When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians' situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.
After Rachel died we realised that her words were having a similar effect on others whose lives were being changed, as ours have been--not just by Rachel's death, but by the window her writing provided on the Palestinian experience and by her call to action.
Earlier this year, when a play created entirely from Rachel's emails and journals first opened in London, we saw in a very immediate way the impact that Rachel's words can have on others. Theatre can reach people in a different and deeper place than reading a news article or listening to a speech: there is an emotional aspect that for some people can be more long-lasting and motivating.
Theatre humanises; all art humanises. It takes us away from the merely logical and rational. In the Israel-Palestine conflict there is often a very logical calculus of death and war--and you must step out of the constructs of that logic in order to construct a logic for peace.
http://www.counterpunch.org/corrie10102005.html
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