THE FORGOTTEN RACHELS
The Forgotten Rachels
By Tom Gross
The Spectator
October 22, 2005
Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping
mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb
attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002.
Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her
grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British
newspaper.
Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while
acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza,
has been widely featured in the British press. According to the Guardian
website, she has been written about or referred to on 57 separate occasions
in the Guardian alone, including three articles the Saturday before last.
The cult of Rachel Corrie doesn’t stop there. Last week the play, My Name is
Rachel Corrie, reopened at the larger downstairs auditorium at the Royal
Court Theatre (a venue which the New York Times recently described as “the
most important theatre in Europe”). It previously played to sold-out
audiences at the upstairs theatre when it opened in April. (It is very rare
to revive a play so quickly.)
On 1 November the “Cantata concert for Rachel Corrie” - co-sponsored by the
Arts Council - has its world premiere at the Hackney Empire.
NO CULT AROUND THESE RACHELS
But Rachel Thaler, unlike Rachel Corrie, was Jewish. And unlike Corrie,
Jewish victims of Middle East violence have not become a cause célèbre in
Britain. This lack of response is all the more disturbing at a time when an
increasing number of British Jews feel that there has been a sharp rise in
anti-Semitism.
Thaler is by no means the only Jewish Rachel whose violent death has been
entirely ignored by the British media. Other victims of the Intifada include
Rachel Levy (aged 17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot
while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and
father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up
while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel
Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home), Rachel
Ben Abu (16, blown up outside the entrance of a Netanya shopping mall) and
Rachel Kol, 53, who worked at a Jerusalem hospital and was killed with her
husband in a Palestinian terrorist attack in July a few days after the
London bombs.
Corrie’s death was undoubtedly tragic but, unlike the death of these other
Rachels, it was almost certainly an accident. She was killed when she was
hit by an Israeli army bulldozer she was trying to stop from demolishing a
structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.
Unfortunately for those who have sought to portray Corrie as a peaceful
protester, photos of her burning a mock American flag and stirring up crowds
in Gaza at a pro-Hamas rally were published by the Associated Press and on
Yahoo News on 15 February 2003, a month before she died. (Those photos were
not used in the British press.)
While Thaler’s parents, after donating their murdered daughter’s organs for
transplant surgery, grieved quietly, Corrie’s parents embarked on a major
publicity campaign with strong political overtones. They travelled to
Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter
(See photo here: Tom Gross on The Forgotten Rachels). They
circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicize
them. They have written op-ed pieces, including a recent one in the
Guardian.
“EVEN THE LATE YASSER ARAFAT MIGHT HAVE BLUSHED AT THAT ONE”
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Corrie was
affiliated, is routinely described as a “peace group” in the media. Few make
any mention of the ISM’s meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan
Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif who, a few days later, blew up Mike’s Place,
a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens, including British
citizens. Or of the ISM’s sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukiya, a
leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission
statement the ISM said “armed struggle” is a Palestinian “right”.
According to the “media co-ordinator” of the ISM, Flo Rosovski, “‘Israel’ is
an illegal entity that should not exist” - which at any rate clarifies the
ISM’s idea of peace.
Indeed, partly because of the efforts of Corrie’s fellow activists in the
ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the
tunnels near where she was demonstrating. Those weapons were later used to
kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and
elsewhere.
However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published in the last two
years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have actor
Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, co-creators of My Name
is Rachel Corrie, leaving almost all the critics who reviewed the play
completely ignorant about the background to the events with which it deals.
So in April, when reviewers first wrote about the play, they tended to take
it completely at face value. “Corrie was murdered after joining a
non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation,” wrote Emma Gosnell in the
Sunday Telegraph. The Evening Standard, for example, described it as a
“true-life tragedy” in which Corrie’s “unselfish goodness shines through”.
Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times) saw the play for the propaganda
it is. At one point Corrie declares, “The vast majority of Palestinians
right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent
resistance.” As Davis notes, “Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed
at that one.”
But ultimately the play, and many of the articles about Corrie that have
appeared, are not really about the young American activist who died in such
tragic circumstances. They are about promoting a hate-filled and glaringly
one-sided view of Israel.
wonder why.