Rachel Corrie

by Lois Pearlman

GAZA CITY Sunday, March 16 (AP) - An American college student in Gaza to protest Israel operations was killed when she was run over by a bulldozer while trying to block troops from demolishing a Palestinian home. At least one Palestinian also was killed.

Rachel Corrie was a 23 year-old volunteer from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a U.S. and Palestinian-based organization that recruits people from around the world to protect residents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rachel and the others lived side-by-side with Palestinian families in Rafah, sleeping in their homes, sharing their meals. Too often, they felt there was no other choice but to offer themselves up as a "human shield" to protect their friends from Israeli soldiers. This afternoon, she was trying to stop a bulldozer from smashing the home of a physician and his family.

According to other ISM members who were with her, the group had been placing themselves between Israeli bulldozers and the homes they were intent on demolishing.

Then someone noticed that Rachel was standing alone in the path of one of the machines.

Some witnesses said she was kneeling at first and others say she was standing upright. All agreed that the bulldozer was some distance from her and proceeding slowly. There was no doubt in any of the witnesses' minds that the bulldozer driver knew she was there.

"Rachel was wearing an orange fluorescent jacket. She was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver as well as to the soldiers in the tank," said Greg Schnabel, an ISM volunteer from Chicago.

But the bulldozer driver didn't stop. He kept moving, pushing up a big mound of soil with its shovel.

When the mound reached Rachel she climbed on top of it. Somehow she lost her footing and was buried underneath.

Then the bulldozer driver ran over her.

Then he stopped.

Then he shifted into reverse and backed over her with his blade still down.

Rachel was still conscious when the other ISM members reached her.

"My back is broken," she gasped to her friends. She was turning blue and in great pain.

Her colleague, "Joe Smith," described what he had witnessed:

"[The driver] clearly saw her, and continued to drive until she was forced onto the top of the dirt he was pushing, elevating her so much that she was at eye level with the bulldozer's cab, he could see right into her eyes. He continued forward, pulling her underneath the dirt, and out of his vision. He continued forward, crushing her underneath the weight of the blade. He continued forward, until she was well underneath the bulldozer. It was then quite clear that she was nowhere but underneath him, but he proceded to back up, without lifting the blade, crushing her again."

She died a short time later in a Rafah hospital.

It was the first time in the nearly two-year existence of ISM that one of its international volunteers had been killed.

Picture taken between 3:00-4:00PM on March 16 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. A clearly- marked Rachel Corrie, holding a megaphone, confronts the driver of one of two Israeli bulldozers in the area that were attempting to demolish a Palestinian home. Photo by Joseph Smith

This photo was taken seconds after the bulldozer driver dragged his blade over her for the second time. According to ISM, this image clearly shows that had he lifted his blade at any time he may have avoided killing her, as the bottom section of the bulldozer is raised off the ground. Photo by Richard Purssell

Rachel was only the first of four Westerners killed or seriously wounded during those spring days in Gaza. On April 4, ISM activist Brian Avery was shot on a street in Jenin. Then on April 11, another ISM member was shot -- both by Israeli forces, witnesses and the families say.

Brian Avery was shot in the face as he stood on a street in Jenin April 4, seriously wounding the 25 year-old man. Avery had planned to leave Gaza the day before, but couldn't get a taxi because Israel had just decreed a curfew. The Israeli government said there were Palestinian gunmen in the area and they may have been the ones who shot Avery. But eyewitness Tobias Karlsson said he and Avery were the only people on the street at the time. They were wearing orange fluorescent jackets that identified them as internationals and their hands were in the air.

Shot a few days later was Thomas Hurndall, as he tried to pull two Palestinian girls away from Israeli machine gun fire in Rafah. "Thomas grabbed one of their hands and as soon as he did that a tank fired at him, hitting him in the head," the Associated Press quoted a photographer on assignment for AP who witnessed the shooting.

Late in April Hurndall still lay in a coma in a Bersheva hospital, not brain dead as initially reported, but is not expected to survive. Israel now admits that he was shot by a soldier, but insists that it was an accident -- that the soldier was returning gunfire from someone shooting at the army watchtower. Perhaps Hurndall was hit by a ricochet, the military suggests.

In a later interview, Cindy Corrie recalled how she felt about the Avery shooting. "That was a devastating day," she recalled. And then, it happened all over again with Hurndall. "Then when we heard about Tom we felt like it was happening to us all over again. We know what his family is going through."

Although he wasn't associated with ISM, British filmaker James Miller was shot to death May 3 on a Rafah street while he was returning from dinner at the home of Palestinian friends. He was in the Gaza Strip making an HBO documentary on the children of the area. At the time of the shooting he was walking with his partner and their translator. They were all clearly marked as journalists and were shouting out their identity when the tank approached them, according to "The Guardian" of London.

