For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, we are joined on the phone by Craig and Cindy Corey.
Their daughter, Rachel, was killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza in March of 2003.
And in the current attempt to bring humanitarian supplies to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, one of the boats has been named after her.
And from what I understand, that boat is on its way right now.
Thank you very much, Craig and Cindy, for joining us on the show today.
How are y'all?
We're doing fine.
We're a little tired.
We've been busy the last day or two.
Following all the events that have unfolded, sadly.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Alright, well, so before we get too far into the current events here, can you tell us a little bit about your daughter?
Sure.
Rachel was our third child.
She was 23 years old, almost 24, when she was killed in the Gaza Strip.
She had studied here in Olympia, Washington, where we live, at the Evergreen State College.
She was in college at the time that 9-11 occurred.
And with others, I mean, that drove her to really looking at the Middle East and our relationship with the Middle East and what she saw as some of the root causes for the problems that were happening at that time.
She began studying about it.
She had friends who went to the Gaza Strip in 2002, when the International Solidarity Movement had something called Freedom Summer.
That organization was started when there was a resolution in the United Nations to have a peacekeeping monitoring, human rights monitoring force in the occupied territories because of the violence of the Second Intifada.
That resolution in the UN was rejected by the United States and Israel.
At that time, the International Solidarity Movement was formed.
Some of Rachel's friends went to some of the first organized activities of that organization.
She saw what they were doing.
She became interested in going herself.
In January of 2003, she traveled to Israel, went for training in the West Bank, and had intended always to go directly to Gaza because she felt like that's where the greatest need was.
She spent about seven weeks in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, a place that Craig and I have now visited numerous times.
People's homes were being demolished there.
Human Rights Watch reported that between 2000 and 2004, a tenth of the population of Rafah lost their homes.
More than 1,500 homes were destroyed.
There was a wide buffer area being created between Egypt and the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military, and they were destroying homes wholesale while that was going on.
So Rachel and other activists, part of what they would do was to stay with families whose homes were along this buffer strip, along the border area, in the hope that their presence and the word that they were getting out about this might offer some protection.
She also was working with women and children.
She worked with something called the Children's Parliament, where kids were learning about democracy, learning how to voice their opinions about what was going on in the world.
She went on International Women's Day to meet with Fatima, the General Union of Palestinian Women, when Craig and I visited there in 2003.
Fatima pulled out a note from Rachel because they had missed each other, and Rachel just was really eager to connect with some of the women on that day.
It's interesting because Craig and I got to go in 2009 after the Cast Lead attacks.
We got to go in March to Gaza with a Code Pink delegation through Egypt, and we were there for International Women's Day and gathered with a large group of women in Rafah, very near to where Rachel had been, so that was very moving to me.
She was killed on March 16, 2003.
She was with seven other international activists who had been called to an area where demolition was taking place or was threatened that day.
The activists would stand between the Caterpillar D9R bulldozers that were moving towards homes and structures to try to prevent their demolition.
During the course of that afternoon, the bulldozers came right up to activists, actually pushed some into concertina wire, but always stopped.
On a run late in the day, Rachel stood between a bulldozer and a home where she had stayed.
She knew that behind her were children that she had spent the night with, helped them with their English.
They worked on Arabic together, and the bulldozer did not stop on that run.
It continued over her.
It backed over her again, and she was killed.
Now, Cindy, let me make sure I understand this part of it, and I'm sorry to ask you to dwell on the details of this part of the story here.
You're telling me that the house that she was standing in front of, that there were children in that house at that moment?
Yes.
There were two families who lived in the house, two brothers.
One was an accountant, one a pharmacist.
Again, Craig and I know these families now.
We've watched these kids grow up.
One part of the family came to the United States in 2005 and traveled with us, spoke to people in Seattle, in Olympia, Washington, where we live, and across the country.
But these were young children at the time.
Our friend, Hollad, lived in the upper floor of the house.
He had two preschool-age children, and he and his wife, Samah, were up there.
