    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.