IN MEMORIUM
Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Rafah
This day in 2003, the IDF killed American activist Rachel Corrie as she defended homes in Rafah from destruction. As Israel threatens to invade the city, a volunteer who stood alongside Rachel writes on her legacy — a call for steadfast solidarity with Gazans.
Rachel Corrie, then twenty-three, speaks during a mock trial of US president George W. Bush on March 5, 2003 in Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
(Abid Katib / Getty Images)
Today there may be no town on Earth denser with misery and foreboding than Rafah, pushing up against Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Since mid-October, Israeli forces have already bludgeoned their way through Gaza City and Khan Younis, massacring, destroying homes, and leaving starvation and terror in their wake. More than one million Palestinians fled south to Rafah, swelling its population to seven times its earlier size.
But now, Israel’s sights are set on Rafah itself — threatening a devastating invasion.
Rafah is today a sprawling city of canvas and plastic sheeting as much as concrete; cold and often sodden, hungry and distraught. Disease is spreading, as people barter what little food they have for medicine, and women tear scraps from tents to use as sanitary towels. Orphans — there may be as many as ten thousand in Rafah — fend as best they can.
Last year, Israel dropped leaflets over Khan Younis telling Palestinians to go to “shelters” in Rafah, to escape the fighting. But there are no shelters, and there has been no escape. Early in the war, a friend lost thirty-five members of his extended family in a single air strike on the town. Most were women and children.
More frequent than attacks on Rafah itself, the sound of air strikes echo from the north, an ominous reminder that the worst may yet be to come.
Last month, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that a failure to invade Rafah would be tantamount to his country’s defeat, and that he would order an invasion even if all the Israeli hostages were released.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said that Washington will not support an invasion of Rafah without a “clear” plan to protect civilians, and that no plan has been provided yet. Israeli officials are reported to be working on a scheme to transfer Palestinians in Rafah to “humanitarian islands” to the north — where, already, food and medicine are scarcer still, and people have starved to death.
President Joe Biden has said that an invasion of Rafah would be a “red line,” but promised no consequences if Israel crosses that red line, as it has crossed so many others. Netanyahu, as he has before, responded with contempt: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them,” he said.
BY TOM DALE
Tom Dale is a writer who has worked in civilian protection, conflict analysis, and journalism in the Middle East. Follow his work at @tom_d_.
JACOBIN
03.16.2024
JACOBIN
03.16.2024
Today there may be no town on Earth denser with misery and foreboding than Rafah, pushing up against Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Since mid-October, Israeli forces have already bludgeoned their way through Gaza City and Khan Younis, massacring, destroying homes, and leaving starvation and terror in their wake. More than one million Palestinians fled south to Rafah, swelling its population to seven times its earlier size.
But now, Israel’s sights are set on Rafah itself — threatening a devastating invasion.
Rafah is today a sprawling city of canvas and plastic sheeting as much as concrete; cold and often sodden, hungry and distraught. Disease is spreading, as people barter what little food they have for medicine, and women tear scraps from tents to use as sanitary towels. Orphans — there may be as many as ten thousand in Rafah — fend as best they can.
Last year, Israel dropped leaflets over Khan Younis telling Palestinians to go to “shelters” in Rafah, to escape the fighting. But there are no shelters, and there has been no escape. Early in the war, a friend lost thirty-five members of his extended family in a single air strike on the town. Most were women and children.
More frequent than attacks on Rafah itself, the sound of air strikes echo from the north, an ominous reminder that the worst may yet be to come.
Last month, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that a failure to invade Rafah would be tantamount to his country’s defeat, and that he would order an invasion even if all the Israeli hostages were released.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said that Washington will not support an invasion of Rafah without a “clear” plan to protect civilians, and that no plan has been provided yet. Israeli officials are reported to be working on a scheme to transfer Palestinians in Rafah to “humanitarian islands” to the north — where, already, food and medicine are scarcer still, and people have starved to death.
President Joe Biden has said that an invasion of Rafah would be a “red line,” but promised no consequences if Israel crosses that red line, as it has crossed so many others. Netanyahu, as he has before, responded with contempt: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them,” he said.
“Razed and Bullet-Riddled and Bare”
At the height of the second intifada, in 2002–03, I lived in Rafah as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization that supports nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Among my colleagues was Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer from Olympia, Washington State, in the United States, with a zany sense of humor that belied a seriousness about life — and the purpose of it — that I would not fully understand until reading her writing years later. Later to join the group was Tom Hurndall, a talented photographer who was shot through the head by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper in April 2003, and died the next year after a nine-month coma
.
Rachel Corrie. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)
Rafah, even then, was “razed and bullet-riddled and bare,” as Rachel put it in a message to her parents. We spent most nights in the houses of families near the border with Egypt. Israel had been creating an empty strip of land there, demolishing homes to create a free-fire zone, and so a tactical advantage for their troops who occupied positions along the border. Sometimes they warned families to leave with bullhorns. Sometimes they shot into the homes until the families fled. And at any moment of day or night, demolition or not, they might rake the homes on the border’s edge with gunfire.
Not every bullet fired at a wall penetrates the building — but some do, especially those fired from more powerful weapons. Everyone who stayed at our friend Abu Jamil’s house, including Rachel, could not but notice, as they played with his children, the pockmarks left by bullets that struck the interior wall, at head height, over the kitchen sink.
