On 16 March 2003, 23-year old Rachel Corrie was murdered when she was crushed to death by a bulldozer operated by the Israeli Defence Force. She used her body as a human shield to stop the IDF from demolishing the home of a Palestinian family in the Gaza Strip.
To date, Israel still pursues its aggressive acts against the Palestinians. Notwithstanding more than fifty United Nations General Assembly resolutions condemning its acts, its policy of extermination directed against the Palestinians continues to escalate. How ironic that Israel is the first to forget the lessons from the Holocaust.
Who ever said that the oppressed of today can become the tyrants of tomorrow must have been thinking of the Israelis.
Death for Liberty
(In memory of Rachel Corrie)
by Cheryl L. Daytec
I have gone, but my spirit stays
Not mine to own like my body
It belongs to a drawn-out struggle
That refuses to succumb
To guns on children’s heads
To power unleashed by the Devil
To bulldozers that turn homes into graveyards
To a false ideology that believes
God is the Commander-in-Chief
of the army of racism
of hatred
of genocide
We fall…on our blood, on our grief
But from them you rise
Like the waves at sea
I, those before me, those after me
We live… still, because we never really died
Flesh decays; a revolution does not
We lend our death to the force of life
flowing through the veins of a struggle
against chains
against walls
against invisibility
Let our death add to the heat in the fire
crawling through the darkness
ruled by the iron hand of ruthlessness
that feeds on the poverty of a people’s spirit
that drinks from the spring
of apathy and surrender
Let our spirit live in the slogans
We have died
That the world may see the picture
Hidden under layers of untruth
That the walls may crumble down
That the gates may open
We have died
That liberty may live. cldy/16mar2011
