When Israel brutally murdered American activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza with no consequence

There is no such thing as accountability when it comes to Israel, even when it murders Americans in cold blood.

When it comes to gauging Israel’s impunity in its relationship with its biggest benefactor, the United States of America, the case of Rachel Corrie is instructive. Corrie, a woman with conscience and an indomitable spirit who felt the pain and suffering of Palestinians over 6,500 miles away in Olympia, Washington, US, was brutally run over by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to protect a civilian home from demolition in Rafah, Gaza, 21 years ago to the day, on March 16, 2003. She was just 23.

In the aftermath of the American citizen’s killing, the US Congress refused her parents’ request to conduct an independent investigation into her murder. To be sure, Representative from Washington Brian Baird had introduced a resolution in the Congress calling for a “full, fair, and expeditious investigation” into Corrie's death, but no action was taken on the resolution.

Contrast America’s reaction to her brutal murder filmed on camera in the presence of multiple eyewitnesses to that of Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody in Iran in 2022. The United States not just fanned an attempted revolution in Iran, but it introduced the Mahsa Amini Human rights and Security Accountability Act (MAHSA Act) that passed the House floor with an overwhelming majority before being stuck in the Senate. US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated their support at every occasion for the Iranian protesters fighting their regime in the wake of Amini’s death. And Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has been enthusiastically raising her hand at the United Nations to veto any censure of Israel as it continues its genocide in Gaza, issued a statement at Amini’s last death anniversary that memorably read: “Mahsa ‘Gina’ Amini’s life was tragically cut short, but her courage inspired a movement that will continue against the unprecedented brutality of the Iranian regime.” The statement then went on to announce fresh sanctions against 29 Iranian individuals and entities. The fake concern for Iranian women was stretched to an absurd degree when First Lady Jill Biden presented the first-ever Best Song For Social Change Award at the 2022 Grammys to — you guessed it — as singer who sang the “anthem” supporting the Iranian protests.

Biden, Blinken, and Thomas Greenfield have green-flagged the unprecedented brutality of the Israeli regime in Gaza. They have announced no sanctions against any Israeli individual and entity for the murder of over 31,000 Palestinians and the accompanying rape and torture of many of them.

They have had no words to even mark the death anniversary of their very own compatriot Corrie, let alone pass acts in the Congress that hold her murderers accountable. Such is the Israeli impunity.

The sham kangaroo courts of the Zionist entity labelled Corrie’s murder an accident and found the bulldozer-driving thug not guilty of any crime.

But Corrie’s father, Craig, a former soldier and a Vietnam war veteran, was under no illusions about identity of the murderers of her child. “The more we found out, the more likely that the killing was intentional, or at least incredibly reckless,” he said in 2010.

“As a former soldier, I was even in charge of bulldozers in Vietnam. … You’re responsible to know what’s in front of that blade, and I believe that they did.”

The Corries’ civil lawsuit in Israel in 2005 was rejected and so was their appeal ten years later.

While American leadership couldn’t care less about heroes of Corrie’s stature, the Palestinians recognise them. They named a street in the West Bank after her.

Rachel Corrie Street in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine.

Just as they did for Aaron Bushnell, another American hero, who sacrificed his life in an “extreme act of protest” for the Palestinian cause, refusing to play any further part in their annihilation at the hands of his government and perpetrated by his own colleagues in military fatigues. He went up in flames shouting “Free Palestine” literally till his last breath.

Aaron Bushnell Street in Jericho, West Bank, Palestine.

This week, the story of another brave American in Gaza came to light. The Zionist terrorists bombed American citizen Deborah Darwel’s house in Gaza. She had refused to leave Gaza despite its brutal bombardment by weapons supplied by her own government and she is sticking to her resolve not to leave Palestinians till she is alive.

Injured, emotional, and lying on a hospital bed, Deborah made her stance clear: “I feel like I am the only foreigner in Gaza right now and I would never leave because if Israel is going to take all of Gaza or all of Palestine, then they want everyone to leave. That’s why I stayed because I don’t want them to take Palestine.”

The likes of Bushnell and Deborah are plenty in America. A significant number of them — across party lines — have made it clear that they want a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

But American politicians know well which side of their challah is buttered.

A 2014 study by two professors at Princeton University and Northwestern University, after studying 20 years of data, found that

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

If that doesn’t warm your heart to the prospect of voting at the upcoming election, nothing will.

Corrie was always a person of conscience. Aged 10, she gave a remarkable speech at a school event titled “I’m here because I care.” It spoke of her pain for the children dying of hunger:

I’m here for other children.
I’m here because I care.
I’m here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger.
I’m here because those people are mostly children.
We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.
We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.
We have got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.
We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs.
We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.
My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.
My dream is to give the poor a chance.
My dream is to save the 40,000 people who die each day.
My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there.
If we ignore hunger, that light will go out.
If we all help and work together, it will grow and burn free with the potential of tomorrow.

One wonders what she would think of the deliberate industrial-scale starving of Gazan children, women, and men being undertaken by Israel and facilitated by her government today.

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Israel needs a humanitarian intervention