When Palestinians called us, we used to go out to protest Israel’s armored bulldozers as they worked along the border strip, watching them and trying to intercede if they moved to demolish a home. We slowed them down a few times, made it more awkward, gave a family here or there a respite of a few days, or weeks. Perhaps we dragged the global spotlight onto that strip of land more frequently than if we hadn’t been there. But the demolition rumbled on. And the world had other preoccupations: the invasion of Iraq was looming
Rafah, even then, was “razed and bullet-riddled and bare,” as Rachel put it in a message to her parents. We spent most nights in the houses of families near the border with Egypt. Israel had been creating an empty strip of land there, demolishing homes to create a free-fire zone, and so a tactical advantage for their troops who occupied positions along the border. Sometimes they warned families to leave with bullhorns. Sometimes they shot into the homes until the families fled. And at any moment of day or night, demolition or not, they might rake the homes on the border’s edge with gunfire.
Not every bullet fired at a wall penetrates the building — but some do, especially those fired from more powerful weapons. Everyone who stayed at our friend Abu Jamil’s house, including Rachel, could not but notice, as they played with his children, the pockmarks left by bullets that struck the interior wall, at head height, over the kitchen sink.
When Palestinians called us, we used to go out to protest Israel’s armored bulldozers as they worked along the border strip, watching them and trying to intercede if they moved to demolish a home. We slowed them down a few times, made it more awkward, gave a family here or there a respite of a few days, or weeks. Perhaps we dragged the global spotlight onto that strip of land more frequently than if we hadn’t been there. But the demolition rumbled on. And the world had other preoccupations: the invasion of Iraq was looming
.
Cynthia and Craig Corrie, parents of Rachel, with the Nasrallah family. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)
On March 16, 2003, a little after 5:00 p.m., I watched as one of Israel’s US-made bulldozers, huge and hulking, turned toward the house of Dr Samir Nasrallah and his young family. Rachel, a friend of Dr Samir’s, placed herself between the bulldozer and the house. As the bulldozer started toward her, it began to build up a roiling mound of earth in front of its blade. As the mound reached Rachel, she began to climb it, struggling to keep her footing on the soft earth, steadying herself with her hands, until her head was mostly over the level of the blade. The driver might have looked her in the eye. But he ploughed on, and she began to lose her footing.
A few weeks before that day, Rachel had a dream about falling, which she recorded in her journal:
. . . falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react . . . And I heard, “I can’t die, I can’t die,” again and again in my head.
The soil on the Rafah border, an uneven mixture of clay and sand, has a warm hue, not so different from that of the Utah cliffs. From across the years, like much of Rachel’s writing, the nightmare seems to have the quality of a premonition.
Try though she did, Rachel could not keep her footing; the bulldozer pushed on, it dragged her under, pushed her into the earth, crushed her insides. She died as I held her hands in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital. In my initial account of the event, written two days later, I noted that ten Palestinians had been killed across Gaza since Rachel, largely without notice beyond the enclave itself.
On March 16, 2003, a little after 5:00 p.m., I watched as one of Israel’s US-made bulldozers, huge and hulking, turned toward the house of Dr Samir Nasrallah and his young family. Rachel, a friend of Dr Samir’s, placed herself between the bulldozer and the house. As the bulldozer started toward her, it began to build up a roiling mound of earth in front of its blade. As the mound reached Rachel, she began to climb it, struggling to keep her footing on the soft earth, steadying herself with her hands, until her head was mostly over the level of the blade. The driver might have looked her in the eye. But he ploughed on, and she began to lose her footing.
A few weeks before that day, Rachel had a dream about falling, which she recorded in her journal:
. . . falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react . . . And I heard, “I can’t die, I can’t die,” again and again in my head.
The soil on the Rafah border, an uneven mixture of clay and sand, has a warm hue, not so different from that of the Utah cliffs. From across the years, like much of Rachel’s writing, the nightmare seems to have the quality of a premonition.
Try though she did, Rachel could not keep her footing; the bulldozer pushed on, it dragged her under, pushed her into the earth, crushed her insides. She died as I held her hands in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital. In my initial account of the event, written two days later, I noted that ten Palestinians had been killed across Gaza since Rachel, largely without notice beyond the enclave itself.
Rachel Corrie stands in front of an IDF bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, on the day she was killed. (Courtesy of ISM Palestine)
My own friendship with Rachel aside, there is a discomfort in relating this that it is necessary to acknowledge, especially today, in the light of the devastation that Rafah faces. Part of our aim, all those years ago, was to exploit a racist structure of violence, and the racist structure of attention that sits alongside it, in order to undermine those same structures. Some people might believe that such an attempt was always quixotic, or that any bid to exploit such a racist structure, such as our effort to pull international eyes to Gaza, is inevitably to affirm that structure.
Regardless, having made my choice, more than two decades ago, I am committed. Whenever I am asked to speak about Rachel, I do so, not only to honor a friend, but on the theory that perhaps her story is a way to render comprehensible to some people, far from Palestine, broader truths about the violence of occupation, and the politics that make that violence possible. And that those truths lead us ultimately back to Palestinians, and back to Rafah. I believe they lead other places too.
Israel’s military operates under the assumption of impunity. So, when some exceptional event, such as the killing of a non-Palestinian, raises the prospect of accountability, the system is ill prepared to respond. The result is often a series of bizarre lies. In Rachel’s case, the authorities could have stuck to disputing details of our eyewitness testimonies. Instead, they also fabricated the claim that Rachel had “hid behind an earth embankment” and was hit by a falling concrete slab. Our photographs of the scene, both before and after Rachel was killed, showed that she was standing in open ground.
