‘Everybody’s fight’: Palestinians hail the sacrifice of Corrie, Bushnell

People of color cite a tradition of white allies risking everything to help them.

Twenty-one years ago today, an Israeli soldier drove an 80,000-pound (26,287kg) bulldozer over a 23-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington. Her name was Rachel Corrie, and she was part of an international team of peace activists who had volunteered to protect Palestinian homes from demolition by Israeli settlers. The US magazine, Mother Jones, gave this account of her final hours:

“At two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie received a cell-phone call from a comrade in the International Solidarity Movement. ‘The Israelis are back,’ she told Corrie. ‘Get over here right away. I think they’re heading for Dr. Samir’s house.’ The news alarmed Corrie. Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah’s house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers, clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months; Nasrallah’s abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.

Certain that the pharmacist’s house was about to be razed, Corrie caught a taxi to the Hai as-Salam neighbourhood. The paved roads of downtown Rafah gave way to sandy tracks lined with scrabbly olive groves, mosques, modest houses, and dirt pitches where Corrie often played football – badly but enthusiastically – with local youths. At 2:30pm, a neighbour of Nasrallah’s named Abu Ahmed caught sight of the activist hurrying past his house. Slight, hazel-eyed, with high cheekbones and dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she carried a megaphone in one hand and an orange fluorescent jacket in the other. “Come inside and have some tea,” he urged her. But Corrie told him she did not have time, and he watched as she disappeared around the corner of his house, heading towards the roar of machinery.

This much has never been contested: placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah’s house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death—her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured.”

Witnesses said that Corrie’s death was no accident; the bulldozer’s operator had deliberately run over her, then put the vehicle in reverse.