Making of a martyr
Sandra Jordan reports from Rafah on the death of
American activist Rachel Corrie, crushed by an Israeli
bulldozer as she battled to prevent destruction at a
refugee camp
Sunday March 23, 2003
The Observer
observer.co.uk
As always, Rachel Corrie went last Sunday to the falafel stall
where she usually had lunch and bantered with the Palestinian
proprietors. Carrying a loudspeaker and wearing an orange
fluorescent vest, the young American peace campaigner was
heading for a protest against the Israeli army's demolition of
Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah.
Later that afternoon Corrie, 23, died under the blade of an Israeli
bulldozer and now, according to a growing legend, she is a new
heroine for Palestine. There are graffiti in Gaza in her honour -
one slogan reads: 'Rachel was a US citizen with Palestinian
blood' - there is a picture of her on the website of the terrorist
group, an honour usually reserved for suicide bombers. Yasser
Arafat has pledged to name a street after her.
In the United States there have been tearful candlelit vigils in her
home town, her letters home have been published on the
internet, there have been glowing tributes from her friends and
teachers, anger from politicians, a march to condemn Israel's
actions and calls for an investigation.
And, of course, there is interest from Hollywood in the story,
with film-makers already approaching people who knew Corrie
and her comfortable middle-class, middle-American family.
Her Western friends are witnessing the making of a martyr. They
have seen the extraordinary transformation of Corrie, a blonde
Evergreen College student from the safe town of Olympia in
Washington state, a girl-next-door who played soccer, liked
gardening and loved the poetry of Pablo Neruda, into a symbol of
the Palestinian resistance.
It's an unlikely legacy for the dreamer Corrie, youngest daughter
of Craig, an insurance executive, and Cindy, a volunteer in
schools. Their child was an accomplished flautist who recently
moved from Olympia to the gentle countryside of North Carolina
A peace activist with the International Solidarity Movement
(ISM), Corrie knelt in the path of the Israeli machine to prevent it
demolishing a house near the Egyptian border in the southern
Gaza Strip. She had got away with this tactic on other
occasions, but this time the bulldozer didn't stop. She struggled
to climb the mountain of earth it was pushing in front of its
blade, but as the machine got higher she slipped and was
buried. The driver slowly advanced and ran her over twice.
'A regrettable accident,' said the Israeli army; a war crime,
claims the ISM.
Corrie knew the risks, but unlike the other Palestinian shahids
she was born into the US milk-and-cookies culture, not the
refugee camps of a society that celebrates the cult of
martyrdom.
'Her death serves me more than it served her,' said one activist
at a Hamas funeral yesterday. 'Going in front of the tanks was
heroic. Her death will bring more attention than the other 2,000
martyrs.'
Corrie's courage is in no doubt. Simply being in Rafah is
terrifying. There are daily gun battles and Israeli tank incursions
and air bombardments. The city is overlooked by grim Israeli
watch towers known as the 'towers of death'. It is squalid and
oppressed.
Corrie and her fellow ISM activists chose to live there to bring
attention to the misery of the Palestinians and show solidarity
with people perceived as terrorists by most Americans. They are
respected and welcomed by the Palestinians, and often act as
human shields to protect children from Israeli gunfire by
accompanying them as they walk to school. Rachel had
become politically conscious only since 11 September, 2001.
She was no Hamas or Islamic Jihad militant, groomed for
martyrdom and soothed by the promise of a privileged place in
heaven.
In Rafah, Arafat's political party Fatah held a wake for 'Retchell
Corie', attended by representatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and
the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade, among others. These are the
militant Islamic fronts condemned by Rachel's government as
terrorists. Their people mingled with secular organisations and
droves of ordinary Palestinians who came to pay their respects,
including children carrying a sign: 'Rachel, we love you as an
angel.' A little boy pointed to a picture of her and said: 'She died
defending this holy and blessed land.'
It is the first time an American has been adopted as a
Palestinian martyr. The posters of Corrie that began to appear
on buildings and lampposts look incongruous beside pictures of
the hundreds of Arab men, women and babies killed since the
intifada began. The homage is particularly ironic because it
began as US troops were preparing for the invasion of Iraq, seen
here by many as a crusade against the Arab world.
Rafah is a besieged town, the 'hottest' in the Occupied
Territories. Corrie came here in January to record human rights
abuses and help local charities. She came as a human shield,
but she didn't think she would die.