In a familiar pattern, the official response was, in approximate order: we didn’t do it, we did it but it wasn’t our fault, even if it was our fault we aren’t liable, and anyway they were terrorists. The IDF’s commander for the southern Gaza strip at the time of the killing told a Haifa court, presumably with a straight face, that “a terror organisation sent Rachel Corrie to obstruct IDF soldiers. I am saying this in definite knowledge.” Observers of the current war will recall a series of similarly “definite” pronouncements.
Israel’s Impunity Is an American Export
Volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines have always been at the heart of the internationalist tradition. And that remains true today, whether accompanying shepherds and olive-pickers in the hills of the West Bank, running supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the war with Russia, giving medical support to the revolutionaries of Myanmar, or fighting the so-called Islamic State group alongside the People’s Protection Units in northeastern Syria. These endeavors, and the people who undertake them, shouldn’t be idealized. But the deep solidarity and connection they embody are unique.The solidarity of volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends.
Still, this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. And it doesn’t need to be. The solidarity of volunteers needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends. That’s something most people can get involved in somehow. In the case of Palestine, it starts by building public support and political pressure toward a cease-fire and a halt to military aid to Israel. That includes unrelenting pressure on Biden and the defense of congressional advocates of a cease-fire from those who want to punish their stance.
The United States underwrites Israel’s occupation through massive military and financial aid, and it is underwriting the present war on Gaza. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official, told the Washington Post that the administration had facilitated “an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support.”
The result, always painfully evident in Rafah, is that Israel’s impunity is an American export. But a withdrawal of support will, in all likelihood, not be enough. Sanctions designed to coerce the recognition of Palestinians’ fundamental rights will be necessary. They will need to go far beyond targeting individual settlers or their supporters.
The call for sanctions is a direct challenge to the main, unspoken tenet of US policy toward Israel. Biden and his subordinates will speak about the need for a Palestinian state, and the need for Israel to show restraint. But their main principle, which has held absolute for three decades and was predominant for decades before that, is that Israel must never be forced to make such concessions. Israel may be cajoled, flattered, persuaded, and nudged, but never compelled. The result is that Palestine is held in a permanent state of exception.
A relative of Dr Nasrallah, the pharmacist whose family home Rachel was defending when she was killed, told me that he felt as though Rafah had been sucked into a “black hole, where international rules do not apply, and the world cannot see or feel us.”
He describes returning home one afternoon to a scene of carnage, the aftermath of an air strike on a neighboring building, in which at least two families were entirely wiped out and another lost two children. (Friends of the Nasrallahs are raising funds to help them out of harm’s way.) The relative, who asked that his name not be used, said that it was now common to see men breaking down in tears at the slightest defeat, unable to provide for their wives or children. “We speak,” he said, “about a fine line between life and death.”
An invasion of Rafah, which may be several weeks away, would be a disaster “beyond imagining,” United Nations doctors say. As Rachel put it a few weeks before she was killed: “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
My own friendship with Rachel aside, there is a discomfort in relating this that it is necessary to acknowledge, especially today, in the light of the devastation that Rafah faces. Part of our aim, all those years ago, was to exploit a racist structure of violence, and the racist structure of attention that sits alongside it, in order to undermine those same structures. Some people might believe that such an attempt was always quixotic, or that any bid to exploit such a racist structure, such as our effort to pull international eyes to Gaza, is inevitably to affirm that structure.
Regardless, having made my choice, more than two decades ago, I am committed. Whenever I am asked to speak about Rachel, I do so, not only to honor a friend, but on the theory that perhaps her story is a way to render comprehensible to some people, far from Palestine, broader truths about the violence of occupation, and the politics that make that violence possible. And that those truths lead us ultimately back to Palestinians, and back to Rafah. I believe they lead other places too.
Israel’s military operates under the assumption of impunity. So, when some exceptional event, such as the killing of a non-Palestinian, raises the prospect of accountability, the system is ill prepared to respond. The result is often a series of bizarre lies. In Rachel’s case, the authorities could have stuck to disputing details of our eyewitness testimonies. Instead, they also fabricated the claim that Rachel had “hid behind an earth embankment” and was hit by a falling concrete slab. Our photographs of the scene, both before and after Rachel was killed, showed that she was standing in open ground.
In a familiar pattern, the official response was, in approximate order: we didn’t do it, we did it but it wasn’t our fault, even if it was our fault we aren’t liable, and anyway they were terrorists. The IDF’s commander for the southern Gaza strip at the time of the killing told a Haifa court, presumably with a straight face, that “a terror organisation sent Rachel Corrie to obstruct IDF soldiers. I am saying this in definite knowledge.” Observers of the current war will recall a series of similarly “definite” pronouncements.
Israel’s Impunity Is an American Export
Volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines have always been at the heart of the internationalist tradition. And that remains true today, whether accompanying shepherds and olive-pickers in the hills of the West Bank, running supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the war with Russia, giving medical support to the revolutionaries of Myanmar, or fighting the so-called Islamic State group alongside the People’s Protection Units in northeastern Syria. These endeavors, and the people who undertake them, shouldn’t be idealized. But the deep solidarity and connection they embody are unique.The solidarity of volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends.
Still, this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. And it doesn’t need to be. The solidarity of volunteers needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends. That’s something most people can get involved in somehow. In the case of Palestine, it starts by building public support and political pressure toward a cease-fire and a halt to military aid to Israel. That includes unrelenting pressure on Biden and the defense of congressional advocates of a cease-fire from those who want to punish their stance.
