Five Questions For: Rachel Corrie’s Parents

Posted on April 16, 2018

Five Questions For: Rachel Corrie’s Parents

April 11, 2018

Craig and Cindy Corrie.

Last month marked the 15th anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a young American peace activist killed in 2003 by an Israeli soldier-driven bulldozer as she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian family home in Gaza. Since then, her parents Craig and Cindy have carried on her work through the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. They paid us a visit with fellow peace activists American Joe Catron and Palestinian Islam Maraqa, who, like Rachel Corrie before her death, work with the International Solidarity Movement.

Q: How does it feel to see the news out of Gaza now at the fifteen-year anniversary of Rachel’s death?

Craig Corrie: It seems to me, particularly when I’m watching from here in the West, that nobody pays any attention to Gaza. Which is why our daughter went there.

Cindy Corrie: Fifteen years is a long time. What Rachel would want us to be asking is, “what do we need to do to support this?” To have more than 20,000 Gazans standing on that border risking what they’re risking and yet doing it joyfully—I think we’re compelled to really listen and to really engage.

Q: After the judge cleared the Israeli military of any wrongdoing in Rachel’s case, you were told “There’s no such thing as civilians in Gaza.” Today, we have high-ranking Israeli official Avigdor Lieberman saying “There’s no innocent people in Gaza.” How does that strike you?

Craig Corrie: It’s a war crime! He’s admitting to a war crime. Let’s not forget that. As a family we’ve tried to hold them as accountable as we could.

Cindy Corrie: There’s nothing here that surprises us. In the court case it became very clear that Israeli soldiers in Gaza in 2003 never expected to testify in a courtroom and be held accountable.

The person who was in charge of Southern Gaza when Rachel was killed by the bulldozer, [Colonel Pinhas (Pinky) Zuaretz], testified in our case. When he was asked what happened to Rachel, he said, “I think a wall fell on her.”

Q: What is different in Gaza today?

Joe Catron: Israel is openly admitting to the massacre of unarmed demonstrators. They’re not trying to obscure it or shuffle the blame onto individual actors as they’ve done in cases like Rachel’s death.They’re claiming it, they’re proud of it. This is something of a tipping point for us here.

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem completely discards the idea that the United States can be any kind of an honest broker in this situation.

Q: Has Trump changed things?

Cindy Corrie: With Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem, moving the U.S. Embassy—I don’t think people in the United States even understand how the rest of the world views that as an outrageous, unacceptable step. It completely discards the idea that the United States can be any kind of an honest broker in this situation.

Islam Maraqa: As Palestinians, we never saw the difference between the American presidents. All the time, the only thing we hear on the news from any American president is], “Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel has the right to defend itself.” And what about the Palestinians? Unfortunately, the Americans are most of the time adopting the Israeli narrative, and supporting everything possible.

Q: What should people here in the United States do to educate themselves about this struggle?

Cindy Corrie: People are always calling for Palestinians to behave nonviolently. If we’re not standing with them, and ensuring that there’s some positive result from this, then I think we set up an even more dangerous situation.

The anti-BDS work going on has provided us a window into our state legislatures and Israeli influence there. It’s an opportunity to do some work there too, to say, “there’s a piece of this you need to know more about.”

Craig Corrie: The obvious tie is the training of our police forces in the United States by the Israelis. We should be working to make sure that our police forces are not trained by people who view whomever they meet on the street as a foreign entity. That’s one of the places where this ties together with Black Lives Matter. It all is in the same room.

Alexandra Tempus is associate editor of The Progressive.

http://progressive.org/dispatches/five-questions-for-rachel-corrie%E2%80%99s-parents/?utm_source=THE+PROGRESSIVE+UPDATED+LIST&utm_campaign=4df7690185-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_194f0c7083-4df7690185-186667669&mc_cid=4df7690185&mc_eid=2dcdfe6b7d

What a year! RCF is celebrating milestones and planning for a great 2018!

Posted on January 2, 2018

Dear Friends,

The salmon are significant to us in the Pacific Northwest, particularly this time of year when they make the journey home to streams where they were born. The rains return to our corner of the country in November, too. This past weekend, we took advantage of a burst of sun to walk at a favorite, nearby nature trail. This is a place we randomly visit most every season, to witness the cycles and changes in our natural world and to consider the parallels in our own lives. It is a place where memories come flooding back – of family holiday walks, field trips with preschoolers, and of rare sightings of beaver and wood ducks.

