The Secular Beatification of Rachel Corrie

By Published On: August 28, 2012

rachel corrie.jpg

Following an Israeli court ruling that the 2003 death of activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by a bulldozer, was accidental, Brendan O’Neill analyses the troubling mindset of comfortable Westerners who travel to Gaza and the West Bank to interfere with Israeli military operations. In The secular beatification of Rachel Corrie sums up everything that is wrong with modern solidarity with Palestine O’Neill observes that “Palestinian solidarity has become creepily anthropological.”

Decked out in Arafat-style keffiyehs (a PC form of blacking up), and possessed of a conviction that it falls to white-skinned, iPhone-armed westerners to expose Israel’s “genocidal” crimes to the world media, solidarity activists who travel to Palestinian territories are becoming more and more like secular versions of the crusaders of old. They are effectively going to Palestine to find themselves, to try to give meaning to their potentially shallow lives through imagining that they can “save” an entire people and halt a “genocide” by standing in front of a tank or writing some blog posts about how tragic are the lives of cute Palestinian children. It is a peculiar form of solidarity that reduces an entire foreign people to the level of child-like victims who need the likes of St Rachel to save them.

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