Hero #037: Rachel Corrie … (04/27/16)
Rachel Corrie was an American peace activist and active member of a pro-Palestinian-liberation group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). She was killed by an Israeli Defense Forces armored bulldozer while trying to stop it from razing and destroying the private residences of several Palestinians in Rafah, a southern region of the Gaza Strip.
Rachel had gone to Gaza as part of her senior-year college assignment to connect her home-town with Rafah in a sister cities project. While there, she joined with International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activists in efforts to prevent the Israeli army’s demolition of Palestinian homes. Tragically, less than two months after her arrival (on March 16, 2003), Rachel was killed during an Israeli military operation after a three-hour confrontation between eight ISM activists and Israeli soldiers operating two armored bulldozers.
While pro-Israeli eyewitnesses say that the bulldozer operator could not see her and ran over her by accident, the other seven peaceful protestors claimed that Rachel’s entire torso was up over the blade of the dozer, that her face was only a few meters away from the operator, and that she was waving her arms and shouting through a bullhorn at him just before she was crushed. As ISM activist Richard Purssell testified, “They began demolishing one house and we called out to them and went into the house, so they backed down. During the entire confrontation they knew who we were and what we were doing. There were eight of us and we were simply standing in their way and shouting. Suddenly, they turned to a house they had started to demolish before, and I saw Rachel standing in the way of the front bulldozer.” Both human-rights activists and Palestinians noted that the demolitions had also been accompanied by gunfire from Israeli snipers. The director of Rafah’s hospital, Dr. Ali Moussa noted that 240 Palestinians, including 78 children, had been killed since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in 2001, “Every night there is shooting at houses in which children are sleeping, without any provocations from Palestinians.” The United Nations admitted that 582 Rafah homes have been demolished and 721 damaged, with 5,305 people thereby made homeless.
“There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t … If you talk about the cycle of violence, or mention “an eye for an eye,” you would be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of what it actually is: a largely unarmed people pitted against the fourth most powerful military in the world” ~ Rachel Corrie
“I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.” ~ Rachel Corrie
“We are all born and someday we’ll all die, most likely to some degree alone. And yet what if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?” ~ Rachel Corrie
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