The Israeli government said Palestinians were shooting at the tank and Miller was caught in the crossfire. An autopsy proved he was "almost certainly" killed by gunfire from the tank, according to the newspaper.

A week later, Israel imposed a partial closure of the Gaza Strip, requiring all foreign nationals to sign a waiver saying they were not members of ISM and would not hold the Israeli government responsible if they were killed or injured. They were also forbidden to enter areas of Rafah near the Egyptian border -- the areas where all the killings of internationals have taken place.

Steven Niva, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Evergreen College and one of Rachel Corrie's advisors, said Corrie wasn't sure at first how involved she wanted to get with ISM, but when she arrived and saw the situation it was obvious to her that it was the thing to do. Her mother said that looking back at Rachel's life it seems it all led to to that place.

"She did things all along that make sense how she got from point A to point B," Cindy Corrie said in an interview at the house where she raised her three children.

Rachel's older sister, Sarah Simpson, lives there now with her husband. It is in a verdant, semi-rural part of Olympia, a place of mud flats, woods, hills, and a small creek that feeds into Puget Sound.

While Rachel was growing up there was a barn out back with chickens and ducks, and Sarah remembers playing in the creek with Rachel and building grass forts. Even when she was in high school, Cindy Corrie said, Rachel would still come home covered with creek mud.

Cindy and her husband Craig are originally from Iowa. During the Vietnam War he served as a combat engineer for 11 months and she stayed with a friend in San Francisco working as a substitute teacher. After the war they visited Washington state and fell in love with it.

All of the Corrie children attended an alternative elementary school on the other side of town, which Cindy Corrie helped organize. It was a liberal school that emphasized social consciousness and awareness of the world outside the students' middle class community.

When Rachel was in fifth grade the entire class did a project on the state of the world's children, and presented it at the state capitol. A local TV station captured the moment in a video that shows a 10-year-old Rachel giving a speech which began, "I am here for other children. I am here because I care."

But Cindy Corrie believes the thing that really changed Rachel's life was a six-week visit to Russia in her sophomore year of high school. She went with five other classmates after a group of Russian youngsters had visited Olympia.

"That experience impacted her pretty profoundly," Cindy Corrie said. "It was difficult for her to look at her world in the same way. She was inspired by the generosity of the Russians in the face of hardship."

Cindy Corrie describes her youngest daughter as a person with "a lot of different sides." She was imaginative, contemplative and a great listener who could also speak up when she had something important to say. She could entertain herself for hours but sought out and enjoyed many different kinds of people. She had close relationships with her teachers, was always surrounded by books and papers, kept her room a mess and never did her dishes.

The Corries were a warm and loving family, sometimes curling up on the couch together and reading late into the night. That closeness seems to be the glue that is holding them together now. They remain gracious and plain-spoken through endless interviews and public appearances, never hesitating to show the love they feel for child they have lost.

Rachel attended Evergreen State College, a public university known for its alternative approach to education and and its activism.

Niva said half jokingly that a lot of people accuse the teachers of influencing the students, but the truth, he said, is that students who seek it out are already alternative in their thinking. This was true for Rachel.

"She came to Evergreen because she was an activist. She came in with an agenda. She had been a community activist in high school," he said.

But everyone agrees that it wasn't until the Sept. 11 bombings that Rachel really came into her own. When the U.S. government began its build-up to an invasion of Afghanistan, Rachel became a peace activist. As part of a five-member steering committee she organized a conference to bring together people working on a variety of peace and justice issues. For the first anniversary of Sept. 11 she helped plan a day-long peace observance at downtown Olympia's Percival Landing, which began at dawn with people writing peace messages.

"She was there all day long," recalled fellow committee member Glen Anderson. "She had the right kind of sense of what we needed. It was quite spectacular, just the right kind of feel."

And everybody remembers her contingent of peace doves in the Procession of Species parade that April, an annual event which features local people from across the sociopolitical spectrum dressing up as the different species of plants and animals. Cindy Corrie said Rachel oversaw the creation of nearly 40 peace dove costumes and puppets.

Today as i walked on the rubble where homes once stood, Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border, 'Go! Go!' because a tank was coming. Followed by waving and 'what's your name?' There is something disturbing about this friendly curiosity. It reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious about the other kids: Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shout at the tanks when they peak out from behind walls to see what's going on. International kids standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks anonymously, occasionally shouting - and also occasionally waving - many forced to be here, many just aggressive, shouting into the houses as we wander away. -- Rachel Corrie e-mail

"We hope to have twice as many this year," she said.

Anderson was deeply impressed with Rachel's abilities as an activist and as a human being.

