On Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old senior at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., was killed by Israeli soldiers in the Rafah Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.

Corrie was run over--and run over again, when the army bulldozer backed up over her a second time--as she tried to prevent soldiers from demolishing a Palestinian home in the camp. She was in Palestine as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), among the most prominent of several nonviolent groups that in the last year have been bringing international activists--primarily Americans and Europeans--to work as peacekeepers: witnessing Israeli treatment of Palestinians, trying to provide assistance to Palestinian civilians wanting accompaniment as a form of protection against the Israelis, and afterwards bringing the stories of what they see back home to their own countries.

A year ago, as Israel launched an unprecedented, brutal military offensive against Palestinian civilians in cities and camps throughout the West Bank, I interviewed one such activist, a young New York woman who vividly described the daily violence unfolding around, and occasionally at, her and her fellow "internationals." Talking on the phone, on a lazy, serene spring day, with a young woman being shot at with American-made bullets is just a bit surreal. These volunteers, more than anyone, know the risks.

The Israel/Palestine conflict has largely disappeared from American news reports since last year's Easter offensive, but that's not because the violence has ended. Quite the opposite: it has become routine, with daily violence and humiliation inflicted upon many Palestinians, Palestinian deaths (often of children) almost every day, and periodic cycles of Palestinian suicide bombings--all, at least rhetorically, inflicted by each side either to retaliate against the other side or "prevent" future violence.

It hasn't; the level of economic deprivation, house and crop demolitions, shoot-to-kill curfews, restrictions on employment and movement, random arrests, beatings, torture, and worse inflicted by the Israelis have all essentially become background noise for Americans. The ongoing Israeli violence against civilians--the worst in the history of an illegal, 35-year military occupation--is something fiercely resented by Palestinians (indeed, by all Muslims), but taken for granted by Americans. ISM and other international volunteers, like Corrie, know all this.

However, they also know that Israelis often hesitate in inflicting their usual levels of violence when there are Western witnesses. Israel knows it, too--in recent months, Israel has begun arresting the volunteers, and both deportations and refusal of entry into Israel (the only way, also, to get into Palestine) have also increased sharply. However, Corrie's death was the first among the international volunteers. Meanwhile, such volunteers have likely saved countless other deaths, either by defusing confrontations or, by their mere presence, dissuading Israeli soldiers or "settler" vigilantes from attacks on individuals or families.

Repeatedly, over the last year, returning American volunteers have reported the same thing: ordinary Palestinians and their families both thank the internationals for caring enough to come, and beg them to tell their countrymen--that's us--what is being done in our name and with our tax money. The munitions scattered like confetti around Palestinian streets all have "made in USA" on them; the Caterpillar bulldozer that killed Corrie was manufactured in her home country.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign aid--almost all of which is either direct military aid or enables Israel to transfer more money into arming what is already the world's fourth largest military. Private donations from Americans have helped fuel the illegal settler movement (which "settles" on Palestinian land by simply stealing it, with the protection of the Israeli Army.)

Not only has George Bush, after 9/11, turned an approvingly blind eye to the indefensible, routine violence against civilians and refugees practiced by Ariel Sharon's government, but Bush officials routinely debate which "problem" America should "solve" first--Iraq or Palestine. The notion that America could bring all this violence to a halt whenever it chose, like flicking a light switch, does nothing to dissuade Muslims from the notion that the US is either orchestrating or is thrilled by the wholesale persecution of a population that is largely Muslim (and Christian--a fact many Americans are oblivious to).

The apparent decision by Bush to "solve" Iraq first has also fueled increasing fears by Arabs--and emboldened hawks in Sharon's government--to push for what would essentially be an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as the "solution." The "solution" is known by its Israeli advocates as "transfer," and by cynics in Washington as the "one country over" notion--that Palestinians can all move one country over to their rightful home--Jordan--and Jordanians, in turn, can be moved one country over to America's new colony, Iraq.

Advocates note that the international boundaries in the region, imposed by the Brits, have little to do with traditional national groupings. But then, the problem with that boundary-drawing was that Westerners assumed that they knew better than Middle Eastern nations themselves who belonged with whom. And there's another explicit and ominous undercurrent: religion. Zionist extremists advocate for a biblical "greater Israel"; meanwhile, Bush, and evangelical Christians like him, are at least to some degree motivated in America's Middle East crusade by a notion that ours is the hand of Providence. Either way, given that no people is likely to abandon their ancestral homeland without a ferocious fight, such strains threaten, with an invasion of Iraq, to unleash far more widespread bloodshed. Religious fanaticism, no matter what its professed deity, tends to do that.

The presence of Rachel Corrie and other American volunteers like her in Palestine has helped soften the intense anti-American hatred understandably felt by many Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims. It's a reminder to them, amidst all the war and threat of more war, that not only are at least some Americans aware of and appalled by what's done in our name by our government, but they're willing to risk their lives to try to help sop it.

George Bush is on a course many in the region fear might lead to the bin Laden fantasy of world war pitting Islam against Judeo-Christianity; one of the reasons the Pope was so vigorous in opposing Bush's Iraq invasion is just such a scenario, which has grave risks for the many countries around the world where Muslims and Christians live side by side. Rachel Corrie's death is a moving testimony to the opposite impulse--the willingness of ordinary Muslims and Westerners to live and work together, even at great risk.

Had Corrie been killed by Saddam Hussein's soldiers, of course, she'd be an instant national hero, particularly among the Neanderthals now spitting on her memory on hate talk radio; America would be enraged, and Baghdad would have become be a smoldering radioactive ruin that much faster. Instead, Bush Administration officials deferred to the Israeli "investigation" of what every Israeli official insisted was an "accident." Ironically, it's exactly what happened 15 years ago, when the international solidarity movement lost another peacenik, this one also from Washington State: Seattleite Ben Linder, assassinated by the contras.

Clippings from that era show reactionary invective toward Linder almost identical in tone and language to the insults hurled (at times also by the media) at Rachel Corrie, her family, her friends and colleagues, and the ISM. The fact that any number of eyewitness testimonies directly contradict this account, consistently describing a scene that sounded a lot like intentional murder, mattered little; and then the bombs started falling, and Rachel was yesterday's news.

But there are now hundreds of other Americans serving as nonviolent peacekeepers, human shields, and witnesses in both Palestine and Iraq. Amidst the mad scramble to protest a disastrous invasion and prevent future ones, it's worth taking a moment to remember not only Rachel, but all of these brave activists. They're putting their lives on the line for their beliefs, for the love of humanity, in solidarity with the civilians we're terrorizing with our tax dollars, and because they feel a need to take responsibility for the actions of our elected government.

We should all be so committed.