My Name is Rachel Corrie, based on Rachel Corrie’s diaries and e-mail messages, is a first-person telling of Rachel’s idealism and hopes for peace. It is a highly polemical piece, based on the writings of one idealistic but incompletely-informed young woman. The play offers virtually no context or background on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead providing a one-sided recital of the Palestinian leadership’s perspective of the Mideast situation. Rachel sees Israel as an imperialistic state that will not make peace and treats the Palestinian people abhorrently. She describes the Palestinians, in contrast, as peaceful underdogs, following in the non-violent footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
In short, the play makes it appear as if Israel is the aggressor, the oppressor. In fact, during the time Corrie was in Gaza in the winter of 2003, the Palestinian terror war against Israel was already in its 30th month. Of the approximately 1,700 Arabs who had died in the violence up to that point, 53% were combatants, and another 13% were Palestinians killed by other Palestinians. But of the 650 Israelis already dead, 78% were civilians. Clearly the side deliberately targeting non-combatants--a war crime, not what Corrie and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who sponsored her, called "resistance"--was the Palestinian. The ISM claims to be operating in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and "Gandhian non-violence," but according to NGO Monitor, which tracks non-governmental organizations,"the ISM's blatant support for Palestinian incitement and rejectionism is the antithesis of a human rights organization."
One theater critic from London, Clive Davis, after seeing that city's production, wrote,
"An element of unvarnished propaganda comes to the fore. With no attempt made to set the violence in context, we are left with the impression of unarmed civilians (blameless Palestinians) being crushed by faceless militants (brutal Israelis). As Corrie jots down thoughts in her notebook and fires off e-mails to her parents, she declares that 'the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far I can tell, are engaged in Gandhian non-violent resistance.' Even the late Yassir Arafat might have blushed at that one."
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