On this visit, the parking lot was full, because the salmon had returned. At multiple viewing points, hundreds were fighting their way upstream, to lay and fertilize their eggs, to take their last breaths, and to let the cycle begin anew. When we witness this phenomenon, we think of Rachel – of all she learned, thought, and wrote about the salmon and this place where she grew. And we think of the Palestinians to whom she connected us – of the determination, persistence, and pain of their struggle.

This has been a year of hard work and change at the Rachel Corrie Foundation. We’ve educated, advocated, and made connections as we’ve continued to pursue the elusive peace with justice in Palestine/Israel that has been our campaign since 2003. But we’ve also turned our attention to sustaining the Rachel Corrie Foundation and ensuring that it continues to advance the values that Rachel championed, now and long after there is resolution of Palestine/Israel. We’ve hired our first Executive Director, Whitney Faulkner, who is working eagerly with our board, staff, committees, and volunteers to lead the way.

These are challenging times on many fronts, and the challenges are connected. At the Rachel Corrie Foundation, we need you to join us in recommitting to Rachel’s vision of a world where communities are linked globally, where universal human rights are prioritized, where all people are respected regardless of race, gender, nationality or religion, and where peace is possible. Many friends and colleagues are working for this same vision across the globe. As we join them, we will always remember that our own efforts began with Palestine and must remain there. We will work toward our shared vision through the lens of Palestine.

Your participation is critical this coming year and in the future. Your engagement, ideas, time, and financial support will determine what we accomplish. As we move into the giving season and a new year, let’s be inspired by the persistence and commitment of the salmon struggling upstream to create life in the creeks where Rachel learned and played. Let’s keep struggling together – to change the realities on the ground in Palestine, to sustain the Rachel Corrie Foundation for years to come, and to realize our shared vision for our planet’s future.

Sincerely,

Cindy and Craig Corrie

Dear Friends,

I am honored to be able to write to you during this holiday season, as Rachel Corrie Foundation’s first Executive Director. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late Irma Giustino Weiss, RCF was able to create this position which allows the Corries to take a step back from the day to day operations of the office. This is an exciting transition for the Foundation designed to strengthen RCF’s movement toward greater sustainability and growth.

I am thrilled to be part of this vital organization, created by Craig and Cindy Corrie and supported by a diverse community of compassionate donors. You are an integral component of the vibrant community that sustains the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. It is because of you and your kindness, that 2017 has been a remarkable year for this organization

Your valuable generosity has offered the Foundation’s staff, Board Members, and volunteers the opportunity to further the work that Rachel started. As the holiday season approaches, please consider giving the gift that keeps giving by becoming a monthly donor or providing a gift in a loved one’s honor. Your investment in the Rachel Corrie Foundation will continue to move forward the work that Rachel started.

Strength and Solidarity,

Whitney Faulkner

Trump Moves to Jerusalem

Posted on December 5, 2017

by Andrew Meyer, HuffPost Contributor, and former RCF Public Policy/Communications Manager

Trump’s unprecedented break with longstanding US policy should finally mean an international rejection of the farcical promises of the “peace process.”

2018 will mark the 25th anniversary of the Declaration of Principles (DOP), the culmination of political negotiations – often termed the “Oslo process” – that took place between the Israelis and the Palestinians beginning in 1993. The signing of the declaration was headlined by a picturesque handshake on the lawn of the White House between then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Overwhelmingly, Oslo was hailed as a revolutionary and unprecedented breakthrough in the bilateral pursuit of a lasting political solution in historic Palestine. This dominant assumption produced an enormous body of literature, written by diplomats, negotiators, politicians, and academics alike. To offer just one example, in his book The Process: 1,100 Days that Changed the Middle East, Israeli negotiator Uri Savir claimed that Oslo was “not just a pragmatic effort at peacemaking after having exhausted all other alternatives” but that it was “a revolutionary development that [implied] a reversal of historical, social, and cultural trends within both Israeli and Palestinian societies. Shaking hands and building a partnership meant not only the renunciation of past hostility but a break with traditions deeply ingrained in each of our societies.”