The United States underwrites Israel’s occupation through massive military and financial aid, and it is underwriting the present war on Gaza. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official, told the Washington Post that the administration had facilitated “an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support.”
The result, always painfully evident in Rafah, is that Israel’s impunity is an American export. But a withdrawal of support will, in all likelihood, not be enough. Sanctions designed to coerce the recognition of Palestinians’ fundamental rights will be necessary. They will need to go far beyond targeting individual settlers or their supporters.
The call for sanctions is a direct challenge to the main, unspoken tenet of US policy toward Israel. Biden and his subordinates will speak about the need for a Palestinian state, and the need for Israel to show restraint. But their main principle, which has held absolute for three decades and was predominant for decades before that, is that Israel must never be forced to make such concessions. Israel may be cajoled, flattered, persuaded, and nudged, but never compelled. The result is that Palestine is held in a permanent state of exception.
A relative of Dr Nasrallah, the pharmacist whose family home Rachel was defending when she was killed, told me that he felt as though Rafah had been sucked into a “black hole, where international rules do not apply, and the world cannot see or feel us.”
He describes returning home one afternoon to a scene of carnage, the aftermath of an air strike on a neighboring building, in which at least two families were entirely wiped out and another lost two children. (Friends of the Nasrallahs are raising funds to help them out of harm’s way.) The relative, who asked that his name not be used, said that it was now common to see men breaking down in tears at the slightest defeat, unable to provide for their wives or children. “We speak,” he said, “about a fine line between life and death.”
An invasion of Rafah, which may be several weeks away, would be a disaster “beyond imagining,” United Nations doctors say. As Rachel put it a few weeks before she was killed: “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
Killing of Rachel Corrie: A life given in the struggle for Palestinian freedom
US peace activist Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family's home 21 years ago
Ikrame Imane Kouachi |16.03.2024 -
JERUSALEM
In southern Gaza 21 years ago today, American activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer she was trying to stop from reducing the home of a Palestinian family to rubble.
Through her activism in Gaza, Corrie helped bring to light many rights violations perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, becoming a symbol of the Palestinian cause.
Corrie, who devoted her life to defending the rights of Palestinians, was very much taken aback by what was happening under Israeli occupation.
In an email to her mother, Corrie wrote: “It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States.”
She added: “I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons.
“I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere.”
An Israeli investigation concluded that her death was an accident, in findings that has satisfied neither Corrie's parents, nor many others worldwide.
In 2005, Craig and Cindy Corrie filed a civil lawsuit against Israel, asserting that she had either been intentionally killed or that the soldiers had showed criminal negligence. They sued for a symbolic one US dollar in damages.
An Israeli court rejected the lawsuit in 2012, ruling that the Israeli government was not responsible for her death.
The ruling was slammed by human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as activists.
Corrie has since become a symbol of the fight for Palestinian rights.
An Irish aid ship that set out for Gaza in 2010 named itself after Rachel and her story has been told in several documentary films about the plight of Palestinians.
Rachel Corrie
On a Sunday 21 years ago, the 23-year-old American woman was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in the southern town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Since then, she has become an icon of solidarity with the Palestinians.
Born on April 10, 1979, in Olympia, Washington, Rachel Corrie had dedicated her life to human rights, defending Palestinian rights in particular.
In 2003, she traveled to Palestine for her senior-year college assignment — to connect her hometown with Rafah, as part of a sister cities project.
During her stay, she engaged with members of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian non-governmental organization.
There, on March 16, she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer, staging a peaceful protest to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition.
She was crushed to death when the bulldozer driver ran her over, according to witnesses.
Gazans received news of her murder with grief and horror, describing her as a "martyr" and staging a massive funeral for the American activist.
Near the home Corrie was protesting to save, Palestinians launched an annual sports championship in her memory.
Many films, plays, and books were written in memory of Corrie, whose name was given to many schools, hospitals and newborn children in Palestine.
The letters Corrie wrote to her family from Palestine were compiled and published as a book with the title, Let Me Stand Alone.
*Writing by Ikram Kouachi
US peace activist Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family's home 21 years ago
Ikrame Imane Kouachi |16.03.2024 -
JERUSALEM
In southern Gaza 21 years ago today, American activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer she was trying to stop from reducing the home of a Palestinian family to rubble.
Through her activism in Gaza, Corrie helped bring to light many rights violations perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, becoming a symbol of the Palestinian cause.
Corrie, who devoted her life to defending the rights of Palestinians, was very much taken aback by what was happening under Israeli occupation.
In an email to her mother, Corrie wrote: “It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States.”
She added: “I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons.
“I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere.”
An Israeli investigation concluded that her death was an accident, in findings that has satisfied neither Corrie's parents, nor many others worldwide.
In 2005, Craig and Cindy Corrie filed a civil lawsuit against Israel, asserting that she had either been intentionally killed or that the soldiers had showed criminal negligence. They sued for a symbolic one US dollar in damages.
An Israeli court rejected the lawsuit in 2012, ruling that the Israeli government was not responsible for her death.
The ruling was slammed by human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as activists.
Corrie has since become a symbol of the fight for Palestinian rights.
An Irish aid ship that set out for Gaza in 2010 named itself after Rachel and her story has been told in several documentary films about the plight of Palestinians.
