Women of Non-Violent Resistance: Rachel Corrie
The reading I’m doing for this class, the video we’re watching and our class discussion have stirred me to want to search out the names and faces of women who have made an impact in various non-violent resistance movements.
I remember reading the following post…so I searched it out again.
Rachel Corrie
The Death of Rachel Corrie (by Starhawk)
Nablus, Palestine
March 16, 2003
Today a young woman was killed in Gaza. Young women, but more often young men, get killed in Gaza and the West Bank every day, and the world pays no attention. What was different today is that Rachel Corrie was an American, an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, the group that I’m here with in occupied Palestine. And her death is a particularly horrifying example of the cold-blooded dehumanization that characterizes this occupation.
Rachel was trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. According to the other activists who were with her, she was in dialogue with the operator of the bulldozer. She was working in the spirit of nonviolence that is a guiding principle of the ISM, which provides support for Palestinian civilians and for nonviolent efforts to bring about justice for Palestine. Rachel climbed up on the bulldozer to talk to the soldier in the cockpit. She climbed down. She sat in front of the bulldozer. The soldier in control of the huge machine drove it deliberately over her. He then backed up, and ran over her again. Rachel was twenty-three years old.
I am trying to fathom the mind that could pull the levers and gun the motor to crush the life out of her young body. That choice, that deliberate act of murder that ended her sweet life, seems incomprehensible. But here in occupied Palestine, that murder is a logical outgrowth of the system of total dehumanization that controls every aspect of life, that cannot see the human being in the Palestinian, that claims to be fighting terror by institutionalizing it.
This post can be found in its full text here.
More posts this week on Rachel Corrie as I learn more about her.
