We Are All Humans Now

Members of the Olympia Community gathered for a funeral procession through the streets of Olympia in honor of those individuals killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza. In attendance were Craig and Cindy Corrie, parents of Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli armored bulldozer in Raffah refugee camp in Gaza in 2001. I remember meeting the Nasrallah family, who’s home Rachel had been protecting when she was killed, with the Corries at the KAOS radio station in 2005. We were there for consecutive interviews. I remember looking painfully into the eyes of Samah Nasrallah and reaching for words to convey my good intentions to her. The feeling that I could not effectively communicate how much I supported them and their family and their community. I was struck by how helpless I felt. How I was left feeling powerless and disconnected.

In the days leading up to the procession on Saturday January 17th 2009, Gaza had been the target of the most mercilessly violent assault I have ever personally witnessed. In the name of national security, Israel had unleashed her arsenal of high tech high power weapons with tremendously destructive effect. Innocent and defenseless women and children and non-combatants representing those most devastatingly impacted. Images of dismembered children, eyes burned shut, legs reduced to stumps wrapped in bandages, lips clenched with pain and confusion streamed onto the internet. Segments on Al Jazeera told of medics so brave that they rushed back out into the streets to retrieve wounded as soon as their own injuries had been tended. One recounting the words of his lost comrade saying, even if he lost one of his own legs he would hop back into the streets to save the innocents. Israel shamelessly targeted these brave and devoted Palestinian medics, shooting at them as they attempted to retrieve the wounded.

Nothing was safe from the weapons of the IDF. UN schools where children huddled with their mothers in fear were hit, dozens died. Whole families were rounded up and herded into buildings where they were prevented from leaving when the shelling began, they died as they had lived, together. In the end even relief supplies, medicine and food, were hit. Burned by phosphorous munitions that are banned by international law for use in such a criminal fashion. Miles of roads were destroyed with heavy machinery, making a return to normal life impossible. The people of Gaza were in desperate straits before this assault, the blockade having reduced them to captives in a refugee camp. Now that refugee camp has been destroyed, detonated and inflamed with white phosphorous. Fathers and mothers like the Nasrallahs have lost children. Children are without parents and brothers and sisters. Whatever semblance of civility and normalcy there had been in Gaza, is now reduced to rubble.

When the trade towers fell in 2001, the citizens of the United States of America felt a distinct camaraderie. The flag that had been burned and torn in its decent from the top of the tallest building in Manhattan was raised up. The rally around the flag began. I wondered then as I do now; why that flag? I mean, why not the flag of NYC or New York State? Down the street the flags of every nation fly, why not the flag of the United Nations? Certainly people of many nationalities died that day. The strike may have been intended to hit US targets, but in the days of globalization it is easily argued that it was a strike against the western world as much as it was a strike on American soil.

On September 12, the Paris paper Le Monde printed 'We're all Americans now'. With this they bridged the Atlantic and the many political divides between the left in France and the rapidly right moving 21st century America. This was how they showed their deep concern for the horrors perpetrated that day, they had taken on the mantle of our national identity. But in the end, innocents in Afghanistan payed the price for this alignment. They could not claim to be Americans, and seek the protections and opportunities it affords.

When Russia rolled a column of vehicles through a tunnel into a disputed Georgian province, then candidate McCain stated with artificial meaning the same line with the substituted Georgians in place of Americans; 'We are all Georgians now.' In addition to wishing to rekindle the fears of Americans that had worked so well to keep Republicans in the white house in the intervening years, he was also wanting us to take sides. Choose a flag, choose an identity. In the end the apartment blocks burned in South Ossetia, and innocents died in the rubble.

I can only speak for myself. I have not been given any greater authority to speak than that. But what I see in Gaza today has led me to a different conclusion than those I cited above. The burned and tattered flag in this case is not a national flag, but the flag of humanity. I am not a Palestinian today, I am a human. I choose the human identity, the one that leads me to defend humanity from inhumanity. The identity that leads me to seek peace and prosperity and a future for all of our children that they can rejoice in. It is in this way that I end my isolation and empower myself to strengthen my connection with the Nasrallah family and all of those good and noble who have lost so much in Gaza. It is not up to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Israel, it is up to all of us. After all; ‘We are all humans now’.