They had come down, actually, that day because the house was threatened.
So they were all in kind of a courtyard area.
They were watching through a crack in the wall as the bulldozer approached the house.
The other family, Dr. Samir's family, had three young children as well, a young boy about, I'm forgetting their ages now, but he was maybe 12 years old about that time, and then two younger sisters who Rachel was very close to.
This was a horrible event in their lives.
But, yes, these families were behind the wall.
Rachel knew they were there.
They were watching as this unfolded.
All right.
Now, well, for people just tuning in, you should know it's Anti-War Radio, and we're talking with Craig and Cindy Corey, Rachel Corey's parents.
Craig, I'd like to give you a chance to just tell us a little bit about your daughter, maybe kind of personally what she was like.
Well, I think she was like, I suppose, in a lot of ways, anybody else's daughter.
So she, of course, was a writer.
I remember when she was in fifth grade, and there's some stuff on the Internet, a little speech that she gave in fifth grade that is kind of quite moving now when you watch it.
But I remember somebody at my office asking her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she just stared this adult in the eye, and she said, I am a poet.
So she loved writing, and she did so all of her life.
And, of course, we put together a book of her writing after she was killed called Let Me Stand Alone, and it's available widely.
But in that, you know, one of the sort of good things that sort of came out strangely, I suppose, somewhat as a result of Rachel's being killed is that we got to see and read her sort of private letters and writing that she did in journals, her journaling, which she didn't want to show us most of that when she was writing it, but it's beautiful.
And so in some ways, we got to know more about Rachel than maybe we would have, and there's just really beautiful writing that she talks about.
As a little girl growing up, we lived kind of out in the country, and there's an estuary by our house that the tidewater comes in and goes out, and she talks about that she grew up in Puget Sound, that her house was up the hill, but she lived in Puget Sound, and I think in the summers that was true.
It's lovely to read about it and think about this kid out there in dirt and water, which is kind of what helps children grow, in my opinion.
Yeah, well, that's what being a little kid is all about, right?
Yeah.
Well, and they even made a play based on her emails and journals, right?
Yes, yeah.
And my name is Rachel Corey, and it's been, well, I think in the last couple of years, it's been on every continent in the world except Antarctica.
I have no knowledge of it being played there.
I would say translated into maybe a dozen languages.
I haven't counted for a while, but we've seen it in several languages and in many different variations of it or productions of it.
In some ways, yeah, there's a lot of ways that we still hear her words over and over again, and that's a gift.
We're actually going to be in Idaho in July for a reading or a production of the play, and this is fairly frequent for us that people contact us and say, we're doing the play, my name is Rachel Corey, and we'd love to have you come and join us.
It's interesting to me, it's been a wonderful vehicle, I think, to bring people to these issues as well as to learn something about Rachel.
The play actually has some very funny parts, because when you ask about her daughter, she had a great wit, a great sense of humor.
I always think she got that from her dad, so I think they had sort of similar wit, and I think that comes through in the play.
I think one of the reasons her writing has been so important to us is that I think people can get a better sense of who this human being was by hearing her own words, much better than when we talk about her.
So we're just grateful that we have that to share with people.
It seems like that's why she's going to live forever, eventually, because of her focus on the humanity of the people that she was trying to protect and the way that she was trying to bring home to the rest of us Americans how real the people of the Gaza Strip is and how unfairly they're being treated.
I wonder what you guys have learned about Gaza and about the situation in Palestine since her death.
We've been there four times.
The first time was about six months after she was killed in September of 2003.
At that time, the home that she was defending was still standing.
It was made unlivable about a month later that year and totally destroyed.
I think the family went out there two years later and tried to find the spot where the house was and figured they had it.
They found it because they found a small square of tile that they recognized as coming from the kitchen.
But it's amazing how not only are the walls pushed down, but eventually I think they bury them in the sand or something like that is what's been going on, those Israelis destroying their house, which of course was not on the border with Israel.
It was on the border with Egypt that they were bulldozing down this squat through a community, the city of Rafah.
