Responsibility for Rachel Corrie's Death; Plenty to go Around:

This past March was the 16th anniversary of the untimely death of then-23-year-old Rachel Corrie, of Olympia, WA, a member of the ISM (International Solidarity Movement) and a student at Evergreen State College, in Rachel’s hometown. Along with other ISM members, Rachel Corrie travelled to Rafah, a city in the southernmost part of the Gaza
Strip, near the Egyptian border. After three days of basic training in non-violent resistance, and how to communicate with Israeli soldiers, Rachel and other ISM members stayed in Palestinian cities and villages to protect Palestinian civilians from house and other property demolitions by the Israeli military, as well as other human rights abuses.

On March 16th, 2003, after receiving a call from a fellow ISM member telling her that the Israeli military-operated bulldozers were going to demolish the house of a Palestinian pharmacist and his family, whose house she often stayed in, Rachel quickly took a taxi to the area. Supplanting herself between the bulldozer and Dr. Samir’s house, she knelt before the bulldozer, dressed in an orange vest to show she was an International, and a kaffeyeh. As the bulldozer kept piling dirt around Rachel, she kept climbing up on the mound of earth, until she was at eye level with the two Israeli soldiers in the bulldozer’s cockpit.

Unfortunately, Rachel’s efforts to stop the bulldozer from demolishing Dr. Samir’s house met with an unfortunate end. Rachel stumbled over the blade of the bulldozer, then fell underneath it. The driver of the bulldozer kept going, without stopping, despite her friends, who were standing off to the side, yelling at him to stop. He ran over and back up over Rachel twice, ultimately killing her. However, there is plenty of responsibility for her untimely and horrible death to go around.Israel should not be in Gaza, West Bank, or East Jerusalem in the first place. Those territories were never ever designated for them under the UN partition. Those areas belonged to the Palestinians. The fact that the driver of the bulldozer killed Rachel in cold blood was vicious. The fact that the United States, and the West, generally, has been complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation of the above mentioned territories is also disgraceful. Yet, at the same time, had the iSM operated in a larger arena, instead of letting Rachel stand singlely in front of Samir’s house, that probably would have saved her life, and she’d be alive today.