My Name Is Rachel Corrie and Zionist Censorship

“If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours—do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained?... I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could.”

—Rachel Corrie to her mother,
27 February 2003 (rachelswords.org)

On 16 March 2003, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American defender of the Palestinians and a supporter of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), was deliberately crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. Now, three years later, the Zionists want to silence her powerful and moving voice again.

In 2005, the words of Rachel Corrie, taken from her journals and e-mails home, were brought to the London stage to sold-out crowds in a prize-winning play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie. The play was supposed to come to New York, but the New York Theater Workshop “indefinitely” postponed it. James C. Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, announced that “after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation.... We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn’t want to take” (London Guardian, 28 February).

The refusal to produce My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a craven capitulation to Zionist censorship; its effect is to silence opponents of the “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people by Israel’s rulers. Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play along with Alan Rickman, wrote (Guardian, 1 March): “After all, she had made her journey to the Middle East in order to [quoting Rachel Corrie] ‘meet the people who are on the receiving end of our tax dollars,’ and she was killed by a US-made bulldozer…if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else? The non-American, the non-white, the non-dead, the oppressed?”

In January 2004 Tom Hurndall, British supporter of the ISM, died after being shot by Israeli forces in Gaza. His and Rachel Corrie’s deaths must be added to the huge toll of Palestinians who have perished at the hands of the arrogant Zionist state, which is stepping up its stranglehold on the Palestinian masses. With support from the U.S. ruling class, it is continuing to starve the Palestinian population, staging murderous missile attacks on civilians, rounding up and imprisoning men and boys, and carving up and walling in the Palestinians on their own land. Defend the Palestinians! Israeli troops, settlers out of all the Occupied Territories!

We honor the memory of Rachel Corrie, the kind of person we would seek to win to revolutionary Marxism. She “was a manifestly courageous, intelligent and decent young woman who died for the just cause of defending the besieged Palestinian people,” as we wrote after her death (WV No. 800, 28 March 2003). Let Rachel Corrie’s voice be heard!