So we saw that early on, that sort of destruction right on the border.
We stayed in Rafah, I believe it was five, nine, six days, something like that.
That was facilitated by the highest levels of the U.S. State Department for which we are thankful that we got to go in there.
We were in briefly, I believe, in January of 2006, and then we were back twice last year.
So right after the attack on Gaza by Israel, then we were in in March of last year, and then back again in September of last year.
And in that attack, the destruction was just wholesale and amazing.
You could be up in the northeastern part of Gaza, and Gaza is only about 30 miles long and from, I think, 7 to 10 miles wide.
So it's a small place with 1.5 million people in there.
Up in the north, along a hillside, you could look either direction.
Everything was bombed.
Everything was rubble.
There were some tents up there.
That was the first time we had seen people living in tents The extended family will take family members in.
So when you see somebody actually living in a tent, it means that either all the homes in that extended family were destroyed, or they've already got 30 people in the living room, and there's just absolutely no place for somebody.
When we came back in September, there were places, the tents were still there.
There was absolutely no building going on because Israel was not allowing concrete or cement to get in, so they couldn't build.
The only cleanup that I really realized or noticed the place where we went back was there was a home that was burned up by white phosphorus.
Israelis fired white phosphorus into this home.
I think the UN was cleaning up every site that had white phosphorus in it.
So that house was taken down, but it wasn't like it was replaced.
It was simply that was taken out.
While we were there, both of those trips, the only gasoline to run, for instance, the cars or motorcycles that go through Gaza or the buses that we were on, that all came in through tunnels from Egypt.
It was not coming in from Israel.
I think there is some amount of oil that comes into fire generators, and maybe some for cooking, but it's not nearly what they need.
There are rolling blackouts as far as electricity through Gaza, which continues.
If I understand right, the situation in Gaza since 2005 is much worse than it was even in 2003 because in 2005 Ariel Sharon, I guess in the American media, they made it seem like this was some benevolent gesture.
He withdrew and sent the IDF in to take all the Jewish settlers, the last of the Jewish settlers, out of Gaza.
Rather than it really being a unilateral peace move, it seems instead like they just turned Gaza into a prison.
Well, that's absolutely what happened.
The settlers were kind of the human shields protecting the people of Gaza in a way.
Well, there were approximately 8,000 settlers that were living in, I forget the number, but approximately 21, 22 settlements that were in the Gaza Strip.
It was amazing to me having been there in 2003 and then returning in 2006.
In 2003 Gaza was still internally occupied.
When Rachel was there she talked about how the Gaza Strip, and Craig reminded you that it was 30 miles long, but when she was there how it would be divided into thirds.
Sometimes students in Rafah would not be able to get to their university in Gaza City.
That's about a half-hour drive between those two places.
Or they could get to university but then not get home again for days because there would be closure between parts of the Gaza Strip internally.
When we were there in 2006, one thing that was remarkable to me is that we could drive down the seacoast along the Mediterranean from Gaza City to Rafah.
One thing that people may not realize is that Gaza is an extraordinarily beautiful place.
I think sometimes when I'm there I'm just reminded about the potential of this place because the Mediterranean is just glorious there.
Unfortunately it's also now highly polluted in that area because raw sewage is being dumped into the sea every day because they can't get what's needed to make repairs to the sewage system and so forth.
We could drive down that seacoast in 2006.
When Rachel was there in 2003, one of the things that made her so sad was that children in Rafah lived right next to the sea but many of them had never been to the sea or seen it because that portion of the seacoast was restricted for settlers to use.
It's an amazing amount of land that those settlements took.
Some say up to 40%, but again I was extremely surprised when we drove down that coast just to see the expanse of land that had been given to these settlements.
Those were gone, the 8,000 people.
It had taken 25,000 Israeli soldiers to keep those 8,000 settlers in Gaza.
Gaza was never as significant to Israelis.
I understand, certainly as the West Bank is or certainly the areas of East Jerusalem.
