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What happened to the Lebanese detainees in Syrian Prisons? They were killed 51.8% They are still living 32.9% They were freed 10.6% Nothing 4.7% Total Votes: 85

If Americans Knew1: Rachel Corrie, an American Conscience2
By Farah Salka, Staff Writer

Beirut, Lebanon −  ‘This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world.’
‘No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here… Disbelief and horror is what I feel. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it… Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway at a checkpoint with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I am done.’
Rachael Corrie in an email to her mother before her death/ 7 February 2003 3

Jewish American Professor, Joel Kovel4, describes how Israel, back when it was directly occupying Gaza, had been infamous for the destruction of Palestinian family homes, especially in the Second Intifada. The city that most witnessed such scenarios was Rafah, at the southern end at the borders between Gaza and Egypt. Israel’s problem with this city in specific is that it claimed that arms were smuggled into Gaza through it. Israel built a wall there, incomparable with the other notorious wall. This wall in Rafah is fifty percent higher from that of the West Bank, with twelve meters of height and eight of depth. Gaza is one of the most intensely populated areas in the world, and by that we understand that there exist numerous houses in every street. As a result, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) understands that there are networks of tunnels running under those houses and that they ought to be removed, without compensation for their occupants.5 Sometimes prior notice is given to the inhabitants; other times, the churning of the colossal bulldozer is the only notice people get to understand that it is time to leave their house. Three years after the rise of the Al-Aqsa Intifada which began after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Haram Ash Sharif Temple Mount on  September 28, 20006, already close to 700 houses in Rafah, experienced demolition by the sixty-ton bulldozers. International world attention offered Rafah a glance in mid 2004. In the course of Ariel Sharon’s plan to evacuate the Gaza strip, Palestinian guerrillas succeeded in killing 13 Israeli soldiers. The guerrillas were from Rafah, so the IDF’s revenge took the form of attacking Rafah and by that, killed some 320 Palestinians, 200 of them civilians, 85 under the age of 18, and 27 of them women.7

There are several brave young activists, from Europe and the United States, who decided to challenge the status quo and travel overseas to experience the reality of the situation and volunteer in the occupied territories. Rachael Corrie was one of them. Corrie was a 23-year-old American peace activist, from Olympia, Washington; a girl full of life, and with aspiration for others. After the events of September 2001, Rachel made a commitment to give her best in the hope of reducing violence in the world, bearing witness to the sufferings of the invisible. In 2003, she set out to volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the toughest place in occupied Palestine, Rafah, always reassuring her vexed parents that no harm would come to her. She would frequently email them, describing her experiences, her dismay, her shock, her nightmares, her hopes and future plans. Her death on March 16, 2003, killed any option for future viable plans.8

Rachael thought her Euro-American, un-Arab look would spare her direct harm, the kind usually inflicted on Palestinians. Her theory proved her wrong. She was out in Rafah with a group of companions seeking to protect houses on the list for demolition by the IDF as they regularly do. She was wearing her bright orange vest of the ISM, standing in front of the bulldozer and blocking a house listed for elimination. She was waving to the driver in the bulldozer and using a megaphone, urging him to stop. She was at the same eye level with him. The blades of the bulldozer, nevertheless, did not hesitate to continue turning until young Rachael was crushed to death. We do not know what the driver was thinking when he smashed Rachael over like a clod of dirt, but we know that he put his D9 in reverse and grinded Rachael’s broken body furthermore into the ground before lifting his blades…9

The first eye witness was a British activist, Tom Dale from Lichfield, Birmingham: 

‘Many of you heard varying accounts of the death of Rachel Corrie; maybe others will have heard nothing of it. Regardless, I was ten meters away when it happened two days ago, and this is the way it went. A group of activists from the ISM were demonstrating against the destruction wrought by Israeli bulldozers along the border line. On this occasion, an American citizen, Rachael Corrie, kneeled down in front of a bulldozer. The driver could clearly see where she was, that she was unarmed, that she was an international from ten meters away; he had time to react.10 They knew where she was; there is no doubt. They pushed Rachel, first beneath the scoop, then beneath the blade then continued till her body was beneath the cockpit. They waited over her for a few seconds, before reversing. Every second I believed they would stop, but they never did.’11

A second eyewitness is an American, Joe Smith from Kansas City:

‘We thought this might happen eventually. We often spoke in the abstract that eventually one of us would get killed, but we always figured they would shoot us, or it would be an ‘accident’, like if a stray bullet gets an unlucky activist. I never dreamt it would be like this, the intentional crushing of a human being. I do believe it was intentional. I do not know if he wanted to kill her, or if he was just focused on doing his work and did not care if he killed her or not; I do not know which is scarier. She was defending the house of a physician. We have all stayed in the house. We know that there are no weapons of any kind there, just a middle-aged doctor and his lovely family. It has nothing to do with retaliatory or preventative operations.’12

Shelly, an Israeli activist, expressed her belief that the driver and his commander are both guilty of murder. The idea of having two people in the bulldozer is to have a better range of seeing. ‘The bulldozer driver actually said to the camera that when you do not get an order to stop and you are a soldier, you just do not stop. He did not say he did not see her.’ 13  The Israeli government’s first report stated that the bulldozer had never touched Rachael, and she was killed by falling debris. The second report changed the story and explained that her death was caused by the bulldozer but was an accident. The Israeli reports were never made public. Rachel’s mother explains, ‘For our family, the report raises questions and fails to reconcile differences between Israeli soldiers, who say they could not see Rachel, and seven international eyewitnesses who say she was clearly visible.’14