Rachel Corrie
On a Sunday 21 years ago, the 23-year-old American woman was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in the southern town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Since then, she has become an icon of solidarity with the Palestinians.
Born on April 10, 1979, in Olympia, Washington, Rachel Corrie had dedicated her life to human rights, defending Palestinian rights in particular.
In 2003, she traveled to Palestine for her senior-year college assignment — to connect her hometown with Rafah, as part of a sister cities project.
During her stay, she engaged with members of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian non-governmental organization.
There, on March 16, she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer, staging a peaceful protest to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition.
She was crushed to death when the bulldozer driver ran her over, according to witnesses.
Gazans received news of her murder with grief and horror, describing her as a "martyr" and staging a massive funeral for the American activist.
Near the home Corrie was protesting to save, Palestinians launched an annual sports championship in her memory.
Many films, plays, and books were written in memory of Corrie, whose name was given to many schools, hospitals and newborn children in Palestine.
The letters Corrie wrote to her family from Palestine were compiled and published as a book with the title, Let Me Stand Alone.
*Writing by Ikram Kouachi
Everybody’s fight’: Palestinians hail the sacrifice of Corrie, Bushnell
People of colour cite a tradition of white allies risking everything to help them.
People of colour cite a tradition of white allies risking everything to help them.
Lebanese anti-American protesters display a poster of peace activist Rachel Corrie during a demonstration near the US Embassy in Aukar northeast of Beirut, Lebanon
[File: Bilal Hussein/AP Photo]
By Benay Blend
Published On 16 Mar 2024
Twenty-one years ago today, an Israeli soldier drove an 80,000-pound (26,287kg) bulldozer over a 23-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington. Her name was Rachel Corrie, and she was part of an international team of peace activists who had volunteered to protect Palestinian homes from demolition by Israeli settlers. The US magazine, Mother Jones, gave this account of her final hours:
“At two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie received a cell-phone call from a comrade in the International Solidarity Movement. ‘The Israelis are back,’ she told Corrie. ‘Get over here right away. I think they’re heading for Dr. Samir’s house.’ The news alarmed Corrie. Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah’s house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers, clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months; Nasrallah’s abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.
Certain that the pharmacist’s house was about to be razed, Corrie caught a taxi to the Hai as-Salam neighbourhood. The paved roads of downtown Rafah gave way to sandy tracks lined with scrabbly olive groves, mosques, modest houses, and dirt pitches where Corrie often played football – badly but enthusiastically – with local youths. At 2:30pm, a neighbour of Nasrallah’s named Abu Ahmed caught sight of the activist hurrying past his house. Slight, hazel-eyed, with high cheekbones and dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she carried a megaphone in one hand and an orange fluorescent jacket in the other. “Come inside and have some tea,” he urged her. But Corrie told him she did not have time, and he watched as she disappeared around the corner of his house, heading towards the roar of machinery.
This much has never been contested: placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah’s house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death—her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured.”
Witnesses said that Corrie’s death was no accident; the bulldozer’s operator had deliberately run over her, then put the vehicle in reverse.
Palestinians in Gaza hailed her as a “martyr”, holding a massive funeral for her, dedicating an annual football tournament to her memory, renaming a street in the West Bank for her, and building a shrine to her strewn with wreaths and olive branches.
On the fourth anniversary of her death, Palestinian youth activists organised a permanent art exhibit of Corrie’s personal belongings at a government site in Rafah, from which they hung placards that expressed sentiments such as “Rachel Corrie died as a Palestinian” and “We welcome her in the highest esteem and honour.”
Every year, on the anniversary of her death, Arab newspapers commemorate her sacrifice, and Palestinian scholars and diplomats pay homage to her.
By Benay Blend
Published On 16 Mar 2024
Twenty-one years ago today, an Israeli soldier drove an 80,000-pound (26,287kg) bulldozer over a 23-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington. Her name was Rachel Corrie, and she was part of an international team of peace activists who had volunteered to protect Palestinian homes from demolition by Israeli settlers. The US magazine, Mother Jones, gave this account of her final hours:
“At two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie received a cell-phone call from a comrade in the International Solidarity Movement. ‘The Israelis are back,’ she told Corrie. ‘Get over here right away. I think they’re heading for Dr. Samir’s house.’ The news alarmed Corrie. Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah’s house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers, clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months; Nasrallah’s abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.
Certain that the pharmacist’s house was about to be razed, Corrie caught a taxi to the Hai as-Salam neighbourhood. The paved roads of downtown Rafah gave way to sandy tracks lined with scrabbly olive groves, mosques, modest houses, and dirt pitches where Corrie often played football – badly but enthusiastically – with local youths. At 2:30pm, a neighbour of Nasrallah’s named Abu Ahmed caught sight of the activist hurrying past his house. Slight, hazel-eyed, with high cheekbones and dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she carried a megaphone in one hand and an orange fluorescent jacket in the other. “Come inside and have some tea,” he urged her. But Corrie told him she did not have time, and he watched as she disappeared around the corner of his house, heading towards the roar of machinery.
This much has never been contested: placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah’s house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death—her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured.”
Witnesses said that Corrie’s death was no accident; the bulldozer’s operator had deliberately run over her, then put the vehicle in reverse.
Palestinians in Gaza hailed her as a “martyr”, holding a massive funeral for her, dedicating an annual football tournament to her memory, renaming a street in the West Bank for her, and building a shrine to her strewn with wreaths and olive branches.