But it took an amazing infrastructure to keep those settlers in place.
What happened in 2005 after disengagement, which I believe was really intended to take pressure off of the Israelis in the West Bank where settlement building was escalating to a high degree, what happened is there was some initial optimism on the part of Palestinians and others that maybe things would improve for people in Gaza.
They were promised that there would be a route developed between Gaza and the West Bank so that people could travel back and forth to see family members.
We know people in Gaza, we know people in the West Bank who have relatives in the other place and they haven't been able to connect with them in person in up to 10 years.
The distance is very, very short between these two places, but there's no ability for them to move in between.
They felt that there were possibly some opportunities for some development to happen in Gaza and so forth.
But what actually happened is that Gaza was put completely under siege.
It was closed.
One of the things Craig and I noticed when we've gone in, whether it's through Egypt or through Erez Checkpoint, which is the one checkpoint from Israel into Gaza that people can travel through, when we've gone in, frequently we will be the only people passing through, particularly Erez Checkpoint, the only people passing through into Israel on a particular day.
We have a photo that shows Craig going into Gaza from Erez Checkpoint and he's the only person in the photo.
We often remind people there are 1.5 million people in Gaza.
If you imagined the population of Seattle or Chicago or some of the cities where we've been and you had one entrance in or out of those places, how many people you would see moving in between.
So the point of that is that people are really confined within this space.
The borders are controlled and closed.
The airspace is controlled.
We visited the airport, which was completely destroyed at the beginning of the Second Intifada.
It's just total closure.
Now there is some movement for medical reasons and so forth.
There is some ability for people to appeal and be able to go to Jerusalem under some circumstances for medical care and so forth.
But still, generally speaking, people are confined to this area completely.
It might be worth pointing out here that at that point, Fatah was still in control of the Gaza Strip, not Hamas.
Yes, that's right.
Then after the election in 2006, when we were there, people were very excited about the election.
But when Hamas prevailed in those elections in the United States and Israel rejected that decision, Jimmy Carter was one of the people who monitored those elections and said that they were very fairly handled.
It was kind of a model election.
But we didn't like the result.
And we, I mean the governments involved, didn't like the result of that election.
So ever since, the people of Gaza have been collectively punished, which is illegal under international law, because of the decisions that were made in a very democratic election.
Now there are reasons for why Hamas prevailed in that election.
Some of it was simply frustration with what had not happened after disengagement.
That some of the things that had been promised had not happened.
There was a lot of feeling that Fatah was very corrupt.
And Hamas has had a history of supporting the social needs of people in the Gaza Strip and also in the West Bank.
So, you know, it's fairly complicated.
And also they didn't really receive a majority of the vote, but because of the way that the seats and so forth were apportioned, they did have a majority of the seats in the legislative council that was elected.
All right, now everybody, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Craig and Cindy Corey from the Rachel Corey Foundation.
And now I know that there's a boat that's been named after your daughter that is, I think, currently on a mission.
It's not one of those seized by the IDF over the weekend.
Correct?
That's true.
The empty Rachel Corey was actually started from Ireland.
It was abandoned in Ireland and I think had, I believe, a Lithuanian crew that was kind of abandoned in there.
And activists in Ireland ended up purchasing it.
And it's really a ship.
I think it's a 1,200-ton ship.
And activists purchased it, refitted it, painted it, and then started to stock it with cement.
And we talked about the need for cement there.
Medical equipment, which is badly needed.
And I know Norway donated, I believe it's about six tons of school supplies, which kind of, that one strikes me in sort of a strange way because each time Cindy and I have gone in, and certainly the last two times, we've been dragging a roller suitcase full of crayons and pencils and writing paper into Gaza.
And, of course, that's only symbolic.
It makes us feel good.
And a few children that we can pass that out to might put smiles on their face.
But six tons sounds to me like something that might be significant.
Of course, the whole point of this is they're not able to take enough goods.
It is humanitarian aid, certainly.
But it's actually to try to block or run the blockade and put some attention to the fact that Gaza is still under siege and that they are in dire need of these supplies.
