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’.





Though she saw dead bodies of Palestinian children with their heads split by the Jewish sharp-shooters, she still had some illusions of ‘the difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen’. She was mistaken. Her country’s President is about to send the US Army to destroy Iraq and turn the killers of Rachel into the undisputed supreme power of the Middle East. If Bush would be guided by America’s interests, he would demand extradition of Rachel’s killer. But the driver is not exclusion. The people behind the bullet-proof windshields of Caterpillars are the final product of Zionism. At the beginning of Zionist movement, its eugenic task was expressed in a poem:
‘Mi dam umi eza Nakim lanu geza’ - ‘out of blood and sweat we shall breed a new victorious and cruel race’, sang the Zionists. With murder of Rachel Corrie the experiment came to its fruition. The ‘cruel race’ is not a dream anymore, it is a new geopolitical reality. A few months ago, a Jewish bulldozer driver shared with the world his experiences [click here] of razing Jenin:


"I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the officers, over the radio, to let me knock it all down; from top to bottom. To level everything. When I was told to bring down a house, I took the opportunity to bring down some more houses. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin, lots of satisfaction. No one expressed any reservations against doing it. Who would dare speak? If anyone would as much as open his mouth, I would have buried him under the D-9".

Rachel’s dreadful death should open America’s eyes to the real danger to the world that grew in the Middle East. Her killers possess nuclear weapons, not only bulldozers. If Bush is so keen on a Middle East intervention and on removal of WMD, his troops could land here, on the shores of ar-Rafah, where is a real threat to the world’s peace, and forcibly remove all the weapons of mass destruction.



Israel Shamir



P.S. A friend of Rachel, an ISM activist Susan Barclay was deported a few days ago to the US by Sharon’s regime, and now she is touring the US with lectures about the unfolding Palestinian tragedy. She can be contacted at  stbarclay@yahoo.com



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