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Rachel Corrie may not have known.... that in November 1947, Israel accepted the UN Partition Plan which would have created a Palestinian Arab state alongside the State of Israel that following the British withdrawal, Israel was invaded in 1948 by its surrounding Arab neighbors with the support of the Palestinian Arab leadership, and that the invading nations, primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, promised--even boasted--that they would commit a genocide of all Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.
that the Palestinians refugee problem created by this war, therefore, Rachel Corrie may not have known that in the aftermath of this war, many Arab Muslim countries across North Africa and Arabia forcibly expelled entire Jewish populations from their ancestral homes, and these refugees were offered sanctuary by only one country: Israel, and that in fact, these refugees and their descendants now account for over half the population of Israel.
that after the Six-Day War in June 1967, which was provoked by Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, expelling the UN peacekeeping observers from the Sinai, and by both Egypt and Syria massing troops aggressively on Israel's borders, Israel offered to immediately return the territories it captured in exchange for peace and diplomatic recognition. that even before the Six-Day War, when Israel did not occupy any of the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, Israel was subjected to terrorist attacks against its civilians by Palestinians that Israel has made repeated overtures for peace, and that these have been repeatedly rejected by the Palestinian leadership, whose stated goals, even today, is the genocidal massacre of Jewish Israelis. - Had Rachel Corrie known these things--had she been presented with a fair and balanced understanding of Middle East history by her professors, her perception of who bears the principle responsibility for this conflict, and exactly who and what constitutes "evil" may have been different.
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