On the fourth anniversary of her death, Palestinian youth activists organised a permanent art exhibit of Corrie’s personal belongings at a government site in Rafah, from which they hung placards that expressed sentiments such as “Rachel Corrie died as a Palestinian” and “We welcome her in the highest esteem and honour.”
Every year, on the anniversary of her death, Arab newspapers commemorate her sacrifice, and Palestinian scholars and diplomats pay homage to her.
A United States Marines jacket, flowers and candles are placed outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington at a memorial for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty United States Air Force member who died after setting himself on fire outside the embassy in an act of protest against the war in Gaza
[Bonnie Cash/Reuters]
‘Sacrificed everything for Palestinians’
In a YouTube video posted Friday, Lowkey, a British hip hop artist of Iraqi ancestry cited Corrie’s death to rebuke narratives that date the current conflict only back to Hamas’ attack on Israeli settlers last year, saying, “Rachel Corrie died as a US citizen defending Palestinian homes in Gaza. . . this didn’t begin on October 7th. Rachel Corrie represented the conscience of humanity. Through her, that basic aversion to watching human suffering was channelled. She gave her life to the Palestinian cause.”
Corrie’s sacrifice has special resonance this year, however, not just because of Israel’s five-month siege and blockade of Gaza, but because of the equally shocking death of Aaron Bushnell nearly three weeks ago.
On the afternoon of February 25, Bushnell, dressed in his US Air Force uniform, livestreamed himself while walking to the Israeli embassy in Washington while calmly declaring his intentions.
“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
Once he had reached the front steps outside the embassy, he poured a flammable liquid atop his buzz-cut head, lit himself on fire, and shouted “Free Palestine!” several times before collapsing in a heap onto the pavement.
As was the case following Corrie’s death 21 years earlier, Palestinians and antiwar activists hailed the 25-year-old Bushnell as a “martyr”.
In a statement published on Telegram a few days after his death, Hamas wrote that the US pilot ” immortalised his name as a defender of human values and the oppression of the suffering Palestinian people because of the American administration and its unjust policies”. Continuing, Hamas wrote admiringly of Bushnell’s effort to highlight the “massacres and Zionist genocide” against Palestinians.
Similarly, the mayor of the Palestinian town of Jericho, Abdul Karim Sidr, named a street for Bushnell only days after his death, declaring that he “sacrificed everything” for Palestinians.
“We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. There were no social, economic or political ties between us. What we share is a love for freedom and a desire to stand against these attacks [on Gaza],” Sidro told a small crowd assembled on the new Aaron Bushnell Road, which adjoins a street named after the iconic Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. In Yemen, Bushnell’s image can be seen on billboards across the capital city of Sanaa. And in Portland, Oregon, a group of US military veterans burned their uniforms in a gesture of solidarity with Bushnell.
Jericho City Councilman Amani Rayan, who grew up in Gaza and moved to the occupied West Bank to study when he was a teenager, told the Guardian newspaper: “He [Bushnell] sacrificed the most precious thing, whatever your beliefs. This man gave all his privileges for the children of Gaza.”
In his YouTube video released Friday, Lowkey noted that Bushnell was mocked, just as Corrie was ridiculed as a “pancake” by Israelis following her death. He said: And much in the same way that Rachel Corrie was mocked after his death, we saw an outpouring of fake posts– produced who knows where– so in his death Aaron Bushnell was smeared.”
Although the media in the US has suggested that Bushnell was suffering from depression or mental illness, Lowkey and others point to his words that indicate clearly that the motivation for his self-immolation was his concern for the Palestinians’ plight. In his will, he wrote, “If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.”
Said Lowkey, “What Aaron Bushnell and Rachel Corrie were responding to was a political system that has invested in the genocide of Palestinians and they stated their objection to that relationship with their bodies. These are wounds of humanity; these are a testament to the universality of the Palestinian cause. The holding of the picture of Aaron Bushnell from Gaza to Yemen pays tribute to the fact that the Palestinian cause is not a cause for one group of people only; it is a cause for all of humanity.”
‘Sacrificed everything for Palestinians’
In a YouTube video posted Friday, Lowkey, a British hip hop artist of Iraqi ancestry cited Corrie’s death to rebuke narratives that date the current conflict only back to Hamas’ attack on Israeli settlers last year, saying, “Rachel Corrie died as a US citizen defending Palestinian homes in Gaza. . . this didn’t begin on October 7th. Rachel Corrie represented the conscience of humanity. Through her, that basic aversion to watching human suffering was channelled. She gave her life to the Palestinian cause.”
Corrie’s sacrifice has special resonance this year, however, not just because of Israel’s five-month siege and blockade of Gaza, but because of the equally shocking death of Aaron Bushnell nearly three weeks ago.
On the afternoon of February 25, Bushnell, dressed in his US Air Force uniform, livestreamed himself while walking to the Israeli embassy in Washington while calmly declaring his intentions.
“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
Once he had reached the front steps outside the embassy, he poured a flammable liquid atop his buzz-cut head, lit himself on fire, and shouted “Free Palestine!” several times before collapsing in a heap onto the pavement.
As was the case following Corrie’s death 21 years earlier, Palestinians and antiwar activists hailed the 25-year-old Bushnell as a “martyr”.
In a statement published on Telegram a few days after his death, Hamas wrote that the US pilot ” immortalised his name as a defender of human values and the oppression of the suffering Palestinian people because of the American administration and its unjust policies”. Continuing, Hamas wrote admiringly of Bushnell’s effort to highlight the “massacres and Zionist genocide” against Palestinians.
