Her death came directly because of the Leftist myth that Israelis are racist - and that Palestinians aren't.
Corrie was brainwashed by her "progressive" teachers at Evergreen College and her International Solidarity Movement colleagues.
One of her instructors, Simona Sharoni, not only encourages but requires students to engage in activism in her classes. Corrie received college credit for her trip to Gaza, working with her professors to call her activism an independent study program.
A basic tenet of the far-Left, which has now become mainstream, is that Israel is an irredeemably racist entity engaged in "genocide" against non-white Palestinians. This myth is what fueled Corrie and ISM to place activists in harm's way, because of a naïve belief that they were invincible - protected by their "white privilege."
One of Corrie's fellow Evergreen students, Joe Smith, also received independent study credit for his time in Rafah while Corrie was there. "I saw ISM as a way that I could directly use my white, Western, American male privilege to directly serve underprivileged people of color," he said a week after her death.
Corrie's emails to her parents while in Gaza emphasized her unwavering beliefs that white privilege would protect her, and that her anti-Israel activism was penance for her being an American. She emailed that Israel wouldn't arrest her and hold her for a long time because "I am a white US citizen." She wrote about how ISM members could make "serious use of our international white person privilege," and said, "If the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible."
Other ISM activists admitted after Corrie's death that they felt invincible. ISM believed that "the white foreigners were the magic bullet that could neutralize Israel's overwhelming military strength." Smith himself admitted how he and his fellow ISMers felt invincible by their whiteness: "It's definitely easy to get cocky in this war zone when a tank is shooting at people and you walk up to them and shout at them, 'Hey, I'm here!' and they pack up and leave. You get so used to this idea, 'Hey, they won't hurt us.' It has really made me realize how naïve and cocky I was."
Corrie and other ISMers took huge risks with their lives because of this child-like belief that their whiteness is a superpower. In fact, an Irish activist in Rafah at the time named Jenny was nearly run down herself by a D9 that she thought she could stop. “The bulldozer’s coming, the earth is burying my feet, my legs, I’ve got nowhere to run, and I thought, ‘This is out of control.' Another activist pulled me up and out of the way at the last minute.”
Even the Palestinians that these activists befriended considered them crazy. But there were no adults around to counteract the almost religious belief they had that Israeli racism would protect them in a war zone.
Notably, ISM would specifically recruit white kids because of this very assumption. Activists were well aware (and struggled with the idea) that they were promoting the idea of being white saviors of darker Palestinians and complicit in the racism they claim to oppose.
But there was another reason why Corrie took such a risk that day that she was killed. And that was Palestinian racism and misogyny.
Even though these woke, white ISM activists flocked to Rafah to supposedly help Palestinians, there was much mistrust among the oppressed people of color that they deigned to help. ISM members were very concerned over an anonymous letter they had received:
[Corrie] was propelled, in part, by frustration. During the past few days she and the nine other ISM activists had become preoccupied with an anonymous letter circulating through Rafah that cast suspicion on the human shields. “Who are they? Why are they here? Who asked them to come here?” it asked. The letter referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as “nasty foreign bitches” whom “our Palestinian young men are following around.”That morning [of Corrie's death], the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter’s effects. “We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military,” Richard “Fuzz” Purssell told me by phone from Great Britain.
Corrie, while assuming that Israeli racism would protect her, felt that if she would only take more risks, then Palestinian racism and misogyny would magically disappear.
And that is exactly what she did.
We know now that Palestinians have treated these white international women horribly. There are many reports of how they have been raped by the Palestinians they think they are helping - and the stories are hushed up by the very organizations like ISM they volunteer for. Corrie believed that Palestinians are inherently good and Israeli Jews inherently evil, and she only had to try a little harder to prove it.
The narrative of Israeli racism and Palestinian victimhood is fundamental to the existence of these organizations like ISM. And that false narrative is not only what killed Rachel Corrie, but also promoted a culture of Palestinian sexual assaults on her fellow, invincible, white women.
