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.