Monday 31 March 2003

The Maid and the Ogre

by Israel Shamir

A dreadful monster assaults the city, kills its brave defenders, and advances to devour the citizens. At the last moment, a young maiden demurely walks forward to meet the monster. Her very sight, the sight of feminine innocence, vulnerability, spirituality, certainty of the right cause, stops the ogre in its tracks. The beast suffers her to tie her belt to his mighty neck and walks away, tamed. It is the story of St Genevieve and of other beautiful and virtuous saints; a part and parcel of human heritage, and the subject of many gorgeous tapestries and paintings.

Courageous and noble maidens are still with us. They stopped the US Army trains with soldiers during Vietnam War, and they stopped Russian tanks in Prague 1968 and in Moscow 1991. Drivers of French, Russian, American and German tanks and trains knew: even a monster stops when a girl placidly places herself on his way. It is a biological law that we all are subject to.

Rachel Corrie was murdered by a monster from another tale. This young American girl, an ISM activist, tried to stop with her fragile body a Zionist bulldozer from ruining Palestinian homes. She could not imagine that the driver will look at her and calmly ride his ten-ton steel machine over her body, and back. Nothing in her life prepared her to the encounter with a monster born and bred in the Zionist labs, a monster that is totally alien and hostile to humans. She wrote to her parents: ‘no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it, tank-shell holes in the walls of their homes and the towers of an occupying army surveying the [Palestinian children] constantly from the near horizons’.

Full story...

The Brutal Murder of Rachel Corrie in Words and Pictures