Twenty-one years ago this month, Rachel Corrie, a young American activist, was protesting the Israeli demolition of homes in the Gaza Strip. Bulldozers had already destroyed the surrounding houses in the neighborhood of Rafah where she was based; on March 16, 2003, they came for the Nasrallah family home where the college student was staying.
Corrie, wearing an orange fluorescent vest and speaking through a bullhorn, was determined to stop them. Standing alone on a mound of earth in the path of the armored vehicle, she expected the Israeli bulldozer approaching her to come to a halt, as other bulldozers had done when faced with international protesters.
But it kept going, and, as her fellow activists screamed and tried to stop it, the 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death. The Nasrallah family's children watched in horror through a crack in their garden wall.