On line college degree

at two o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, Rachel Corrie received a cell-phone call from a comrade in the International Solidarity Movement. "The Israelis are back," she told Corrie. "Get over here right away. I think they're heading for Dr. Samir's house." The news alarmed Corrie. Samir Nasrallah was a Palestinian pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children a few hundred yards from the battle-scarred Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Corrie and other pro-Palestinian activists based in Rafah had frequently spent the night in Nasrallah's house, acting as human shields against the Israeli tanks and bulldozers clearing a security zone around the border. Almost every other structure in the area had been knocked down in recent months; Nasrallah's abode now stood alone in a sea of sand and debris.

Certain that the pharmacist's house was about to be razed, Corrie caught a taxi to the Hai as-Salam neighborhood. The paved roads of downtown Rafah gave way to sandy tracks lined with scrabbly olive groves, mosques, modest houses, and dirt pitches where Corrie often played soccer--badly but enthusiastically--with local youths. At 2:30, a neighbor of Nasrallah's named Abu Ahmed caught sight of the activist hurrying past his house. Slight, hazel-eyed, with high cheekbones and dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, she carried a megaphone in one hand and an orange fluorescent jacket in the other. "Come inside and have some tea," he urged her. But Corrie told him she didn't have time, and he watched as she disappeared around the corner of his house, heading toward the roar of machinery.

This much has never been contested: Placing herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer that she believed was about to flatten Nasrallah's house, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death--her skull fractured, her ribs shattered, her lungs punctured. But the bitter accusations and violent recriminations that followed obscured almost everything else about the incident. Palestinians hailed her as a martyr of the Intifada. Several eyewitnesses charged that the bulldozer operator ran her down deliberately and called her killing "a war crime." The Israeli government, which rarely acknowledges the deaths of Palestinian civilians killed during its military operations, went into damage-control mode. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised President Bush a "thorough, credible, and transparent investigation." Later Israel declared the killing a "regrettable accident" and blamed it on overzealous Corrie and the other activists working as human shields. Charges and countercharges flew back and forth until, like Rashomon, the facts of Rachel Corrie's death dissolved into a half-dozen competing versions of the truth, none of them fully convincing.

In the United States, the reaction to Corrie's death also reflected the deep divide over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Candlelit vigils took place in her hometown; her poignant letters home were posted on the Internet along with tributes from friends and teachers; Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) called for a congressional investigation. But many others greeted Corrie's death with a distinct lack of sympathy. Americans' preoccupation with the impending war in Iraq combined with the perception that Corrie was in league with Palestinian militants dampened any sense of outrage. She was ridiculed as "roadkill" on one website and excoriated on others for burning a makeshift American flag before Gaza schoolchildren, a photo of which prompted anti-war protesters and other likely allies to distance themselves from her. A university newspaper ran a scathing cartoon depicting a woman standing in front of a bulldozer along with dictionary definitions of the word "stupidity" and one addition: "3. Sitting in front of a bulldozer to protect a gang of terrorists." Most Americans, if they thought about her at all, considered Corrie a naif who had chosen the wrong side and paid, tragically, with her life. If Corrie thought that a white, American, female college student putting her life on the line could somehow change hearts and minds, she would, in death, be little more than a news blip, convincing people of nothing more than what they already believed. What remained unclear were the precise circumstances of her death-and why a 23-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington, would have placed her body in front of Israeli military bulldozers in the first place.

AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE 2003, two and a half months after Corrie was killed, I traveled to the Gaza Strip in search of those answers. Driving down from Jerusalem, I passed through the Erez Crossing, the nearly deserted transit point from Israel into Gaza. Despite a thaw in the peace process--the Aqaba summit and the inauguration of the "road map" were just days off--conditions had deteriorated since my last visit a few months earlier. Hamas militants had just fired homemade rockets at Israel from a nearby village, and the Israeli army had seized control of the area to prevent more attacks. Two Israeli Merkava tanks blocked the road leading into Gaza. With cars no longer permitted in or out, I was forced to walk to a taxi stand a half-mile away, through a landscape of chewed-up asphalt and flattened homes. I passed a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, the same type that ran over Corrie. The massive machine wheezed and spewed diesel smoke as it pushed an enormous heap of concrete debris, olive trees, and metal sheeting--evidently the remains of somebody's house and garden--into a larger pile at the roadside.

Mohammed Qishta, a slender, 23-year-old Palestinian who works as an interpreter for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and knew Corrie, met me at a crowded taxi stand on a hillside above the tanks. In his friend's battered Toyota we drove south toward Rafah, following the same coastal road Corrie had taken when she arrived in Gaza four months earlier. A small, 140-square-mile rectangle of land, Gaza was in Egyptian hands until Israel seized it during the 1967 Six Day War. Still surprisingly fertile, abounding with small plots of olives, squash, cucumbers, and oranges, Gaza is now surrounded by electrified security fences, its population barred from Israel. One million Palestinians are effectively held hostage by 6,700 Jewish settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)--although the sea provides a vital escape valve. As we sped down the coast, Palestinians played beach volleyball and swam in the placid blue waters of the Mediterranean. Then, north of the Palestinian town of Khan Younis, the coastal road abruptly ended: The beachfront land now belonged to the fortified Jewish settlement of Gush Katif. We cut inland and continued down the main Gaza highway, past a concrete bunker where Israeli soldiers peeked out through a tiny slot, machine guns at the ready.

By the time I arrived in Rafah, the posters that had gone up across Gaza in Corrie's honor--one slogan read "Rachel was a U.S. citizen with Palestinian blood"--were and peeling, and Yasser Arafat's pledge to name a street after her had apparently been forgotten. New martyrs were being produced nearly every day. As we sipped coffee in Rafah's main square, across from the run-down apartment block containing ISM headquarters, a convoy of vehicles festooned with the black flags of Islamic Jihad drove by, heading for the cemetery: One bore the body of a militant killed the day before. Later, as we left the offices of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in northern Rafah, an Israeli sniper perched in a nearby watchtower began firing down the road, apparently without provocation. We hit the ground and crawled back inside the building. During the fusillade, which lasted 15 minutes, one young man was shot.

RACHEL CORRIE grew up in Olympia, where her father worked as an insurance executive and her mother, an accomplished flutist, volunteered at local schools. In September 1997, she entered Evergreen State College in Olympia, a small liberal-arts institution known for its experimental curriculum and its left-wing orientation. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, graduated in 1977 and is often held up as the kind of irreverent, creative personality allowed to flourish at the school. A distrust of authority and a passion for unpopular causes permeate the politics of both students and faculty. In 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former journalist and Black Panther convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting of a Philadelphia police officer, delivered Evergreen's commencement address via audiotape from death row, sparking outrage in conservative circles. "The radical ideologies espoused every day at Evergreen State College are of every nasty branch of extremism," one columnist recently wrote. "Anti-Americanism. Anti-God. Anti-life. Anti-Israel. Anti-capitalism. Anti-tradition."