What to do about Rachel Corrie Play

With trepidation I weigh in to the Rachel Corrie debate. There is now to be a play about Rachel Corrie, and some of the Hasbara groups have been wondering how to deal with the play. One group has suggested handing out fact sheets about her, an activity I disagree with. I wrote back to the group saying so.

Throughout this I use the term "myth" in a neutral, almost positive way. If you have always thought of a "myth" as being lies and falsehood consider this: A five dollar note which is physically a piece of plastic has a myth of being worth five dollars. This is the sense in which I use "myth". A kind of shared reality we all agree to.

Rachel Corrie has been "enlarged" into a full cultural myth for Westerners with Palestinian sympathies. On the pro-Israeli side of politics we need to better understand the cultural war, a war which we never seem to fight, let alone win.

You can't fight a cultural icon with facts, because it is not about the facts. eg Here in Australia we have a cultural icon of the cute cuddly koala bear. No amount of factual material about how dirty, smelly, disease carrying.... koalas are - can ever debunk the myth. Tourists will still spend their dollars buying the mythologised koala to take back home.

Corrie is perfect hero / myth material. She believed in the Palestinian cause [whatever that means], and died while carrying out her mission. It matters not whether she was being careless, or she was bitten by a snake, or shot accidentally by Israelis or indeed by Palestinians. What matters (in mythology terms) is that she died in the course of duty. It is perfectly understandable why they write a play about her. It is perfectly understandable that the play glosses over the true facts and focuses on the myth - always building on that myth.

We have no effective strategy in this cultural war. To distribute "fact sheets" will make us look silly, and will actually serve to re- enforce the myth building. Our strategy has to be to take the long term view and fight the cultural war on its own territory.

We need to become aware of the importance of "heroes". We need to find some of our own heroes, such as the (private) security guards who have died preventing suicide / homicide bombers from getting to targets. How many lives did they save? We need to write plays about them, and we need to feel comfortable to make our heroes "larger than life". That's what heroes are.

Once we have a foot in the cultural war door we can speak to their myths much more effectively: We can say [obviously in a subtle way] "Our heroes saved lives, and helped the cause for which they were fighting. Your heroes on the other hand never actually benefited the cause for which they fought, they never benefited the Palestinian people."

To be able to the make the accusation: "Your hero died for nothing" is a mortal wound to the myth.

I DO apologise for being so verbose and so negative, but it is becoming more important than ever for our side to start fighting the cultural war, which is being won hands down by the Left.