http://starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/price_of_an_orange.htmlI am writing this as we approach the anniversary of two murders. And I find myself thinking about an orange, a ghost orange, growing on a branch on a ghost tree that no longer stands in the courtyard of a home crushed to bloodstained rubble. In Rafah, the border town that lies on the dusty frontier where Gaza meets Egypt. A place of cement tenements pockmarked with bullet holes, streets choking in dust and smashed concrete, barbed wire and fences and sniper towers, where Rachel and Tom died, like so many of the Palestinians they had come to stand with in solidarity.
In March of 2003 Rachel Corrie was killed as she was trying to stop an Israeli soldier from demolishing a home. The bulldozer driver saw her, and deliberately ran over her. She was twenty-three years old.
Just a few weeks later, an Israeli soldier firing from a sniper tower shot Tom as he was trying to save some children who were under fire. After nine long months in what the doctors call a "vegetative state," his body breathing but his mind and brain destroyed, Tom died in mid-January, just a day after his mother whispered in his ear that his murderer had finally been arrested. He was just twenty-two.
Tom and Rachel were not unique in dying in Rafah. Palestinians are killed every day. A year ago, the toll was more than 250 dead in Rafah alone since the beginning of the Intifada, more than 50 of them children. Now the count must be much higher. The same day Rachel died, Akhmed, a fifty-year-old street sweeper who lived with his mother, went out to sit on his stoop and smoke a cigarette. The soldiers gunned him down, for no particular reason, and his death made no international headlines, caused no controversy, evoked no words of condemnation from a shocked world.
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