The mainstream U.S. media hiccoughed for some time, some very short time, and then let the American citizen’s death sink as if it never happened.15 Maha Sbitani, an American citizen living in Ramallah explains, ‘When I called my daughters in the U.S. and told them about this, and my daughters listen to news everyday, they simply did not hear about it. Imagine. An American girl, whose tax dollars, her parents’ tax dollars, her friends’ tax dollars, paid for her death. We all paid for Rachael’s death.’16  

Furthermore, several myths have crept into the media coverage of the incident. American media tried to portray the option that Rachael died by accident. If there were no witnesses at the time of death, this might have been taken as a credible option. However, according to international eyewitnesses and photographic documentation, Rachel Corrie’s death was deliberate and caused by the bulldozer. Photos proved the bulldozer had passed over Rachael’s body: The tracks of the tires were in front and behind the spot where she lay dead.17 The U.S. State Department human rights report on the Occupied Territories in 2005 states clearly, ‘On March 16, an Israeli bulldozer clearing land in Rafah in the Gaza Strip crushed and killed Rachel Corrie.’18

Another fallacy involves claiming that the driver did not see Rachael. There were two people in the bulldozer and not one. Both of them did not see Rachael? The eyewitnesses explained that the blade produced a large pile of earth as the bulldozer advanced; Rachael had climbed above that mound to an extent high enough to have eye contact with the driver.19   

The American President never condemned this atrocity. Congress never passed a resolution condemning the use of American tax money to kill an American citizen. The U.S. State Department never imposed any form of diplomatic sanctions against the government of Israel, whose only ‘apology’ for one of its soldiers crushing a peace activist consisted of calling it ‘regrettable’. Even the memorial service for Rachael that was held the following day in Gaza was also stopped by the interference of an Israeli tank. 20

In Rachael Corrie’s videotaped interviews while in Rafah, she cogently pictured everyday events for Palestinian civilians: ‘I have been here for about a month and a half now. This is definitely the most difficult situation that I have ever seen. In the time that I have been here, children have been shot and killed. Every few days if not every day, houses are demolished. I feel like what I am witnessing here is a very systematic destruction of people’s ability to survive and that is incredibly horrifying.’21 Her accounts correspond greatly with the reports of third-party human rights monitoring organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.22

Alison Weir, founder of the American organisation23, If Americans Knew, expressed her dismay on the second anniversary of Rachel’s death. ‘Israel, as with all those it kills, claims that her death “was an accident” or “was necessary for security” or that “she was a terrorist” or that “she was protecting terrorists”! As fast as these Israeli fabrications are refuted, new ones are produced. What Israel says, our media repeats.’24

U.S. diplomat, Edward Peck offered his opinion on the Corrie issue and proclaimed that anyone who has ever seen the video knows it was done on purpose. ‘You cannot drive a bulldozer over someone and say it is an accident.’ Furthermore, he adds: ‘The U.S. government had a major crisis when a Chinese woman was arrested by the Chinese government and held in jail for a while; even the president of the US talked about it. And when she returned, an American senator met her at the airport. This Chinese woman was not an American citizen. She was a legally resident alien.  For decades, the government of Israel has arrested American citizens, held them in jail, sometimes without charges, in some cases where torture was alleged in sworn statements.’ However, the American government has never said a public word about the death of Rachael. ‘One of the organisations got four of these young Palestinian-American citizens to appear on CNN to tell their story and they did. It was a seven minute segment, which in television is a life time. That segment can no longer be found in the CNN archives. It never happened. Do you understand? It never happened.’25  

Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, speaks of the continuous erosion of freedom of expression when attempting to discuss the Middle East, uncensored. For him, there is an attempt to force the media to conform to Israel's rules; it is international and mounting. The most shameful attempt for Fisk is the decision of the New York Theatre Workshop in 2006 to stop the planned production of the play ‘My Name Is Rachel Corrie’. The play consisted of Rachael’s story in her own words and emails to her family. Fisk explained, ‘Rachel's was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the freedom of the wrong people.’ That is why there was a need to silence her life and her death also. The play was ‘postponed indefinitely’.26

Less than a month after Rachael’s death, another American citizen, 24-year-old Bryan Abrey, lost his life to a high-calibre bullet in his face. Less than a week later, 21-year-old British Tom Hurdel was shot in the back of the head.27 The difference between Rachael and Tom is that unlike Rachael’s case, Tom’s British government did exert pressure on Israel, one for an investigation. The result of the British pressure was that the responsible Israeli soldiers have been found guilty for the killings in Rafah of both ISM activist, Tom Hurndall, on April 11, 200328, and British reporter, James Miller, on May 3, 2003.29 This judgment was previously preceded by an initial one absolving the Israeli military of any responsibility towards the deaths.

The systemic erasing of Rachael’s message is dangerous. If, for such an act, the Israeli government can remain untouched, then the green light has been given for the Zionist Regime to carry on now and forever with its killing of unarmed civilians, peaceful protesters, and young souls.30 Rachael was not the first international that the IDF has killed cold bloodedly. She will not be the last either if the red light is not projected by the international community. On March 29, 2002, Israeli forces killed another 21-year-old American in Ramallah while she was holding her baby on her lap. She was half-Palestinian. Maybe this explains why American media largely failed to cover the incident.31

To be continued…

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