Photo: “Rachel Corrie Peace Vigil”. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. CC BY-SA 3.0
By Jake Andersen
If you’ve walked around Evergreen, I’m sure you’ve seen the Rachel Corrie Memorial on the third floor of the College Activities Building (CAB). The memorial, a bronze dove perched atop a steel pyramid, stands outside of the Student Activities and Cooper Point Journal offices. Though the sculpture always caught my eye when I passed it, it wasn’t until I researched who Rachel Corrie was that I finally understood what her memorial stands for
In her senior year of college, in 2003, Rachel flew from Olympia to the Palestinian city of Rafah in order to connect the two cities as sisters. At the time, Palestine and Israel were locked in a bloody conflict known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, or the Second Palestinian Intifada. Rachel, a life-long activist, was eager to lend her support to the citizens caught in the middle. Working with a pro-Palestinian group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Rachel and other ISM members fought for the safety of Palestinian citizens caught in the middle of the conflict.
The mission of ISM’s presence in Rafah was to protect Palestinian citizens from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). During her first two months, Rachel learned Arabic and began to endear herself to the local Rafah community while working to fix the city’s compromised water source, the damaged Canada Well. The Canada Well had been built in 1999 by the Canadian International Development Agency to provide over 50% of Rafah’s water. Unfortunately, in 2003, the ISM released an official press statement stating that on Jan. 30 of that same year, the Canada Well had been purposefully damaged by Israeli bulldozers, limiting many citizen’s water access. The IDF would randomly fire on Palestinian workers who were trying to repair it, and to counteract this, the ISM would station themselves at the well to discourage military action. Despite this, the wells would still fall under fire several times an hour.
On Mar. 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie was run over by an IDF bulldozer whilst defending the house of a Palestinian doctor whom they had been staying with from demolition. She was rushed to a nearby Red Cross hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Her death ignited worldwide controversy, as the ISM and the IDF argued over the terms of Rachel’s death. According to a 2003 IDF report, The ISM claimed that the driver intentionally ran Rachel over while the IDF argued that she “ … was struck as she stood behind a mound of earth that was created by an engineering vehicle operating in the area and she was hidden from the view of the vehicle’s operator who continued with his work … ” and that “Corrie was struck by dirt and a slab of concrete resulting in her death.”
In 2005, Rachel’s parents brought a suit against Caterpillar Inc. in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging that Caterpillar was liable for Rachel’s death. In the suit, Corrie et al. v. Caterpillar, her parents claimed that Caterpillar supplied bulldozers to the IDF despite knowing that the bulldozers would be used to further what the Corries claimed was a violation of international law. The case was dismissed by a federal judge on the grounds that it violated the Political Question Doctrine. This means that it was a case that was about politics, rather than legality, and thus wasn’t suited for the courts. In 2007, the Corrie family appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, but the case was similarly dismissed.
In 2010, the Corries filed a lawsuit against the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Defense Ministry in the Haifa District Court, seeking $324,000 in compensation. During the case, the driver of the bulldozer testified for four hours, claiming that he was unable to see Rachel from inside his cockpit. He did so while obscured, as state prosecutors feared his life would be at risk should his identity be revealed. Four experts, one of whom the Corries endorsed, spoke about the cabin visibility of the bulldozer, each agreeing that visibility would be obscured. The Palestinian physician who examined Corrie’s body, however, was denied a travel visa by Israel and was not allowed to testify via video link. The judge, Judge Oded Gershon, ruled against the Corries, stating that the driver and his commander were unable to see Rachel and therefore were not at fault for her death.
A 2012 Daily Mail article recorded that Gershon then went on to condemn the actions of the ISM, stating that the organization ” … abuses the human rights discourse to blur its actions which are de facto violence … ” and referring to it as “… an army of activists serving as ‘human shields’ for terrorists wanted by Israeli security forces … ” and that the ISM provides “financial and logistical aid to Palestinians including terrorists and their families, and (engages in) disruption of the sealing of suicide bombers’ houses.” Despite his ruling, Gershon waived the Corrie’s court fees. The decision was appealed on May 21, 2014, in the Israeli supreme court, but the original ruling was upheld.
As of today, the Corrie’s have pursued no further legal action in defense of their daughters unjust death. The Corrie’s time is now spent spreading information about their daughter’s life through the Rachel Corrie Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides support to organizations that spread messages of global cooperation and grassroots activism.
The city Rafah is still in a precarious state. The city is home to the Rafah Border Crossing, the only border crossing between Egypt and Palestine. The 2019 World Report stated that Egypt has been restricting the passage of goods and people through the Rafah Border Crossing to less than a quarter of the average traffic and only recently began to loosen these restrictions. The ISM still continues in their mission to end human rights violations across the world, a mission that sometimes feels farther from completing than it did in 2003.
