by Joe Thorne
Many people were inside the houses we demolished. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn’t see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9; and I didn’t see houses falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn’t care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations…
– Moshe “Kurdi Bear” Nissim, D-9 bulldozer operator during the 2002 Jenin invasion
Seven years ago today, roughly a year after the Jenin invasion described above, Rachel Corrie – an American volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement – was crushed to death by a 50 ton D9 military bulldozer in the Gaza strip. Last week (10th March), Rachel’s parents had their first day in an Israeli court, in an effort to compel the state to accept culpability for Rachel’s killing. At the time, in 2003, a witness described her killing like this.
