Rachel Corrie Was Not A ‘Human Animal’. Nor Are Palestinians.
Stories of resistance and resilience amid a brutal occupation
‘Human shield’
I’m here for other children. I’m here because I care. I’m here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger. I’m here because those people are mostly children.
We’ve got to understand that the poor are all around us and we’re ignoring them. We’ve got to understand that these deaths are preventable.
We’ve got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us. We’ve got to understand that they are us. We are them.
My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000. My dream is to give the poor a chance. My dream is to save the forty thousand people who die each day. My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.
These were the words of a little American girl in her fifth grade who cared about humanity. Rachel Corrie’s dream was to end hunger by 2000. Yet, in March 2003, at the age of only twenty-three, she would meet an untimely death in the most brutal and horrible manner imaginable. She would be crushed under an Israeli military Caterpillar bulldozer weighing over 60 tonnes in the Palestinian border town of Rafah.
Her crime? Rachel and her friends from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) “served as ‘human shields’ for leading terrorists in a way that endangered their lives”.
Well, that’s the Israeli version.
To most of us, she is a hero who stood up against a gigantic military bulldozer of an occupation force to prevent the unlawful demolition of the house of a local pharmacist, Samir Nasrallah. Rachel had a good relationship with Samir and his family and had even stayed at their place on occasions. She taught his son English, while he helped her learn Arabic.
She stood up against injustice and paid the ultimate price.
This incident took place well before Hamas won the elections in Gaza. This was Israel’s treatment of an unarmed peace activist who was a citizen of the US, Israel’s biggest ally and sponsor.
The US did nothing to provide justice to Rachel’s family over her death.
Rachel was treated worse than a ‘human animal’ because, allegedly, she served as a ‘human shield’.
If Israel can get away with such brutal murder of an American citizen, imagine what kind of atrocities it can commit against Palestinians and get away with.
‘Human animals’
Actually, Israel did not leave the matter to our imagination. It has openly declared and demonstrated to us the level and scale of violence it can inflict upon innocent Palestinians with complete impunity.
On 9 October 2023, after ordering a complete siege of Gaza, cutting off all essential supplies including food, water and fuel, the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said:
We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.
What have we seen since then?
The deadliest forms of missiles and bombs dropped on children, cutting them apart, burning them to ashes, or crushing them under rubble.
We have seen fathers carrying their children’s body parts in bags.
We have seen babies in ventilators left to die and rot in hospital beds.
We have seen children having shrapnel removed and amputations done on them without anaesthesia.
These children have been treated worse than ‘human animals’ because, allegedly, they are acting as ‘human shields’.
The Friday prayer
I occasionally deliver the Friday sermon in my local mosque in Melbourne. Two weeks into Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, it was my turn to lead the Friday prayer.
Before starting the sermon, I walk over to a man from Gaza who prays with us. He has two angelic boys — beautiful brown eyes and curly brown hair — both less than ten years old. They look very cute in their white thawb (robe) and taqiyah (skullcap) as they pray next to their dad.
A grim thought passes my mind. What would have happened to these beautiful little kids if they were still in Gaza?
I ask their father about his relatives in Gaza.
Alhamdulillah! he praises God as he tells me that his relatives are ‘ok’. By ‘ok’ he means none of them are dead yet. However, they have been displaced and their homes bombed.
In my sermon, I talk about the suffering of the Palestinians. I could not get myself to talk about some feel-good spiritual topic while innocent children are being bombed to bits.
After the prayer, another Palestinian man in the congregation asks my permission to say a few words to the small gathering of Muslims. I must have been visibly disturbed during my sermon as also, most likely, were others in the mosque. And perhaps the man could sense that.
As he stands up and speaks to us all, it feels like he is consoling the rest of us. He has relatives in both Gaza and the West Bank. He is the one who we would expect to be disturbed and depressed by current events. Yet, he seems to have a sense of calm and an inner strength about him that I perhaps don’t.
He recites a verse from the Qur’an about not losing hope. And he tells us that his family and relatives in Palestine, and most Palestinians in general, despite facing such unspeakable atrocities, are optimistic. Their spirits are high. They have not lost hope. Their trust in God, as firm as ever.
I feel like someone has just dressed up a wound inside of me. Here I am, the Imam of the congregation, who has just delivered a religious sermon preceding one of the most important acts of worship of the week — the Friday prayer. Yet, the short few words of this ordinary Palestinian man has, more powerfully, connected all of us to one of the most central messages of the Qur’an — never lose hope in God’s mercy.
Hope
A few weeks later, I spoke to both of my Palestinian brothers from the mosque and asked them how their family and relatives were. Things had changed by then. One of them had a relative shot dead by a sniper. His body was still lying at the scene as we were speaking, unable to be removed due to the Israeli attacks. Another had lost a cousin in an Israeli airstrike.
Yet, what remained unchanged was their resilience, their unshakable trust in God, and their hope in God’s mercy. They see the thousands of innocent lives who have perished in this genocide as martyrs, who have moved on to a better abode, in the shade of God’s mercy, far removed from the suffering they endured on earth.
As devastated as I was to hear of the deaths, I could not help but feel inspired by their strength of character and faith. In fact, this is exactly what I saw in videos after videos coming out of Gaza. People standing among rubble, dead bodies and strewn body parts, yet chanting, Hasbunallah (God is sufficient for us).
We have seen journalists carry on with their jobs, telling the world about the horror unfolding in Gaza, even as they mourned the loss of their loved ones and colleagues.
We have seen medical staff performing medical procedures with the lights from their phones as the power turned off in the hospitals due to lack of fuel. They left no stone unturned to help the wounded even as essential supplies ran out and even as Israel continued to bomb hospitals.
We have seen brave volunteers clearing the rubble with their bare hands rescuing people from underneath it.
We have seen heroes emerge shining the light on the inherent good that humans are capable of even during the darkest of moments.
The most beautiful humans
Israel described Rachel as a reckless individual, putting herself in harms way to protect terrorists. And, more recently, as we have all witnessed, they called Palestinians ‘human animals’ as justification for carrying out a genocide.
Rachel’s story is one of many which show Israel’s targeting of innocent civilians pre-date Oct 7th and has nothing to do with fighting Hamas. And what the current, ongoing, live genocide shows us is the extent of evil Israel is prepared to unleash upon innocent Palestinian lives.
Yet, despite the evil and carnage that we see being perpetrated in Gaza, we must not lose sight of the inspiring human stories that are emerging out of unfathomable conditions of suffering.
As I reflect upon the courage and resilience shown by people like Rachel and the Palestinian people, it restores my faith in humanity — that there will always be people who will stand up for justice against the most powerful forms of evil, and selflessly come forward at the service of others.
Far from being ‘human animals’, they are the most beautiful people to have walked this earth, who will forever inspire humanity to aspire to the highest standards of justice even if it comes with the greatest forms of sacrifice.
