The on-going attack of Iraq threatens to obscure a tragedy of less immediate global consequence, perhaps, but of no less import, at least for those who loved her. Last Sunday, a young American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death in Gaza, trying to protect a Palestinian family's home from a bulldozer operated by an Israeli soldier and paid for by the United States. I do not wish to politicize Ms. Corrie's death by condemning one more time the injustice of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, sanctioned and financially supported by the United States, or by pointing once again to how so many have been killed, on both sides, by bulldozers and bullets and bombs. No, today I wish only to mourn the loss of a singular young woman who I never met but will forever miss. Here is a woman who stood in front of a bulldozer because she refused to believe the worst about mankind, even when, in her e-mails to her mother, she writes of "nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside." In 1989, at Tiananmen Square, the tank turned away; on Sunday, at Gaza, the bulldozer didn't, silencing a voice that even strangers now long to hear. And so I give the last word to Ms. Corrie, from an e-mail to her mother recently published by The Guardian: "I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances - which I also haven't seen before. I think the word is dignity."