let it become an easy equation: Israelis bad but
Palestinians bad too equals all accounts balanced. The
accounts are not balanced. In this Intifada, three
Palestinians have died for each Israeli. But it's not a
matter of numbers, it's a matter of policies that
assault the possibility of ordinary life and hope for
an entire people. It's children never knowing when
they'll be able to go to school, it's workers never
knowing whether their trip home through a checkpoint
will be an annoying ordeal or a few months of arrest
and torture. It's ambulances not allowed to get to
patients or families not allowed to cross a border to
visit each other. It's homes searched by soldiers
breaking through walls and smashing all your worldly
goods one night. It's daily, ongoing, relentless
tension and humiliation and despair.

The Titi brothers both fought for justice for
Palestine. One blew himself and innocent people up. The
other worked with the ISM, the International Solidarity
Movement, the group that Rachel and I are both part of,
that supports nonviolent resistance. He is now in
prison. Almost every Palestinian who has chosen the
path of nonviolent resistance is in prison or dead or
exiled. When good liberals ask, "Why don't the
Palestinians adopt the tactics of Martin Luther King or
Gandhi?" that's part of the reason why.

Another part is that some of them do, in spite of
facing an opponent daily growing more ruthless.

The day after Rachel's death, the Israelis killed nine
Palestinians in Gaza, including a four-year-old girl.
Those deaths may have made the news briefly, but they
elicited no great public outcry. We expect Palestinians
to be killed, regularly. Rachel made an heroic choice
to risk her life. The four-year-old girl, whose name is
not splashed over the Internet, had no choice.

Palestine is that girl, and this family whose house I'm
protecting, and both Titi brothers. To refuse to see
that complexity is to participate in the murders that
become thinkable when a whole people is made invisible.

I am thinking about Rachel on the eve of war, as my
country prepares to make a murderous choice on a vast
scale. I and others have done everything we possibly
could to stop it. I have marched and organized and
written and called and emailed and risked arrest for
months. We have built the largest, most unified, global
peace movement that has ever existed. Millions and tens
of millions have stood up for peace. Diplomats have
resigned and country music singers have risked their
careers. Republicans have broken ranks and even
Democrats have registered mild objections. It hasn't
been enough.

Against my will, and in spite of all my efforts, I am
about to be made complicit in a mass murder of human
beings who have been rendered invisible to us by our
government and our media and our own discomfort with
difference.

But I'm not angry tonight. I'm not sad or grieving.
I've gone into that territory which underlies the stony
ground and cracked cement streets here, that place
where you go when you've been angry so long and seen so
much and grieved until you're empty, that place I think
of as the zone of deadly calm.

That zone is a kind of a numb place, where nothing
scares you any more, and you can do just about
anything. It's very close to the place where you give
up, as Rachel never did, your faith in something basic
and good in human beings.

It's not a policy of security to push an entire people
into that place. It's a place that breeds acts of
desperation and revenge. And I have much company here.
It's quiet here, on the eve of war. A few tanks: a few
bursts of gunfire. Nothing to get upset about yet.
--
Copyright (c) 2003 by Starhawk. All rights
reserved.This copyright protects Starhawk's right to
future publication of her work. Nonprofit, activist,
and educational groups may circulate this essay
(forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or
reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change
any part of it without permission. Readers are invited
to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.

__________________________
This E-letter is posted at
http://www.whatmatters.nu/wmeletters/wmeletters27.html#WM-127

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