Rachel Corrie, a Witness for our Times
The legacy of an activist who paid the highest price for Gaza
Rachel Corrie’s death on 16 March 2003 brought the Palestinian struggle home to me for the first time. She was a girl my age, born forty-five years ago on this day, 10 April 1979. She was a student at a nearby college that my sister considered attending, the archetypal girl next door.
Yet Rachel’s fate was anything but ordinary. Dressed in an orange flak jacket and holding a loudspeaker, she was bulldozed to death by an Israeli driver intent on destroying the home of the Palestinian family she was trying to protect. It was three years into the Second Intifada, and Israel had decided to destroy all the homes in the region of Rafah where she was staying in order to make way for a new security fence.
The group she was with had developed a strategy of stopping the home demolitions by standing in front of the bulldozers so that they would not proceed. In the weeks leading up to her murder, the strategy had worked. The group had stopped the destruction of several homes in Rafah that same day.
Dressed in an orange flak jacket and holding a loudspeaker, she was bulldozed to death by an Israeli driver intent on destroying the home…