"She was a life-giving, energetic, creative force. She had great potential for being a life-long activist. She had the right instincts, the right sense of organizing. She would have had a great future ahead of her. She was positive and passionate and she was willing to take on responsibilities and follow through. But its wasn't about her. She did it because it needed to get done. She was modest. There was a lack of ego," he said.

That fall she was already planning her trip to Palestine and "preparing" her family for it, according to Cindy Corrie.

Once she arrived in Rafah, Rachel involved herself in solidarity work, accompanying workers, accompanying workers when they fixed water pipes or electrical lines, guarding the two water wells that were left after the Israelis destroyed the others, and spending her nights in houses near the Egyptian border that were at risk of being demolished.

But somehow, Smith said, she still found time to work on setting up a sister city and to get to know the local families. She became especially close with Dr. Samir Masri, and his wife and three children. It was their house she was defending from demolition when she was run down by an Israeli bulldozer.

After her death, the local residents who had known Rachel declared her a martyr or "shahid" and created a poster of her as they do for all their martyrs. Printed with the words, "Rachel, she came to stop the tanks," it was posted and distributed by the thousands.

They also mourned her in a traditional three day funeral, with locals coming to pay their respects to the ISM members who served as her "family."

It would be nearly a week before Rachel's own family would be able to negotiate her body through the endless checkpoints and onto a plane bound for Seattle. The next week there was another memorial service of her in Olympia, a three-hour affair with her family, political comrades, professors and even some of her former elementary school teachers.

Like her appearance at the state capitol nearly 14 years earlier, the service was captured on video.

"I'll continue media and legal work regarding Rachel's death, but I can't handle two. I just can't. Learning my limits has been a crucial part of my personal development here. I have learned to say no, and I'm saying it now," he wrote for the web site "Electronic Intifada."

Smith, a 21-year-old college student from Olympia, Washington via Kansas City, Missouri, is an earnest young man with an edgy sense of humor and a pair of turquoise-rimmed glasses. While he was attending Evergreen State College in Washington he coordinated the local chapter of Food Not Bombs. He had come to Rafah, he said, because he saw it as an ideal place for hands-on work against the double whammy of racism and war. As a teenager he had worked on environmental issues with Earth First! but he said he "began to see it as a privileged path."

Some students and staff members at Smith's school had volunteered with the ISM and returned with stories that inspired others to join. Rachel Corrie also responded to the call, encouraged by a friend who said the West Bank was getting attention while the Gaza Strip was being ignored.

It was an ad hoc group of individuals and organizations that founded the International Solidarity Movement in August 2001, when it became clear that the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993 had produced the opposite of peace -- more Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and more violence against Palestinians.

"After 2000 Palestinians came to realize that Israelis were talking about peace but not working for peace on the ground," said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American and ISM founder. Her husband is Adam Shapiro, an American of Jewish descent, holds down the New York office when she is in Palestine.

The final straw, she said, was the grandstanding appearance at the sacred Temple Mount in Jerusalem by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and 1,000 troops. This led to Palestinian demonstrations and the explosive reaction by Israel that ignited the second Intifada.

"Israel responded with live ammunition instead of rubber bullets," she said. That October Israel fired over one million bullets. Large numbers of Palestinians were killed and injured, shot in the head and chest. Israeli journalist Amira Haas called it the shoot to kill policy."

ISM organizers reasoned that bringing internationals into the picture would accomplish several goals -- to draw more media attention, to help shield Palestinians because Israelis would see western lives as "more valuable," and to create a body of people who could speak first hand about the situation once they returned home.The presence of internationals also serves to boost the morale among Palestinians in the occupied territories.

"It means a lot to us to know that they are here," she said.

The first campaign was two weeks of non-violent civil disobedience to protest the Israeli roadblocks. But in 2002, the Israeli military took over cities in the occupied territories and the ISM was forced to change its operations.

"We moved into emergency mode," Arraf said. "Ambulances were being shot at, there were curfews, people were immobilized. the UN and the Red Cross were not providing the services people needed. We put internationals on ambulances and walking the streets to deliver food and medical supplies. We moved into a mode of trying to keep people alive."

Arraf said Americans and people from Great Britain still make up the bulk of the volunteers, and about one quarter to one third of the Americans are Jewish. Some Israeli Jews also work with the group, including co-founder Neta Golan who lives in Nablus.

All volunteers get two days of intensive training in Jerusalem when they first arrive. After that they work in small self-directed affinity groups of five to eight individuals. They pay their own way, renting an apartment together in the cities, and living with families in the villages.

'We don't do tours. We don't encourage people to come who don't know what's happening," she said.

The recent violence against ISM members has brought heightened media attention and a flock of critics. Some of the them have tried to make political hay out of the arrest in March of alleged Islamic Jihad member Shadi Sukiya, who was found hiding in the ISM office in Jenin. But a statement from the Israeli Defense Forces indicates that it did not believe the ISM was implicated in any of Sukiya's activities.

