Why Rachel Corrie Matters
Why Rachel Corrie Matters
Twenty years after her death, her anger at the world's complacency on Palestine still stings.
Note: I wrote this piece in mid-February and submitted it to opinion editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, and The Guardian. None were interested.
Twenty years ago, on March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist, was struck and killed by an armored Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Corrie had journeyed to Gaza as part of a wave of international activists determined to document the everyday violence against Palestinian civilians—home demolitions, missile attacks, killings by snipers—committed by the Israeli military and Israeli settlers with few, if any, legal repercussions.
Although Corrie’s death was covered in the international media for a few days, it was quickly drowned out by the US invasion of Iraq, which began with air attacks on Baghdad three days later. That might have been the end of the story, had she not left behind an extraordinary collection of letters, essays, and journal entries that soon appeared in Harper’s magazine, in a book, Let Me Stand Alone, and in a play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, written by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner. My Name is Rachel Corrie was produced to acclaim in London in 2006 and scheduled for the New York Theater Workshop before the Workshop’s director delayed the production. “I can only guess at the pressures of funding an independent theatre company in New York,” Rickman said in response, “but calling this production "postponed" does not disguise the fact that it has been cancelled. This is censorship born out of fear.”
Rachel Corrie was born and raised in Olympia, Washington by idealistic, peacenik parents; she led a relatively sheltered, ordinary life, graduating early from high school and enrolling at Evergreen State College, while supporting herself as a waitress and a trail-builder with the Conservation Corps, wondering what to do with the rest of her life. She struggled with depression that she feared might one day overtake her. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 jolted her into action: realizing how little she knew about the Middle East, she began learning Arabic and studying the history of the region, and soon became involved with local activist groups. “I am probably different from some people,” she wrote in her journal, “in that I actively seek to personalize suffering that is distant from me. And if I am not using that to make brave, radical steps toward…social change every day, what are the people who actively try to distance themselves from other people’s suffering doing? What is going to act as a catalyst for them?”
In the two decades since her death, I’ve come to think of this as one of the central questions of our age. As ordinary human beings in a state of cascading global emergencies, to what degree do we, or should we, allow ourselves to lead ordinary lives? Is it possible to live otherwise? And if we do choose to think of ourselves as “stable” or “settled”—getting married, having children, holding jobs—how can we pretend the continuing global emergency isn’t going to disrupt or shatter our lives at any moment? One of Corrie’s very last letters, written from Gaza in the months before she died, puts it this way:
“This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my co-workers. But I also want this to stop. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it.”
I read these words shortly after her death, in Harper’s, and they left me deeply shaken. Why was I living a comfortable life as a young writer in New York and not with her, on the front lines? I had been to a number of protests against the lead-up to the Iraq War that winter—protests which had, from all I could tell, no effect at all. Why shouldn’t I be doing more?
Privileged citizens of Western democracies often tell themselves a story about nonviolent protest which essentially goes like this: change will happen if enough people stand up and “make their voices heard.” That might involve going to a tightly orchestrated protest march like the 2017 Women’s March and holding up a sign. It might involve signing petitions or canvassing for votes. It nearly always involves donating money or sponsoring fundraisers.
Scholars of social change, on the other hand, know that social movements nearly always have to take matters much further than that to make real change. Real nonviolent protest and disobedience, the kind that not only makes the headlines but changes them, involves people willing to risk their lives, their safety, their liberty. These kinds of protests often spark outrage and accusations of extremism. But they work. This was true of the suffragettes; it was true in Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement for Indian independence; it was true in the Freedom Rides and the Selma March; it was even true (briefly) in Egypt during the Tahrir Square protests of 2011. Two months ago, the tragic killing of the protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, in Atlanta brought long-delayed national attention to the movement against “Cop City,” a massive police training center under construction in an urban forest against the wishes of community leaders and the City Council.
Rachel Corrie’s death galvanized the global Palestinian solidarity movement, which has grown exponentially over the past two decades, increasing support for the highly controversial, and imperfect, nonviolent movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The power of this solidarity movement can be easily measured by the efforts of the right-wing Israeli government and its overseas supporters to stifle even its most mild and even-handed critics. Just last month, under pressure from donors and political figures, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government rescinded a job offer to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, because of HRW’s documentation of Israel’s pervasive pattern of human rights violations against Palestinians. In many parts of the US and Europe, discussing Palestine—let alone supporting BDS—can cause you to lose your job, your academic affiliations, or have your writings censored, your speeches interrupted, your Zoom links severed. Nonetheless—even in the face of a new escalation of violence unleashed by the Israeli Defense Forces and armed settlers since the beginning of 2023—the solidarity movement carries on.
My own contribution has taken a different form. Since I first encountered Rachel Corrie’s words in 2003, I’ve been at work on a novel about a fictional young American killed in Palestine, and how her death sets off a chain of events that dissolve her family and community. The question that hangs over my novel is in a way the same question Rachel posed her in journal all those years ago: W hat are the people who actively try to distance themselves from other people’s suffering doing? What is going to act as a catalyst for them?
Young as she was, Rachel Corrie’s confidence in her convictions inspired a new global movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Twenty years later, in this extraordinarily troubled moment, her selfless commitment to a just and peaceful solution to the conflict is more important than ever. But the question remains: what will be the catalyst for the rest of the world, which shows itself over and over to be indifferent to Palestinian suffering?