This dominant narrative around Oslo helped form what historian Ilan Pappé terms the “peace orthodoxy” – an international and “almost religious belief in the two-state solution.” Since then, the orthodoxy has been central in allowing Israel to navigate several paradoxes that have been produced by its subsequent policy decisions. One of these paradoxes is the ever-widening gap between global public opinion, which is increasingly critical of Israeli policy, and the unwavering support for the Jewish state offered by political and economic elites in the West.

Enter Donald Trump, who’s erratic and reactionary political agenda has now centered historic Palestine in its sights. Contravening what amounts to a global position on the status of Jerusalem, particularly as it relates to East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state, Trump has notified Israeli and Palestinian political leadership that he intends to officially recognize the entirety of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This move by Trump should be seen as precisely what it is – the final spotlight illuminating the theatre of absurdity that has been the Middle East “peace process.”

As the shining moment of this process, the Oslo Accords were anchored in two particular aspects of the agreement’s structure – mutual recognition and the reliance on interim arrangements to bring about final status agreements. These “final status issues” were clearly delineated within the DOP – security arrangements, settlements, borders, refugees, and the status of Jerusalem. The current state of the first four issues is perfectly clear. Since the signing of the agreements, security and economic arrangements meant to buttress Israel’s position of strength have remained the center of attention and effort. The Israeli settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has nearly tripled. Israel’s borders, which have never been officially declared, remain fluid, accompanied by serious discussion of formal annexation of the West Bank initiated by top-level Israeli political leaders such as Naftali Bennett. Finally, to no surprise, Israel has made no substantial move toward rectifying the refugee issue it created by employing ethnic cleansing as the means to forge its state in 1948.

And now, finally, the United States – Israel’s steadfast arms dealer and protector from rightful international condemnation – will codify a formal rejection of the international consensus on Jerusalem. For many liberals in the US, this will fall in line with Trump’s position on the Paris Agreement; that is, as nothing more than an uncalculated maneuver by a President who seems stubbornly committed to controversial policy decisions, if even merely for their own sake. For Palestinians, however, this development takes what has been collectively understood for decades – that Israel and the US are happy to collude in denying Palestinian self-determination – and moves it into the headlines of the mainstream press.

If there is anything productive that can come from Trump’s decision regarding Jerusalem it is that, perhaps finally, those who are interested in reaching a just political solution in historic Palestine can relinquish their investment in the peace orthodoxy. Those who could not muster the same foresight offered by the brilliance of Edward Said who, as early as 1995, described the Oslo process as a way for Israel to “repackage” its system of domination in Palestine, finally have all of the evidence in front of them. It can now be stated, without any doubt, that the entirety of the so-called “peace process” was constructed in aid of the denial of a Palestinian state.

This realization allows us to shed the confines of the peace orthodoxy in order to finally initiate an honest debate about the contemporary reality within historic Palestine. What has happened in this territory since the arrival of thousands of settler-immigrants in the late nineteenth century is not accurately reflected in the structure nor the lexicon of the “peace process.” This is not a situation that can be solved under the false impression of political negotiations between two national parties. What is taking place in Palestine – indeed, what has been taking place – is an anti-colonial struggle against a settler colonial powerhouse.

Since the imposition of its political project upon historic Palestine, the Zionist goal has been crystal clear – to control as much of historic Palestine with as few Palestinians living in the territory as is possible. It is this history, the one that exists before the revisionist historical red lines imposed by the peace process, that is absolutely fundamental to our ability to accurately assess the contemporary political situation in Palestine. Along with developing severe structural impediments to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the peace process also insists upon Oslo as a new starting point for observing and diagnosing any problems still existing within Palestine. That is, this peace process, its lexicon, and its orthodoxy work to assert a false reality of mutual national struggle, which in turn erases the legacy of Israeli foundational violence and, therefore, the anti-colonial Palestinian struggle.

To be more direct, the “peace process” purportedly, or at least rhetorically, seeks the establishment of a Palestinian state, while Israeli settler colonialism explicitly denies that possibility. There is no room for a viable and sovereign Palestinian state within the Zionist – and now Israeli – political imaginary. It cannot exist. In other words, as has long been argued by those examining the prospects critically, this twenty-five year exercise has been meant to be heavy on the “process” and ambiguous on the “peace.”

