What Rachel Corrie and Lawrence of Arabia Had in Common
By Lee Smith
Last week an Israeli court dismissed the civil lawsuit brought by Rachel Corrie’s parents, ruling that the March 2003 death of their daughter was accidental and that the state of Israel bears no responsibility for her death. Working as an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, the then-23-year-old college student from Washington state was killed when she stood in the path of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer to protest against Palestinian home demolitions. ‘She did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done,’ said Israeli Judge Oded Gershon. ‘She consciously put herself in danger.’
The one question that has yet to be answered is: Why did she put herself in danger? What, exactly, was Rachel Corrie doing in Gaza?
Judging from Corrie’s letters, it is clear that she desired to help the persecuted. ‘Many people want their voices to be heard,’ she wrote to her friends and family in February 2003 about the Palestinians she was meeting in Rafah, ‘and I think we need to use some of our privilege as internationals to get those voices heard.’ But if Corrie sought to help the downtrodden, she might have gone to many different parts of the world; communities even here in the United States would have benefited from her talents and energies. Instead, she went to the Middle East.
In many precincts of the American and European left, it is a piece of conventional wisdom that the Arab-Israel conflict is one of the central moral dilemmas of the age. Even the bloody, intra-Arab strife coursing throughout the region hasn’t derailed the notion that the conflict in the Holy Land is the most significant conflict in the Mideast: It remains useful as a reflecting pool for a well-known variety of Western narcissism. From this perspective, solving the Palestine question is an important step in righting the sins of the West.
Groups like the International Solidarity Movement, then, act as a sort of tour agency for a particular kind of Western adventurer, searching for a level of raw political engagement and ideological commitment that simply doesn’t exist in the United States. The obvious advantage that Israel offers is that, compared to the rest of the Middle East, it is relatively safe. Corrie herself implicitly acknowledged this fact when she walked into the middle of a war zone to mount a protest. No sensible person could similarly assume the mercies of, say, the Syrian regime were he to walk into the middle of that war zone to complain of government atrocities.
Nonetheless, Corrie had indeed put herself in harm’s way—a wager that culminated with her losing her life.
One way to understand Corrie’s story is as part of a longstanding tradition of adventurous, generous, and sometimes vain Western travelers to the Middle East. Among these crusading spirits, the most famous example is perhaps T.E. Lawrence, who saw in the band of Arab tribesmen and former Ottoman officers he led against the Turks an opportunity to serve the underdog and tie himself to a larger cause. Along the way it appears that Lawrence, embracing local customs and dress, recognized that the Arab Revolt also offered him a staging ground for a kind of charismatic search for the authentic self that had the flavor of salvation.