Yesterday or two days ago on MSNBC, they had, I guess, a very objective person analyzing the situation and explaining that concrete is a dual-use technology.
Yes, you could use it to rebuild a house, but you could also use it to make a bunker.
So we can't let the people of Gaza have concrete a year and a half after Operation Cast Lead.
Yeah.
I remember when we were actually on the phone with members, staff of members of Congress, and we had objected that they said no children should have to live in fear and run to a bunker.
And we said, well, what about the children of Gaza?
And he said, well, this isn't talking about one child or another.
And we said, well, the children of Gaza don't have a bunker to run to.
So, you know, a bunker sounds pretty defensive to me.
I don't know why they shouldn't have bunkers.
I hadn't figured out what it was that the Israelis thought that maybe the Palestinians would do with cement as a weapon, you know, whether they'd throw it over the fence or the wall at Israelis.
It's preposterous.
They, you know, they were holding pasta, you know, and I don't know what weapon they were going to make out of noodles.
But the one thing we know is a family having, you know, Rachel killed there seven years ago and trying to find some sort of truth about that.
And we followed that.
As we speak, there's a trial, a lawsuit going on.
It's on hold right now, but in Haifa, where we're suing the government of Israel and Rachel's killing, trying to get the truth out about this.
And what we've been able to find out and actually get in sworn testimony in court from Israeli people connected with the Israeli Defense Force or with the Israeli government is that they were lying to the U.S. and our family when Rachel was killed about different things.
There's no other way to put it.
So that they would, you know, make some absurd comments about this is, of course, not a surprise to us.
Yeah, well, they even tried to say Al-Qaeda was on the boat and on like that.
Yeah, and, you know, one of the sort of strange and sad things, like I say, when we've been to Gaza, the extreme strain that is in that area right now makes it more likely that Al-Qaeda, there are certainly groups to the right of Hamas.
You know, Hamas freely talks about a 20-year ceasefire and then they say at the end of 20 years, we will have people who have not grown up with this sort of violence in their lives and they will be able to talk to each other and find a real truth.
That sounds, when you hear it, fairly reasonable.
And I think there are folks about that are not nearly that reasonable.
And the pressure that is put on the Gaza Strip makes those far extremists press more clout than they should.
I think that one of the strange things about the Operation Cast Lead, as the Israelis call it, just an attack on Gaza, one of our Palestinian friends said it embarrassed Israel and installed Hamas.
So far the Israeli policy, as near as I can tell, and I'm not exactly certain what their goals are, because it's so foreign to me, but it seems to me it's been a failure.
If what they really say is they're trying to get Hamas out of there, it's been a failure.
Yeah, well, and of course there's that story in the Vanity Fair about how they had that whole covert mission to arm up Fatah by way of the Egyptians in order to have a civil war against Hamas and at least force them to compromise or something.
And all that did was backfire, all the guns ended up in the hands of Hamas.
They just finished off Fatah in Gaza, basically, as a result of that operation.
Yeah, and I don't know the truth of it, but I had an Al Jazeera reporter tell me that he had heard that actually the tip-off to Hamas came from Israelis, so that they were able to meet that landing party and get their weapons.
So I do think that we don't see the whole game, and I'm not sure anybody in the United States sees the whole game that's being played there.
We're just seeing sort of shadow parts of it, and in that is the lives of our friends.
They're trying to go forward, they're trying to get those kids that we now know to have a future that all of us would want for any of our children.
And that's what we, the people around here, have to keep foremost in our minds, is that in the end of the day, we're talking about just folks in other parts of the world, and they just want the same sort of thing for their family that we want for ours.
We meet such remarkable people when we're there.
And this last time, I just took very detailed notes of all the things that different people at different organizations, different people had to say to us, because it's truly remarkable how they maintain their spirit and their humanity through the terrible confinement that they're experiencing, but also then these terrible attacks.