Similarly, the mayor of the Palestinian town of Jericho, Abdul Karim Sidr, named a street for Bushnell only days after his death, declaring that he “sacrificed everything” for Palestinians.
“We didn’t know him, and he didn’t know us. There were no social, economic or political ties between us. What we share is a love for freedom and a desire to stand against these attacks [on Gaza],” Sidro told a small crowd assembled on the new Aaron Bushnell Road, which adjoins a street named after the iconic Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. In Yemen, Bushnell’s image can be seen on billboards across the capital city of Sanaa. And in Portland, Oregon, a group of US military veterans burned their uniforms in a gesture of solidarity with Bushnell.
Jericho City Councilman Amani Rayan, who grew up in Gaza and moved to the occupied West Bank to study when he was a teenager, told the Guardian newspaper: “He [Bushnell] sacrificed the most precious thing, whatever your beliefs. This man gave all his privileges for the children of Gaza.”
In his YouTube video released Friday, Lowkey noted that Bushnell was mocked, just as Corrie was ridiculed as a “pancake” by Israelis following her death. He said: And much in the same way that Rachel Corrie was mocked after his death, we saw an outpouring of fake posts– produced who knows where– so in his death Aaron Bushnell was smeared.”
Although the media in the US has suggested that Bushnell was suffering from depression or mental illness, Lowkey and others point to his words that indicate clearly that the motivation for his self-immolation was his concern for the Palestinians’ plight. In his will, he wrote, “If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.”
Said Lowkey, “What Aaron Bushnell and Rachel Corrie were responding to was a political system that has invested in the genocide of Palestinians and they stated their objection to that relationship with their bodies. These are wounds of humanity; these are a testament to the universality of the Palestinian cause. The holding of the picture of Aaron Bushnell from Gaza to Yemen pays tribute to the fact that the Palestinian cause is not a cause for one group of people only; it is a cause for all of humanity.”
A man holds up a sign during a ‘Muslims in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza’ rally in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles, California July 25, 2014
[Lucy Nicholson/Reuters]
A tradition of white allyship
Corrie’s parents say that their daughter calculated – wrongly – that her white skin would protect her in a way that it did not immunize Arabs, although on the same day that she died, nine Palestinians were killed, including a four-year-old girl and a 90-year-old man, with none meriting so much as a mention in the Western news media. Human Rights Monitor reported that, during Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli tanks have “deliberately” run over several Palestinians defending their homes or land, fatally injuring them. The Western media has largely ignored these deaths.
Commenting on social media in recent weeks, many Americans have noted that questioning the motives of white allies who articulate solidarity with racialised groups is consistent with a US tradition in which the media typically portrays white dissidents – from the abolitionist John Brown to the slain civil rights activists David Goodman and Michael Schwerner – as demented, naive or cynical in an effort to delegitimise resistance movements. Similarly, Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife who was killed while shuttling African American volunteers registering voters in Selma Alabama – was called a “whore” by some whites and the late director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover, said that she was having sex with her Black passenger when she was killed.
That signals to supporters of both Corrie and Bushnell that acts of solidarity, especially when it is interracial, jeopardise imperialist projects by beginning to change hearts and minds. At a memorial for Bushnell, Mike Prysner, an Iraqi war veteran, contextualised Bushnell within a long line of soldiers and veterans whose antiwar leadership helped end the war in Vietnam.
“It can again for Gaza,” Prysner said at a memorial for Bushnell.
In an interview, Rabab Abdulhadi, the Palestinian-born associate professor of ethnic studies, race and resistance studies and the founding director of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas studies at San Francisco State University, noted the proliferation and long history of solidarity movements, from Palestinians supporting Spaniards in the Spanish civil war against Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, the support of Palestinian resistance movements by African American activists such as Malcolm X, and Che Guevara’s visit to Palestine just months after the Cuban revolution toppled the US-backed government of Fulgencio Battista.
In an unpublished 2015 interview with a book author, Bernardine Dohrn, the leader of a radical, far-left organisation, the Weather Underground, said that her activism was inspired by seeing the news coverage of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was murdered by a mob of white men in Mississippi in 1955. She was struck, she said, by the fact that she was the same age as the boy whose mutilated body had been dragged from a swamp.
“It was one of the things that taught me that when white people say they hate violence”, she said, “they don’t really hate violence. What they really mean is that they hate violence against them. The whole idea behind the Weather Underground was, as we stated, to bring the [Vietnam] war home and have white people feel just a fraction of the violence that they were visiting on Black and brown people all over the world.”
The Weather Underground was formed as a response to the state’s assassination of the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, and is part of a tradition of white allies – sometimes violent – who emerged after World War II to provide material support to resistance movements by people of colour, and include the West German organisation, Rote Armee Fraktion (known as The Red Army Faction or the Baader-Meinhof group), as well as white, Jewish anti-apartheid fighters such as Ronnie Kasrils, Ruth First (who was assassinated by apartheid-era security forces) and her husband, Joe Slovo, the head of South Africa’s communist party. So beloved was Slovo, in fact, that his 1995 funeral procession in the all-Black Johannesburg township of Soweto was long regarded as the largest in Soweto’s history until it was surpassed in 2018 upon the death of Winnie Mandela.
