“My Name Is Rachel Thaler” is not the title of a play likely to be produced anytime soon in London. Thaler, age 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following the February 16, 2002 attack when a suicide bomber approached a crowd of teenagers and blew himself up.
She was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live. Yet I doubt that anyone at London’s Royal Court Theatre, or most people in the British media, have heard of her. “Not a single British journalist has ever interviewed me or mentioned her death,” her mother, Ginette, told me last week. Thaler’s parents donated her organs for transplant (helping to save the life of a young Russian man), and grieved quietly.
After the accidental killing of Rachel Corrie, by contrast, Corrie’s parents embarked on a major publicity campaign. They traveled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasir Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicize them.
Among those who published extracts from them in 2003 was the influential British leftist daily The Guardian. This in turn inspired a new play, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” which opened this month at the Royal Court Theatre, one of London most prestigious venues. (The New York Times recently described it as “the most important theatre in Europe.”) The play is co-edited and directed by Katharine Viner, editor of The Guardian’s weekend magazine, and by film star Alan Rickman (of “Die Hard” and “Harry Potter” fame). Their script weaves together extracts from Corrie’s journals and e-mails.
For those who don’t recall the story, Rachel Corrie was a young American radical who burned mock-American flags at pro-Hamas rallies in Gaza in February 2003. A short while later she died after jumping in front of an Israeli army bulldozer that was attempting to demolish a structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.
Partly because of the efforts of Corrie and her fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the IDF was unable to stop the flow of weapons through these tunnels. 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 written on Corrie and published worldwide in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have Rickman and Viner, leaving almost all the critics who have reviewed the play completely clueless about the background of the events with which it deals.
“Corrie was always a progressive with a conscience…she went to work with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza,” wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian last week, without a shred of explanation as to what the ISM actually is.
ISM is routinely described as a “peace group” in the Western media. Few make any mention of ISM’s meeting with British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Assif 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 Shadi Sukia, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement the ISM says “armed struggle” is a Palestinian “right.”
“‘Israel’ is an illegal entity that should not exist,” wrote ISM media coordinator Flo Rosovski, clarifying the ISM’s idea of peace.
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 were published by the Associated Press and on Yahoo News on February 15, 2003, before she died. But the play doesn’t mention this. So British reviewers are left to tell the British public that the play is a “true-life tragedy” in which Corrie’s “unselfish goodness shines through” (Evening Standard).