And, you know, we hear so much when incidents like this happen about security for Israel, and we care deeply, excuse me, Craig and I care deeply for people in Israel as well.
We have many, many, many friends there.
We spend a lot of time with people there.
But when you look at what's actually happening, the people who come under the most threat in this situation are the Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, and that violence continues towards them.
And it takes many different forms, and we hear much less about it.
When we were there in 2009, I felt compelled each time I talked to someone to ask them what the impact of Operation Cast Lead had been on them.
And people recognize us, and they're eager to talk to us, and they were happy and enthusiastic about our being there.
But then when I would ask this question, at some point in the conversation, almost everybody told me that they had lost their cousin, their brother, their mother in what had happened.
It's something that Craig and I understand, and others who have had these kinds of losses understand, is that the hole that's created for people when they have that kind of experience and the trauma is something that continues and impacts people forever, for the rest of their lives.
And there's just continuing trauma against that people there are having to experience.
And it also manifests in ways that I think we don't think about, the occupation, the siege that's ongoing there.
We met students, we met people who are trying to leave Gaza.
We have friends who have wanted to come to the United States, and they haven't been able to leave, to come and visit, just to visit.
But we met a student, Ibrahim, when we were there, who had a prestigious scholarship to Wales.
He had started the process to try to leave the Gaza Strip to go for his scholarship before we got there.
And the border was open through Rafa Crossing, which goes into Egypt.
That's how we got in, in September of 2009.
The border was open for a few days.
Ibrahim had signed up to get on buses to go out of Gaza so that he could go to Wales.
But his bus was, I believe, number 17.
And only 13 busloads of people were able to get out from Rafa through Gaza.
So when we saw him, he was desperately looking for ways to try to negotiate his travel.
And the British became involved in supporting him.
There were arrangements made for him to be picked up at Erez Checkpoint and taken to Amman, Jordan, to be able to fly out through the UK.
But he was never given permission to actually do that, to go through Erez Checkpoint and to be picked up and transported.
It took until November when the border in Egypt opened up again.
So this was from September to November before he was able to leave.
He nearly lost the scholarship.
It took people in the UK explaining to people at the university just how impossible it was for him to leave.
Now this young man was somebody who had written to me years before.
He was a teacher, an elementary school teacher in Gaza.
His kids had studied Rachel's story.
He knew Rachel's story.
And he wrote to me a couple of years before.
I had to be reminded of this, but when he told me I exactly remembered this happening, he wrote and said, they're too young, my students, to write about Rachel, but they can draw pictures.
And he had sent pictures of their drawings about Rachel, about what had happened to her, to us, through the Internet.
You know, this is a wonderful human being.
And recognized by Swansea University as somebody deserving of this scholarship, and yet he had to go through this ordeal just to leave.
And the other thing that happens with students and other Palestinians who do leave is that then they're not able to come back or they're afraid to come back because then they face the problem of not being able to get out again.
So there are just so many ways in which the closure, the siege manifests in their lives at all times.
Well, you guys are Americans like me, and so I know that you know as well as I do that people in the Middle East, at least the chosen people of any given discussion, can be reduced to simply kind of cartoon characters or maybe they're little dots on a shape on a map or something, but they don't seem to really be human beings to Americans.
A lot of the time, I'm sure you guys have noticed, you know, you instruct someone that actually a lot of the Palestinians are Christians.
And they go, oh, maybe it's not okay to murder them then.
You know, that kind of thing.
Well, here's the headline.
According to ABC News today, American 19 among Gaza flotilla dead.
Furkan Dogan was shot five times, including four times in the head.
And so, okay, maybe he has a kind of funny name, but he was an American.
Four bullets in the head from the Israeli Defense Forces.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought it back to now.
And I'm guessing we have very little time left.
You know, American citizen or citizen in any other place, here's a young wife that's been snuffed out.
And the other part of the news that we're hearing just, you know, it's varying news coming out of our government, the U.S. government, about an investigation and what goes into this.
But it seems that right now what our government is saying, well, the Israelis will have to investigate it and maybe United States government can be sort of an onlooker.
