Marla Ruzicka And Rachel Corrie

by Alexander Cockburn

Whatever sour emotions I entertained while reading accounts of the funeral of Marla Ruzicka had nothing really to do with the sad death on April 16 of a brave young woman in Baghdad. On many accounts -- and I have had a detailed conversation with a close friend of Marla's whose judgment I trust entirely -- she was an idealistic person whose prime political flaw seems to have been the very forgivable one of naivete.

Both in Afghanistan and Iraq, in furtherance of her humanitarian schemes, Marla Ruzicka elected a stance of studious neutrality in ascribing responsibility for the victims of U.S. bombings and ground fire. This pursuit of "credibility" certainly yielded its ironic reward in the political range of those who publicly mourned her.

A U.S. senator -- Barbara Boxer -- attended Ruzicka's funeral in Lakeport, Calif. Not only Bob Herbert of the New York Times poured out an emotional column honoring Ruzicka, but also Robert L. Pollock, a writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. " America has lost a peerless and unique ambassador," Pollock wrote on April 19, insisting that "she stood out from the crowd of journalists and self-proclaimed humanitarians -- far too many of whom believed their mission was to bear witness to an American misadventure in Iraq that would, and should, fail."

Any sourness in my soul had to do with a contrast. Almost exactly two years earlier, on March 16, 2003, another brave young woman in a foreign land lost her life, not to a suicide bomber, but under the blade of a 60-ton bulldozer made in America by the Caterpillar company, specifically for house demolitions. It was driven by an Israeli soldier who surely saw Rachel Corrie, clearly visible in her fluorescent orange jacket and rolled the bulldozer blade right over her.

No U.S. senator attended Rachel's funeral. They ran in the opposite direction. The Corries disclosed that after their return to the United States with their daughter's body, they contacted their U.S. senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, and told them how their daughter had been deliberately murdered while peacefully demonstrating against a house demolitions, such demolitions being violations of international law. Murray and Cantwell, the Corries recall, were quick with expressions of outrage and promises of investigations. The Corries never heard from Murray or Cantwell again.

Cindy Corrie's mailbox filled with disgusting letters abusing her for being a bad mother, and the Israel-right-or-wrong crowd began an unrelenting campaign of abuse of Corrie, to the overall effect that she had it coming to her, that "She was defending terrorists who smuggle weapons across the border to kill Israelis," and that the International Solidarity Movement, of which she was a member, was a terrorist symp group.

As Professor Steve Niva of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., wrote on the CounterPunch website shortly after Corrie's death, the house of Dr. Samir Nasrallah, which Rachel was defending, " was being demolished because, like dozens of others that have been bulldozed in Hay Salaam, his home was near the 'Apartheid Wall" Israel was building."

And how did the Zionists on Evergreen Campus, where Corrie had studied, react? Did Corrie's murder prompt them to any serious reflection on Zionism as Activedly Applied in Gaza? No. Niva writes to me that the small Zionist groups began complaining that they felt uncomfortable as Jews to be on campus, and a few started raising concerns about alleged anti-Israel and possibly anti-Semitic sentiments getting a free pass on campus. They started to peddle charges about the Middle East Studies faculty -- and rumors began to circulate at the synagogue that there was a "crisis" regarding Jews at Evergreen. Slurs against Niva continue to this day, as they do against Corrie.

Later, the magazine Mother Jones ran a 7,000-word attack on Corrie and the International Solidarity Movement, an attack later convincingly demonstrated to have been plagiarized from extreme right sites and sources. Nor was there measured lamentation from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which surpassed itself in foam-flecked savagery in a piece by Ruhama Shattan, which managed to blame Corrie for the bombing death of the State Department officials that occurred in Gaza in October 2004! Shattan's piece had already run in the Jerusalem Post and actually prompted Paul Patin, of the American embassy in Tel Aviv, to write a letter to the Post denouncing it as "hateful incitement" and "disgusting abuse of the anniversary of the death of this American citizen." Maybe this letter is what prompted the WSJ's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, to see Shattan's diatribe as suitable material for his pages.

Marla Ruzicka decided to work "within the system," as they say. Maybe, given the aims of her organization, CIVIC, that was an appropriate choice. I would certainly not want to pass judgment on the matter. The "system" duly mourned and honored her. Rachel Corrie saw that the "system," with all its innumerable and fraudulent roadmaps to peace, negotiated solutions, Oslo frameworks, processes of peace" and so forth had not stopped, nay, was encouraging the daily outrages of demolitions of Palestinian homes. She stood in the path of that system and died. Her murder was covered up by Israel and therefore condoned by the government of the United States.

Across the 30 years that I have written about the vast injustices done to Palestinians by successive Israeli governments, condoned and paid for by the United States, I have read a thousand admonitions to support what peace plan was in train, to espouse solutions with "credibility." And here we are now, when all the peace plans and roadmaps stand definitively revealed as the frauds they always were.

Any imagined evacuation of Israeli settlements from Gaza is pure distraction. The story lies in the new settlements stretching out from East Jerusalem, amputating any conceivably viable Palestinian state. In this illegal enterprise, there's no "case for Israel" beyond simple sanction of violent, illegal occupation and eviction. Two years after her murder, I honor Rachel Corrie and ask those supposedly reasonable, credibility-seeking voices on the Zionist side of the aisle here in the United States, What have you got to say for yourselves now?