Twenty years ago on March 16, the world got a tragic glimpse into what the state of Israel was going to become. Given the green light in the Oval Office by President George W. Bush, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – “a man of peace," Bush said at the time – started the now-inevitable march to apartheid and the murderous treatment of the Palestinians against whom the main battle would be waged.
That glimpse was the senseless murder of a passionate, 23-year-old woman whose laudable purpose at the time was simply the protection of Palestinian homes being bulldozed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). On that day, Rachel Corrie, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, was brutally murdered by an IDF armored bulldozer as she tried to interject herself between it and its merciless destruction of yet another Palestinian home in the southern Gaza Strip.