And I just want to press to the people listening that in our daughter's case, Rachel Corey, the death of her, she was promised a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation by Prime Minister Sharon to President Bush.
And even until today, the U.S. government is saying that that investigation never occurred.
It's also true of Kristen Anderson as an American citizen.
And there's not been, as far as I can tell, any sort of investigation in that.
And Brian Avery was shot in the head shortly after Rachel was killed.
But he survived.
Both Tristan and Brian are, thank God, alive today.
But neither of them have had an investigation.
Now, in our daughter's case, it's absolutely official government stance that that's not happening.
And yet they're saying that Israel can investigate itself in this particular case when it has not been able to.
And in the entreaties they're saying from the White House through a high level at the State Department, including Secretaries of State, have not gotten the Israelis to look into the death of our daughter, a U.S. citizen.
I don't think it matters much where the person is a citizen, what state they're a citizen of.
I think it has to be pressed.
And what I'm saying is that I think that the listeners need to get on the phone, get whatever communication they can have to the White House and the State Department and say, this is the wrong policy.
We need to be proactive in the international community of getting a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation of what happened there.
And we know, and it's obvious that the U.S. government knows, Israel cannot or will not do that themselves.
And I have it in writing from the U.S. government that they cannot force Israel to do it.
So let's go find another alternative policy that makes some sense.
All right.
And you are right, Craig, that we're short on time here.
But let me give you all a chance to tell us about the Rachel Corey Foundation here before I let you go.
There was a young woman, Emily, in the West Bank who went to a protest against what happened with the flotilla.
She also is a U.S. citizen.
She, I believe it must have been on Monday, was shot and lost her eye.
Tear gas grenades in the face.
Tear gas, yes.
And I think it's just so important for people to remember that what happened at the high seas is one example of the assault on nonviolent resistance in this issue, but that that goes on in the West Bank and in Gaza all the time.
I believe there was a young Gazan who was killed in nonviolent protest not too long ago as well.
And, of course, the list of Palestinians who were killed in nonviolent protest against the wall in the West Bank is growing.
And we've been involved in remarkable nonviolent efforts at Belain and other places in the West Bank.
It's just amazing how they've continued that.
But we have to pay attention to what's happening and draw attention to the attack on these people who are resisting in this way.
The Rachel Corey Foundation, we're located here in Olympia, Washington.
Part of the work, of course, is what Craig and I do as volunteers, just continuing to speak about what we've witnessed and seen.
But the foundation works at building connections.
We have connections with people in Gaza.
We do work to try to support women and children and others in Gaza through organizations that we worked with.
You mentioned people not knowing about there being Christians in these places.
And we visited the World Council of Churches, actually, in Gaza when we were there last year, learned that there are 2,000 to 3,000 Christians in Gaza and that they feel very much a part of their community and not threatened being there.
They are Gazans with others, other Gazans, with Muslims and others.
So it is important for us to break down the stereotypes.
And we try to do that with the relationship-building work that we're doing.
We use art in the written word because it was so important to Rachel to bring attention to these issues.
And we have an amazing mural now in downtown Olympia, the Olympia Rafa Solidarity mural that I hope people will come and see.
It's a huge olive tree that has leaves that have been created by artists and by organizations locally, nationally, and internationally in solidarity with the Palestinian people, but also drawing attention to the different issues of the search for social justice in so many different areas and how those issues connect.
So we have a lot of different groups represented, some that are associated with activities in Latin America, some locally dealing with issues of poverty, immigration issues, and so forth.
So I hope people will come to see that.
There's a lot to say about our work.
People can go to the website.
It's the www.
RachelCoreyFoundation.org website.
And we would love to hear from people.
All right.
Everyone, that is Craig and Cindy Corey, parents of Rachel Corey.
And, again, the website was RachelCoreyFoundation.org, right?
That's right.
Okay.
Thank you both very much for your time on the show today.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
This is Anti-War Radio.
We'll be right back.
