On March 16, a 23-year-old woman from the United States was killed in the Middle East. But wait - you might ask - wasn't that before the war on Iraq was officially launched?
This is true. Rachel Corrie was not in the U.S. Armed Forces. And she did not die in Iraq, but in occupied Palestine.
A student at Evergreen State College in Washington, Corrie had gone to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group that uses nonviolent methods to oppose the Israeli occupation.
It was no bombing attack that took Corrie's life. Rather, she was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer. These bulldozers are, along with artillery tanks and gunship helicopters, key weapons in the U.S.-supplied arsenal of the Israeli military - an arsenal that is employed daily to intimidate, dispossess and murder the Palestinian people.
Corrie was among several activists who were defending Palestinian homes from demolition in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip. Following ISM procedures, she placed herself in the path of the bulldozer, waving her arms in clear view of the driver. But the bulldozer did not desist. It rolled over her once and then backed up over her for good measure. Eyewitness accounts make it clear that her death could have been no accident.
The destruction of Palestinian homes is a staple in the Israeli occupation. Often without warning and under the flimsiest of pretexts, the Israeli military destroys Palestinian homes almost daily, even if it means killing civilians in the process.
The home demolitions are a central tactic in Israeli military actions. In last year's deadly incursion by Israel into the Jenin refugee camp, for example, bulldozers followed closely behind the armored personnel carriers, leaving a devastating toll in lives and possessions.
Corrie's murder was, in one sense, nothing unusual; it typifies the violence and repression Palestinians face every day. The only thing extraordinary that she was an American. As an ISM spokesperson said afterward, "We thought we had an understanding (with Israeli troops). We didn't think they would kill us." But Palestinians enjoy no such "understanding" under Israeli occupation.
It would be a mistake to consider Rachel Corrie more important than any of the thousands of victims of the occupation - which, in February alone, claimed 82 Palestinian lives. To cite just one example, about two weeks before Corrie's death, an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip killed a Palestinian woman, Nuha Sweidan, who was nine months pregnant.
But we would be wise to allow Corrie's murder to teach us the true nature of the Zionist regime. Is this what it means to be "the only democracy in the Middle East," as its supporters so often proclaim?
Rachel's murder can also be a starting point to understanding the role of the U.S. government, which supports Israel to the tune of some $6 billion a year. This massive aid, as one writer put it, is "the lifeblood of the occupation." Just who is being "aided" anyway?
To place U.S. support of Israel in its regional context, we should realize that the U.S. war on Iraq is part of the same dubious package. People throughout the Middle East sense - correctly - that even if they don't live in Palestine or Iraq, they could very well be next.
Rachel Corrie's life also reveals another crucial truth about the Israeli occupation: Military repression has not broken the people's will. To the contrary, it only fuels their resistance. And this may hold just as true of the bombings in Baghdad as it does of the demolitions in Rafah.
Paul Coltrin is a future graduate student in Spanish, and is studying through Continuing Education. He can be reached at paul at osudivest.com.
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