Palestinians do not need U.S. brokerage of meager political or economic gains through asymmetrical negotiations. It is not Trump nor Israel who hold legitimacy as an arbiter of Palestinian rights. What Palestinians need – indeed, what the world needs – is the comprehensive dismantlement of Israeli settler domination in historic Palestine. As Trump prepares for his move to Jerusalem, it has never been more clear that the path toward this dismantlement could never have been located within this “peace process.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-moves-to-jerusalem_us_5a271872e4b073bb87c97f9c

Investing in the Future of the Rachel Corrie Foundation

Posted on April 5, 2016

Dear Friends,

My name is Jessica Babcock and I’m the Program Manager for the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. I was introduced to RCF by former interns I met while completing my graduate work in Conflict Transformation at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. By happenstance I moved to Olympia in 2013, began volunteering with RCF, and helped with 2014 Peace Works and Human Rights Day events.

As a new employee, it is with great enthusiasm that I get to discuss RCF capacity building as we surpass our Matching Grant Campaign goal with nearly a week left to go! We couldn’t have done it without your support. Huge thanks to all of you who have reached out with encouragement and contributions!

The goal of our campaign is to increase our capacity for program and organization management that fosters sustainability and most effective use of our Corrie family co-founders. You’ve already heard from Allison and Andrew how investing in youth development and grassroots participation helps make our vision a reality. Creating a solid youth program builds our capacity to support all RCF efforts, as our interns and volunteers actively engage in planning, implementation, and evaluation of our projects – those that connect us with Gaza and help us maintain our relationships to Rafah, our Olympia Arab Festival that shares and celebrates Arab culture, scholarship programs that support students locally and in the West Bank, advocacy and education in Congress, support for the right to boycott and divest, our annual Peace Works events, and more. All of these support RCF’s vision of ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and U.S. support of it, and realizing a Middle East and world where freedom, equality, respect, and security are enjoyed by all.

Currently, and historically, RCF has relied upon a very small part-time staff, and more than full-time volunteer efforts from founders Cindy and Craig Corrie to deal with the “nuts and bolts” of managing the nonprofit. This is often surprising to those who hear of RCF from afar and know of our national and international reach. We aim to develop a structure that allows the Corries more time to address the implications of their search for accountability for Rachel, to speak in communities and on college campuses throughout the U.S., to engage in the networking and coordination so vital to the work being done nationally and internationally on these issues, and to write about their experiences and learning during these past thirteen years.

To do this, we need a clear and expanded staffing structure that includes an Executive or Associate Director, and new funding to support that structure and the goals, operations, programs, projects and long-term sustainability of RCF.

Peace Works was one of RCF’s first established programs. On May 3rd here in Olympia, with several supporting organizations, we will host our tenth Peace Works event with guest Ilan Pappé. In the weeks before, through “Reflection and [Re]generation: Past and Future Works,” we will journey back and ahead, looking at what has been and what can be. After ten years, this program is an example of our capacity and ability to continue Rachel’s legacy in a dynamic way that demonstrates that peace works.

Rachel’s legacy aligns perfectly with one of the goals of Peace Works: To bridge differences by increasing awareness about the issues that separate human beings. At this past month’s March 16th Remembrance we heard from Alice Coy, who was with Rachel when she was killed in Gaza. Alice told us that even in the face of hate and injustice, Rachel had the ability to recognize the humanity in everyone, including the Israeli soldiers in the bulldozer. She never wavered. It’s so important for us to relate as human beings and to be aware of what connects us, while also acknowledging our differences.

RCF has been able to sustain itself at its present level with a part-time and volunteer staffing structure, supported primarily and consistently by many individual donors like you, who regularly make small to sizable contributions. After thirteen years of service to our communities, globally and locally, it is time for the Rachel Corrie Foundation to grow our organization in order to ensure that we remain a sustainable advocate for Palestinian rights, universal human rights, and anti-oppression everywhere. We have built our base, but we can reach many more with a stronger structure that you help to create.

As we continue our present funding campaign until Rachel’s 37th Birthday on April 10th, we ask you to invest in Rachel’s legacy, to invest in the future of the Rachel Corrie Foundation, and to invest in your commitment to peace and justice.

If you have already helped, we are deeply grateful. If you have not, we hope you will take this opportunity to donate now to support RCF programs and our future.

In Solidarity,

Jessica

Five Questions For: Rachel Corrie’s Parents

by Andrew Meyer, HuffPost Contributor, and former RCF Public Policy/Communications Manager

Trump’s unprecedented break with longstanding US policy should finally mean an international rejection of the farcical promises of the “peace process.”

Connect with RCF Online