While Liuzzo was not as radical as Slovo, she might be as beloved by Blacks in the US as Slovo is by Black South Africans. Watching televised accounts of law enforcement’s savage attack on the more than 500 peaceful, African American protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, the 39-year-old mother of five was moved to tears while watching Martin Luther King’s televised appeal for people of conscience to help register Black voters, and decided at that moment to heed King’s call and make the trip to Selma in her ’63 Oldsmobile.
Shuttling a Black volunteer from Montgomery to Selma on the night of March 25th, 1965, Liuzzo was accosted by a car carrying four Ku Klux Klan members, and shot dead, her car veering into a ditch.
On the afternoon she left for Alabama, though, her husband, a business agent for the Teamsters, arrived home to find his wife packing a suitcase. He tried desperately to dissuade her from going, but she would have none of it. As she opened the front door to their home to leave, suitcase in hand, he made one final, desperate plea.
“Vi,” he said, “this isn’t your fight.”
“This,” she said, “is everybody’s fight.” And with that, she turned to walk out the door, heading south.
A tradition of white allyship
Corrie’s parents say that their daughter calculated – wrongly – that her white skin would protect her in a way that it did not immunize Arabs, although on the same day that she died, nine Palestinians were killed, including a four-year-old girl and a 90-year-old man, with none meriting so much as a mention in the Western news media. Human Rights Monitor reported that, during Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli tanks have “deliberately” run over several Palestinians defending their homes or land, fatally injuring them. The Western media has largely ignored these deaths.
Commenting on social media in recent weeks, many Americans have noted that questioning the motives of white allies who articulate solidarity with racialised groups is consistent with a US tradition in which the media typically portrays white dissidents – from the abolitionist John Brown to the slain civil rights activists David Goodman and Michael Schwerner – as demented, naive or cynical in an effort to delegitimise resistance movements. Similarly, Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife who was killed while shuttling African American volunteers registering voters in Selma Alabama – was called a “whore” by some whites and the late director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover, said that she was having sex with her Black passenger when she was killed.
That signals to supporters of both Corrie and Bushnell that acts of solidarity, especially when it is interracial, jeopardise imperialist projects by beginning to change hearts and minds. At a memorial for Bushnell, Mike Prysner, an Iraqi war veteran, contextualised Bushnell within a long line of soldiers and veterans whose antiwar leadership helped end the war in Vietnam.
“It can again for Gaza,” Prysner said at a memorial for Bushnell.
In an interview, Rabab Abdulhadi, the Palestinian-born associate professor of ethnic studies, race and resistance studies and the founding director of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas studies at San Francisco State University, noted the proliferation and long history of solidarity movements, from Palestinians supporting Spaniards in the Spanish civil war against Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, the support of Palestinian resistance movements by African American activists such as Malcolm X, and Che Guevara’s visit to Palestine just months after the Cuban revolution toppled the US-backed government of Fulgencio Battista.
In an unpublished 2015 interview with a book author, Bernardine Dohrn, the leader of a radical, far-left organisation, the Weather Underground, said that her activism was inspired by seeing the news coverage of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was murdered by a mob of white men in Mississippi in 1955. She was struck, she said, by the fact that she was the same age as the boy whose mutilated body had been dragged from a swamp.
“It was one of the things that taught me that when white people say they hate violence”, she said, “they don’t really hate violence. What they really mean is that they hate violence against them. The whole idea behind the Weather Underground was, as we stated, to bring the [Vietnam] war home and have white people feel just a fraction of the violence that they were visiting on Black and brown people all over the world.”
The Weather Underground was formed as a response to the state’s assassination of the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, and is part of a tradition of white allies – sometimes violent – who emerged after World War II to provide material support to resistance movements by people of colour, and include the West German organisation, Rote Armee Fraktion (known as The Red Army Faction or the Baader-Meinhof group), as well as white, Jewish anti-apartheid fighters such as Ronnie Kasrils, Ruth First (who was assassinated by apartheid-era security forces) and her husband, Joe Slovo, the head of South Africa’s communist party. So beloved was Slovo, in fact, that his 1995 funeral procession in the all-Black Johannesburg township of Soweto was long regarded as the largest in Soweto’s history until it was surpassed in 2018 upon the death of Winnie Mandela.
While Liuzzo was not as radical as Slovo, she might be as beloved by Blacks in the US as Slovo is by Black South Africans. Watching televised accounts of law enforcement’s savage attack on the more than 500 peaceful, African American protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, the 39-year-old mother of five was moved to tears while watching Martin Luther King’s televised appeal for people of conscience to help register Black voters, and decided at that moment to heed King’s call and make the trip to Selma in her ’63 Oldsmobile.
Shuttling a Black volunteer from Montgomery to Selma on the night of March 25th, 1965, Liuzzo was accosted by a car carrying four Ku Klux Klan members, and shot dead, her car veering into a ditch.
On the afternoon she left for Alabama, though, her husband, a business agent for the Teamsters, arrived home to find his wife packing a suitcase. He tried desperately to dissuade her from going, but she would have none of it. As she opened the front door to their home to leave, suitcase in hand, he made one final, desperate plea.
“Vi,” he said, “this isn’t your fight.”
“This,” she said, “is everybody’s fight.” And with that, she turned to walk out the door, heading south.
'You are supporting Israel solely for the reason that they look like you. Light hair, light eyes'
A widely circulated video shows an activist being given two minutes to explain why she supports Palestine during an event at the Raleigh City Council in North Carolina, United States.
March 16, 2024
A widely circulated video shows an activist being given two minutes to explain why she supports Palestine during an event at the Raleigh City Council in North Carolina, United States.
March 16, 2024
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