PACIFICA COMMENTARY TRANSCRIBED ON MARCH 20, 2003

Three isolated men on an isolated island decided to conduct a holocaust, crime against humanity, a massacre. This will be known as the children's holocaust because the majority of the victims will be children.

Citizens of the United States have been betrayed by a Congress and a President, that are of the corporations, for the corporations and by the corporations.

"Fascism," said Mussolini, "should be more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." And friends, the corporations are paid for the material of war and then they will be paid again for reconstruction of the fifty-first state after the war.

We want our country back. We want our hard earned tax money to go to education, health care and the reestablishment of the public sector, which has been systematically destroyed. Taxation without representation is tyranny.

We must not be paralyzed by this act of crass terror that is taking place as we speak. Each of us must engage in the resistance in accord with our ability and our conscience. Our non-violent international revolution for peace and justice has begun. We must vigil, march, protest and picket daily. Our core organization is many million strong.

We must be more creative than ever before.

RACHEL CORRIE…..PRESENTE, PRESENTE, PRESENTE!

Here is part of Rachel's letter to her parents just before she was crushed to death by an Israeli bull-dozer.

"I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here.

They know that children in the United States don't usually have their parents shot and they know they sometimes get to see the ocean. But once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place, where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, and once you have spent an evening when you haven't wondered if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep, and once you've met people who have never lost anyone-- once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn't surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed "settlements" and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing--just existing--in resistance to the constant stranglehold of the world's fourth largest military--backed by the world's only superpower--in it's attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew."

And a thought from the Talmud (the collection of Jewish law and tradition consisting of the Mishnah and the Gemara):

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."

The struggle for peace and justice continues.

For a free copy of this commentary call 323/852-9808…323/852-9808.

This is Blase Bonpane.

What follows is a portion of Rachel's letter which I did not have time to read on the air.

As an afterthought to all this rambling, I am in Rafah, a city of about

140,000 people, approximately 60 percent of whom are refugees--many

of whom are twice or three times refugees. Rafah existed prior to 1948,

but most of the people here are themselves or are descendants of people

who were relocated here from their homes in historic Palestine--now

Israel. Rafah was split in half when the Sinai returned to Egypt.

Currently, the Israeli army is building a fourteen-meter-high wall between

Rafah in Palestine and the border, carving a no-mans land from the

houses along the border. Six hundred and two homes have been

completely bulldozed according to the Rafah Popular Refugee

Committee. The number of homes that have been partially destroyed is

greater.

Today as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once stood,

Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border, "Go!

Go!" because a tank was coming. Followed by waving and "what's your

name?". There is something disturbing about this friendly curiosity. It

reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious

about other kids: Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering

into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from the tanks when they

peak out from behind walls to see what's going on. International kids

standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks

anonymously, occasionally shouting-- and also occasionally waving--

many forced to be here, many just aggressive, shooting into the houses

as we wander away.

In addition to the constant presence of tanks along the border and in the

western region between Rafah and settlements along the coast, there are

more IDF towers here than I can count--along the horizon,at the end of

streets. Some just army green metal. Others these strange spiral

staircases draped in some kind of netting to make the activity within

anonymous. Some hidden, just beneath the horizon of buildings. A new

one went up the other day in the time it took us to do laundry and to

cross town twice to hang banners. Despite the fact that some of the

areas nearest the border are the original Rafah with families who have

lived on this land for at least a century, only the 1948 camps in the

center of the city are Palestinian controlled areas under Oslo. But as far

as I can tell, there are few if any places that are not within the sights of

some tower or another. Certainly there is no place invulnerable to

apache helicopters or to the cameras of invisible drones we hear buzzing

over the city for hours at a time.

I've been having trouble accessing news about the outside world here, but

I hear an escalation of war on Iraq is inevitable. There is a great deal of

concern here about the "reoccupation of Gaza." Gaza is reoccupied

every day to various extents, but I think the fear is that the tanks will

enter all the streets and remain here, instead of entering some of the

streets and then withdrawing after some hours or days to observe and

shoot from the edges of the communities. If people aren't already

thinking about the consequences of this war for the people of the entire

region then I hope they will start.

I also hope you'll come here. We've been wavering between five and six

internationals. The neighborhoods that have asked us for some form of

presence are Yibna, Tel El Sultan, Hi Salam, Brazil, Block J, Zorob, and

Block O. There is also need for constant night-time presence at a well

on the outskirts of Rafah since the Israeli army destroyed the two

largest wells. According to the municipal water office the wells

destroyed last week provided half of Rafah's water supply. Many of the

communities have requested internationals to be present at night to

attempt to shield houses from further demolition. After about ten p.m. it

is very difficult to move at night because the Israeli army treats anyone in

the streets as resistance and shoots at them. So clearly we are too few.

I continue to believe that my home, Olympia, could gain a lot and offer a

lot by deciding to make a commitment to Rafah in the form of a sister-

community relationship. Some teachers and children's groups have

expressed interest in e-mail exchanges, but this is only the tip of the

iceberg of solidarity work that might be done. Many people want their

voices to be heard, and I think we need to use some of our privilege as

internationals to get those voices heard directly in the US, rather than

through the filter of well-meaning internationals such as myself. I am just

beginning to learn, from what I expect to be a very intense tutelage,

about the ability of people to organize against all odds, and to resist

against all odds.