Yesterday David Bromwich published a piece on Huffpo memorializing Rachel Corrie in the best way, by using her story to critique the media and the American government and ultimately to the fields of political philosophy and Jewish and American identity. Deeply moving. The piece begins with a precise description of several injuries to Americans who have put themselves in harm's way in Palestine, including Tristan Anderson, who Bromwich says is likely to survive, but with some brain damage. And then, to the large ideas:
What drives these Americans to risk their lives against Israeli soldiers on behalf
of a subject people half the world away? The answer is a passion for justice,
and a commitment to civil rights. Why should any of this be of interest
to Americans? For a general reason and a particular one. The general:
this is a passion and a commitment that we Americans at our best have
been supposed to share; it is the largest single reason we have received
the admiration of other people around the world. The particular reason
is as obvious but more immediate. Barack Obama, our first black president,
and a man who has identified himself as a beneficiary and successor
of the tradition of Martin Luther King, has promised $30 billion of
military aid to Israel over the next ten years — with no conditions, no
budget-items specified, no limitations spoken of. Barack Obama is known
to be a moderate politician, and so we may deduce that the moderate
plan, with Israel, is to keep increasing the leviathan-bulk of the American
subsidy and not to ask questions.
We ought to know a good deal about a country to which we give
such large continuous donations. But Americans who care for public
discussion of this subject are obliged
to conduct it ourselves, since, if recent history is a guide,
we will get no help from the leading American newspapers. Even the appointment
today of Avigdor Lieberman, an avowed racist and a believer in the feasibility
of the expulsion of all Palestinians, as foreign minister in the new
Israeli government under Binyamin Netanyahu — even this predicted and extraordinary
news is not likely to provoke the New York Times or the Washington
Post to report with honesty who this Lieberman is, and what he signifies.
Nor will the Obama administration do it. They will be as hesitant
and mixed and occasionally contradictory in their signals on Israel
as they have been on many other subjects; more so, because in this case
an organized body of censors and guardians attends to the reputation
and support of Israel in the U.S. Let us nonetheless open the discussion
by admitting that the Israel we think we know is the Israel of books
written sixty and forty years ago, and of movies made from those books.
…No person fearful of being a victim can be rewarded with special rights or special powers.
If we — Americans, Israelis, everyone — want to deserve our freedom, we must
agree to live in a moral world where people are responsible for themselves.
And just as we cannot be punished for the things that our parents did,
so the crimes we commit can never be justified by the things our parents suffered.
This is a moment to study the life and death of Rachel Corrie.
She left letters of great interest which
show her to have been a kind of young American that many of us have
known and admired. Thoughtless protectors of the status quo will say
that this is Israel's cause after all; that we have no right to ask
questions, as Rachel Corrie did; that Israel, like the U.S., is a
democracy under siege. This will not do. The U.S. and Israel are not
helpless "survivor" countries, trying to work off the trauma of recent
victimhood. We are vastly powerful modern states, both of which
dominate our regions, and one of which could dream of dominating the
world in the year 2000. Both have recently engaged, under the eyes of
the world, in exorbitant, brutal, and unjustifiable wars that have
tarnished our fame. In both countries, there is no sign of the
militarism ending.
Yet in both countries — though
the U.S. lacks a newspaper even close to being as serious and candid
as Haaretz — there is a citizenry capable of being educated
and roused to punctual action in its own long-term interest. The truth
about this has never altered. The commandment governing the long-term
good of a country is the same as that for an individual — in the dry and
accurate words of Thomas Hobbes, "Seek peace." And in memory of
Rachel Corrie, let us say also: the addiction to war and indefinite
expansion is no longer an Israeli problem. How did we ever dare to suppose
that it was? When Americans are shot by a gun or mauled by a bulldozer,
it is as much an American problem as when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner were beaten, shot, and burned, and their bodies
left in a swamp, in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964.
