Diaries, videos and personal testimony can cut through denial and abstraction, forcing the world to recognise the individual lives caught inside genocide.

There are few tools left for a young girl coping with the reality of surviving a genocide, and so she writes in her journal.

Rachel Corrie was 23 years old when she left her hometown of Olympia, Washington in 2003 to volunteer in Rafah and Gaza City. It was her second time ever leaving the United States. While in the occupied territories in Israel, Rachel wrote furious to-do lists about possible next steps she should take as a volunteer acclimatising to a new country. From getting a new phone number to call her mom, to calling the other organisers she worked with, her journals quickly filled with reminders about the next important thing she needed to do, and the larger questions she wrestled with as she dreamed and planned for her future.

In the safety of her diary, Rachel reckoned with the US military-industrial complex and Israeli soldiers shooting at children, and how these forces overshadowed the nonviolent activism she engaged in.

On 16 March 2003, Rachel Corrie stood outside the home of a Palestinian family to position herself as an unwavering obstacle in the face of a bulldozer driven by Israeli soldiers intending to wreck the 600th Palestinian home that week. Despite her privileged white skin and neon-orange jacket demanding the protections that an American citizen is supposedly entitled to, the bulldozer pushed her down a mound of dirt and drove over her body, crushing and killing her while an audience of activists and families watched in powerless........

© Pearls and Irritations