I was 12 years old when Rachel Corrie was born in our shared hometown of Olympia, Washington — a small, rain-soaked city that raises activists the way the midwest raises corn and cattle.

Rachel left for Gaza in her early twenties and was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 while trying to protect a Palestinian home.

Many of my friends in Olympia at the time didn’t understand her passion for helping. She tried to enlighten us in her writing.

Her voice, written from Gaza before she was killed, reminds us exactly who is suffering—and why she was there:

“I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now… An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here…

Rachel’s writing wasn’t abstract idealism—it was bearing witness.

“Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I’m having dinner with.”

But Rachel, like so many of us, was also conscious of Jewish oppression:

“The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That’s kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.”

After Rachel was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah, there were Zionist “pancake breakfasts” in her “honor.”

The premise was grotesque: gather, flip pancakes, and laugh about the young woman flattened by a bulldozer.

Mockery as public bonding. Cruelty as community glue. Butter, syrup, and a wink that said: we can kill your heroes and still laugh in your face about it.

And now, in 2025, we are watching something even more grotesque. Zionist protestors — many of the same families who once CELEBRATED Rachel’s death — are physically blocking caravans of food trucks headed to starving children in Gaza by sitting in the roads.

They are daring those trucks to run them over, knowing the aid providers are not as cruel as they are. It is a performance of power wrapped in smug moral cowardice.

To see them now, smirking in the road, is to feel the same cold rage that comes when you realize irony has turned to poison.

These aren’t passive protests—they’re daring those trucks to run them over, knowing full well that humanitarian drivers won’t. It’s a calculated stunt: sit in the road, weaponize your own safety, and then twist the absence of harm into a propaganda win.

And all of this happens while Gaza is under near-total siege—its borders sealed, its ports choked, its people rationed into malnutrition and death. The blockades don’t just target military supply lines—they target flour, fuel, clean water, and baby formula.

In that light, the pancake breakfasts and these truck blockades are part of the same playbook: Weaponize symbols of food, turn nourishment into a punchline, and mock the people you starve.

History isn’t a circle—it’s a wheel, grinding the same bones into the same dust.

The only food that slips past the blockade now comes under the crosshairs—bags of flour delivered while soldiers take aim at a baby’s skull. This isn’t relief; it’s theatre for an audience that wants to feel merciful without stopping the killing.


Don’t look away.

Name it.

Dismantle it.

Break the blockade — starve the siege.