"It should be noted that this is not the first time that terrorists make use of offices and property of international and humanitarian organizations to carry out terror attacks and to hide from IDF forces," it said. "Such behavior puts the organizations and their staff and property at risk."

Shapiro said the ISM does not engage in violence but, "We do acknowledge and respect the right of Palestinians to use legitimate armed resistance as enshrined in international law." And he added, "We do not support or contribute to it in any way. Also, we do not recognize suicide bombers as legitimate."

On a live radio interview after Hurndall's shooting a spokesman for the Israeli consulate in Washington, D.C. accused the ISM of encouraging "idealistic young people" to put themselves in life threatening situations.

Shapiro responded, "There is no (adequate) way to prepare people before they experience things," he said. "If we are aware of someone who is immature or unable to handle themselves, they won't go out, they will work in the office or do legal work. We are frank and explicit about the situation on the ground. Nobody is thinking that their presence alone is going to change what is going on."

Tom Wallace, an American who staffs the ISM press office in Bethlehem, would not suggest that the Israeli military was targeting the organization's members, but he did say it had given its tacit approval.

"When the Israeli government decided not to charge the bulldozer driver (that allegedly ran down Rachel Corrie), it sent a signal to the soldiers that they will not be persecuted," he said in an interview after the Hurndall shooting.

"But the real point," he continued, is when is the Israeli government going to stop killing civilians? There are Palestinians being killed every day and they're just kids. Four kids were shot in Jenin just before Tom for throwing rocks at a tank that doesn't belong there. It's horrifying. What's more horrifying is the silence of the world as it continues. None of the 69 United Nations resolutions against Israel have any chance of being enforced. People are outraged, but the government's aren't responding."

The Union of Health Workers, a grass roots Palestinian organization, is building a youth center in Rafah which it plans to name in memory of Rachel Corrie. It should be completed in about six months, according to Shirabe Yamada of the Middle East Children's Alliance in Berkeley, California.

The other American ISM veterans were also transformed by the experiences in Palestine. According to his hometown newspaper, Brian Avery is back home. He has undergone 3 of the 7 operations that will be needed to restore his shattered face. With his jaw still wired shut, the young activist who once wrote home, "Mom, don't worry about me. They don't shoot Americans" has not commented on his feelings about the events. Israel officially denies that soldiers were involved in his shooting.

Joe "Smith" is back in Kansas City, doing construction work with his father, saving money to return to college and looking for " a good therapist."

"I'm in a period of recovery," he said, sounding younger and softer than he had during a telephone interview from the Gaza Strip in April. "I'm trying to relax, trying to compile everything I experienced, my photos, my writing and my emotions."

He plans to attend Grinnell College in Iowa, where he will study history and Arabic. After graduation, his dream is to return to Palestine "for several years at least," organize with ISM and "focus on writing a really solid play." "I feel much more attached to the place than anywhere else in my life," he said.

But after witnessing the death of two comrades and serious wounding of another, he was compelled to call it quits. Smith took the difficult road back to the airport in Tel Aviv, making the decision he knew was always open to him. He went home to well-stocked supermarkets and streets where soldiers don't shoot at people from armored tanks.

While riding in a taxi to an official inquiry into Corrie's death, Smith said, "It's more frightening now. In the past I was overconfident. It has challenged my Western privilege, but I know that I can leave whever I want. Palestinians don't have that choice."

JERUSALEM (AFP) Thursday, June 26 -- After studying the findings of the probe into the March 16 incident, which took place in the southern Gaza Strip, chief military prosecutor Major General Menahem Finkelstein closed the file "without any steps being taken against those involved," the statement said. [..] The army statement said the investigation showed Corrie was killed "while disturbing the field operations being carried out by IDF bulldozers" in an area under full Israeli control. "From the findings it is clear that Rachel Corrie was injured as a result of earth and building rubble falling on her as she tried to climb on a pile of earth during the field work that was being carried out by an armoured IDF bulldozer," the army said. "The armored bulldozer team that was involved in the incident did not see Ms. Corrie, who was standing behind the mound of earth, and it was not possible to see her or to hear her voice," it said. "It is clear the death of Ms. Corrie was not caused as a result of a direct action by the bulldozer or by its running her over, but by the falling of earth and building materials that was pushed by the bulldozer." As a result, "it was found there is no place for taking disciplinary action against the soldiers involved," the statement said, expressing the army's "sorrow over every incident in which innocent people are harmed." The investigation included the interrogation of the soldiers involved and of eyewitnesses, the findings of the autopsy and the collection of evidence, it said. But Israeli army sources pointed the finger squarely at the ISM activists, alleging it was their "illegal and irresponsible" action that was responsible for Corrie's death.