Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2007, pages 65-66

Waging Peace

Craig and Cindy Corrie Find Warm Welcome in Des Moines

BACK HOME in Iowa after a trip to New York City for the opening of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” the play about their daughter (see December 2006 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, p. 41), Craig and Cindy Corrie found a warm welcome at Grace United Methodist Church in Des Moines on Oct. 26. Grace United was Craig’s home church in his youth, and his 93-year-old mother, Doris Corrie—Rachel’s grandmother—still attends services there.

In the three-and-a-half years since their daughter was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Corries have adopted as their own the cause in which their daughter Rachel lost her life.

“It’s an American story,” said Craig Corrie, speaking of his martyred daughter. “If you come from a position of privilege, as any middle-class American does, you come to understand that responsibility comes with that. You can see in Rachel’s writing that she was starting to articulate that to herself and believe it and realize that there are things that are going on in the world that demand action.”

Craig and Cindy Corrie and other members of the family traveled to New York for the opening in early October. He and his wife have seen the play three times, Corrie said, and they are pleased that the current production at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village has been extended to late December.

Few Americans, even those who are not strangers to the occasional rough-and-tumble of political protest in this country, would wish to imagine the horror of losing a child beneath the blade and bulk of a 60-ton armored IDF Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer. Fewer still would manage to cope gracefully with such a senseless and devastating loss, and to invest it with meaning.

The Corries have founded the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Social Justice, <http://www.rachelcorriefoundation.org/>. In June of 2005, they co-sponsored an educational tour that took them and members of the Nasrallah family, whose Gaza home Rachel was killed for defending, to some 20 events across six states in support of the effort to rebuild Palestinian homes destroyed by the IDF. (See Sept./Oct. 2005 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, p. 46.)

The Corries have traveled to Israel and Gaza several times since 2003, and their experiences inform their wide-ranging examination and discussion of the crisis in Israel and Palestine—as do their many connections to and active cooperation with both Israeli and Palestinian activists.

Their daughter Rachel, her vibrant spirit and her courageous perspective are central to the Corries’ work.

Cindy Corrie spoke of finding an old journal she had kept at a time when she was mothering three young children. “I had taken the time to jot down a question that Rachel, at two-and-a-half years of age, had asked me one day. She said, ”˜Is brave part of growing up?’

“As Doris, Rachel’s grandmother, wrote, ”˜Rachel’s life didn’t touch yours lightly. She impacted you,’” said Corrie.

Corrie said Rachel first became interested in Palestine after 9/11, when she took a more active role in the peace movement in her hometown of Olympia, Washington. Her interest was stimulated by friends—one of whom who had moved to Olympia after growing up in Israel, living there for 29 years, and serving in the military. The Israeli woman had become an outspoken critic of the occupation and one of the co-founders of Women in Black.

The Corries described their daughter’s nonviolent direct action work in Rafah, Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and her death there at the hands of an IDF bulldozer operator. They also provided a brief history of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the occupation’s impact on the lives of Palestinian civilians. At the time Rachel Corrie was working with the ISM, her mother said, the IDF was in the process of destroying some 1,700 homes in Rafah in mass demolition and clearing operations.

“More than 10 percent of the population of Rafah lost their homes,” said Corrie. “Most of these people were refugees, many dispossessed for the second or third time. Human Rights Watch, in Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip, stated that the pattern of destruction strongly suggested that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law. In most of the cases, Human Rights Watch found the destruction was carried out in the absence of military necessity.”

Citing a report by Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Corrie pointed out that more than 50 percent of house demolitions in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories are clearing demolitions. Most Western news accounts of her daughter’s killing glossed over Israel’s illegal policy of mass home demolitions with a single sentence mentioning Israel’s 10-year-old policy of destroying the homes of suicide bombers, Corrie said.

Her parents’ response to Rachel’s killing has been to honor their daughter by educating others. Along with other families who have embraced nonviolent activism in behalf of peaceful dialogue after the tragic loss of a loved one to violence in the Middle East, the Corries have become humanity’s torchbearers. With their declaration, “Ours must be a loving resistance,” these families light our path and show us a way out of destruction, darkness, and despair.

Sponsors of the event were AFSC, Grace United Methodist Church”“Church & Society Committee, and the Iowa Peace Task Force.

—Michael Gillespie