Co-hosts: Amy Goodman and James Zogby

Participating: Anthony Arnove, Huwaida Arraf, Brian Avery, Nirit Ben-Ari, Leila Buck, Kia Corthron, Suheir Hammad, Leonard Hubbard from The Roots with A. Marcy Francis, Brian Jones, Liz Magnes, Malachy McCourt, Betty Shamieh, Jonathan Tasini, Zafer Tawil, Tom Wallace, Ora Wise, and Maysoon Zayid.

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This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still want to dance around to Pat Benetar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop.

— Rachel Corrie from Rafah, February 27, 2003

In April of 2006 hundreds of people came to Olympia, WA, from around the world for The Rachel Corrie Foundation’s inaugural Peace Works event. The two-day conference in April followed pre-conference activities and events and focused on the struggle in Palestine and Israel.

The foundation plans to conduct annual events to analyze war, racism, global economic inequality, oppression of women, and other forms of injustice, and to formulate a hopeful vision of a world community that responds constructively to its inhabitants’ rights, needs and aspirations. For more bacground on the conference, read this.

Video

The following films were produced from the first annual Rachel Corrie Foundation Peace Works - April 2006, courtesy pdxjustice.org.

PART 1
Diana Buttu - “From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State”
Diana Buttu is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer. In 2000, she left North America to move to Palestine in order to assist with the then “peace” negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel as one of the PLO’s legal advisors. With the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation (and the breakdown of negotiations) Diana decided to remain in Palestine.

PART 2
Amira Hass - “From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State”
Amira Hass lives and works in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. In 1993 she became the first Israeli reporter to live in Gaza, reporting on the Israeli occupation for Ha’aretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, which is available in English translation through their website. Amira Hass received the International World Press Freedom award for her work in the Gaza Strip. Her time there also resulted in her first book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege. She is also author of Reporting from Ramallah : An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land. She spoke, along with Palestinian-Canadian lawyer, Diana Buttu, on the topic “From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State.”

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By Andrew Ford Lyons
Orginally in The Palestine Chronicle

How quickly we backslide: In June of 1937 the federal government slapped chains and a padlock onto the doors of Maxine Elliot Theatre in New York. It was an attempt to halt a performance of “The Cradle Will Rock,” a Marc Blizstein musical the feds found far too full of dangerous ideas for public consumption. The show’s director, Orson Welles, rushed back from Washington, D.C., on opening day after a failed attempt to convince the government to lift its ban. He found about 600 people waiting to see the performance idling in front of the theater, along with his cast.

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These are a selection of emails Rachel Corrie wrote to her family while serving as a human rights activits in Palestine. Include amid these letters home are some photos of Rachel and other human rights activists in Rafah, a Gaza city on the border with Egypt where Rachel was located. These were found at MIFTA.org.

February 7 2003
Hi friends and family, and others,

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me - Ali - or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me, “Kaif Sharon?” “Kaif Bush?” and they laugh when I say, “Bush Majnoon”, “Sharon Majnoon” back in my limited arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn’t quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: “Bush mish Majnoon” … Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say, “Bush is a tool”, but I don’t think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago. (more…)

On March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie died in Rafah, in Gaza, Palestine; she was defending the home of the Nasrallah family. Rachel, a student here at Evergreen, left her Olympia home to be part of the international movement that has been working for a just peace in Israel and Palestine.

Rachel was a writer and from a young age she spoke and wrote many a powerful word. Katherine Viner ( a reporter for the Guardian, London) and actor-director Alan Rickman drew upon her many writings and her emails from her days in Rafah to create the narrative monologue…..

“My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

The play has earned wide acclaim in London where it played at the Royal Court Theatre. The play was scheduled to open at the NY Theatre Workshop on March 22nd;

but — amidst great controversy — it has been postponed indefinitely.

We want to honor the life, spirit and words of Rachel with an informal and personal reading from both the play and related writings.

So, Anne Fischel, Therese Saliba and Lin Nelson invite you to …..

A Reading of Rachel’s Words
Thursday, March 16th
Noon - 2pm
Seminar 2 — Room E3105

Listen to two selections from the 7-movement cantata “The Skies are Weeping,” by Alaskan composer Philip Munger wrote the piece in honor of Rachel Corrie.
Movement No.2: “Dance for Tom Hurndall.” (This piece will be performed under a new title, “Recently Untitled Dance” on Tuesday, April 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the Recital Hall of the UAA Arts Building.)

Movement No.7: “Rachel’s Words.”