As for Corrie’s take on the other side of the ledger, the deaths of a thousand Jews at the hands of her nonviolent buddies aren’t worth mentioning.
Her reaction to an e-mail from her mother questioning Palestinian violence is an impassioned rant justifying any measures the Palestinians might take to fight the Israelis. Suicide bombings get kashrut certification from Corrie because the sweet Palestinians she meets are worthy – and the faceless Israelis are not.
The play concludes on this moderate note. What follows then is an audiotape of one of Corrie’s confederates, claiming she was killed deliberately. After that, the audience is treated to an actual home video of the 10-year-old Corrie affirming her opposition to world hunger before the lights go out.
We can poke fun at the pretensions of the authors of such maudlin trash, as Oscar Wilde did over a century ago when he wrote of another piece of sentimental hogwash, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power of a lie, even one so transparent as Rickman and Viner’s mythical version of the misguided Corrie.
There is a tradition of using theater as a political bully pulpit, and you can easily imagine this farrago having a long shelf life, touring the provinces and college campuses where untold numbers of naive audience members will grieve anew over the death of innocent little Rachel at the hands of the rapacious Jews.
Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner – and all those who applaud their work – want you to believe that Rachel Corrie died for America’s Middle East sins.
But if you believe that, it isn’t much of a stretch to think, as Corrie apparently did, that the Jews of Israel deserve to die, too. As British writer Tom Gross noted at the time of the play’s opening, its promoters, like Corrie herself, might have taken the time to learn about the many other Rachels, the Jewish women and girls slaughtered by Palestinians in the name of a jihad that Corrie supported whether she understood it or not.
Yet what makes “Rachel Corrie” worth noting is that this premise of Israeli perfidy and Palestinian victimhood is actually presented in many an American classroom.
Those who wonder that truth can be so easily stood on its head need only wander up from the West Village playhouse where the show will appear until the end of the year, and visit virtually any campus where a Middle East Studies department has taken root.