Her British friend and fellow activist, Tom Dale, 18, from Lichfield
in Staffordshire, said he saw her die. First, he said, there was
fear on her face as she realised that her defiant gesture was
going wrong. Joe Smith, 21, who went to college with Corrie,
said that, although they acknowledged the danger, they saw
death as a 'small, unlikely, potential risk'.
'We knew there was a risk,' Smith said, 'but we also knew it
never happened in the two years that we (the ISM) have been
working here. I knew we take lots of precautions so that it
doesn't happen, that if it did happen it would have to be an
intentional act by a soldier, in which case it would bring a lot of
publicity and significance to the cause.'
The activists have compelling photographic evidence to support
eyewitness claims that Corrie's death was a deliberate,
murderous mowing down of a unarmed protester. Dale watched
as she knelt down in front of the bulldozer, perhaps 20 metres
away, something the activists had done repeatedly that day as
they had in the past. 'The bulldozer went towards her, very
slowly, she was fully in clear view, straight in front of them.'
As the bulldozer got closer, it pushed a mound of earth in front
of its blade. The heap began to overtake Corrie so she stood up
to climb up the mounting soil. 'Unfortunately, she couldn't keep
her grip there and she started to slip down. You could see that
she was in serious trouble, there was panic on her face as she
was turning around,' said Dale. 'All the activists there were
screaming, running towards the bulldozer, trying to get them to
stop. But they just kept on going. '
The activists said the driver saw Corrie. 'As the mound grew
higher she climbed up, getting to eye level with the driver. He
saw her in her fluorescent orange jacket. But he kept on going,'
Smith said.
A traumatised Smith raised his camera and took photographs:
Rachel standing in front of the bulldozer; then her bloodied body
being pulled from the freshly turned soil; being cradled in the
arms of her friends.
'If only they'd had a video camera,' one Palestinian journalist
lamented. 'A film of the Israelis killing an American in cold blood
would have ended the intifada.'
The weight of the heavy-duty, US-made military earthmover, its
blade down, dragged over her body, crushing the American
student deep into the soil. Once. Twice. She was still alive when
the driver, an Israeli soldier, reversed over her, but she died soon
after being taken in a Red Crescent ambulance to Rafah
hospital, where she regained consciousness for a moment. Her
last words were: 'My back is broken.'
The hospital report says Corrie died from suffocation. Her ribs
and left clavicle were broken. Her upper lip was lacerated. The
doctors stitched up her face for the journey home to her grieving
family on the other side of the world.
The Israeli Defence Force has opened an investigation into
Corrie's death. An IDF official confirmed that a military police
investigation has also been launched, which will last between a
week and a month. The spokesman could not confirm whether
the US government had requested the investigation, though her
parents have asked for one. He criticised the student and the
other activists for putting themselves in harm's way by entering a
combat zone. 'They were highly irresponsible,' he told The
Observer .
For now, the official Israeli line is that the driver did not see
Rachel through the bulldozer's thick bullet-proof glass. However,
the spokesman acknowledged that the armoured personnel
carriers (APCs) that accompany bulldozers are responsible for
directing the drivers towards their targets. So why didn't the APC
drivers get the bulldozer to stop? The IDF declined to comment.
There was a storm in Rafah last Wednesday. Strong, gusting
winds blew desert sand across the roads, lodging in puddles on
the bitumen. At 2.30pm it began to rain. Water bonded with the
sand and fell as droplets of mud on the mourners who had
gathered to commemorate Corrie at the spot where she was
fatally injured. The desolate sandy stretch is now strewn with
the rubble from the demolition of houses which she could not
prevent. It faces towards the Egyptian border where Israeli
troops are on patrol.
As the memorial service got under way, the Israeli army sent its
own representative. A tank pulled up beside the mourners and
sprayed them with tear gas. A bizarre game of cat-and-mouse
began as the peace activists chased the tank around to throw
flowers on it, and the Israeli soldiers inside threatened, in return,
to run them down.
The game ended when the Israeli bulldozers came out,
accompanied by more APCs, firing guns and percussion bombs.
The insult was as clear as the danger of the situation and the
people went home, the service halted.
There are those who dismiss Western activists as just
well-intentioned 'political tourists', naive and ineffectual
do-gooders. On the night of Corrie's death, nine Palestinians
were killed in the Gaza Strip, among them a four-year-old girl
and a man aged 90. A total of 220 people have died in Rafah
since the beginning of the intifada.
Palestinians know the death of one American receives more
attention than the killing of hundreds of Muslims. 'It is a fact,'
agrees Richard Purcell, who shared a messy, run-down flat with
Rachel Corrie in Rafah. 'That's the way things are in this world. I
wish it wasn't.' |
