A boat named after Rachel Corrie. Photocredit: freegazaorg
The background
Rachel Corrie was a 23-year old American peace activist killed in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to protect a Palestinian house from being demolished in Rafah. She was wearing a high visibility jacket and lay down in the path of a bulldozer. The Israelis were demolishing 1,700 houses; this was during the second intifada. A judge in Haifa state, in a civil case brought by the Corrie family, has absolved the state of Israel (standing vicariously liable for the Israeli Defence Force) of responsibility for her death, and from not conducting a credible investigation. Corrie’s parents had alleged unlawful or intentional killing, or alternatively gross negligence; the case was has been going since March 2010.
So is the judge’s verdict simply propping up the state militia? The commentariat is divided.
“There was no negligence on the part of the bulldozer driver. I reject the suit. There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages,” said Judge Oded Gershon, quoted on The Week.
Protecting the military
The court ruled, said Zak Golombeck on Huffington Post, that Rachel “had intentionally acted as a human shield,” therefore she “was defending terrorists and should have removed herself from the zone of danger.” Though there is evidence that the driver could see Rachel, the judge preferred the driver’s view point. The judge also ruled that the activism was happening in a “war zone” – though this is an academic point, since the judge accepts the driver’s view: it’s hard to believe that Rachel posed a threat. Whilst the court was certainly not a “kangaroo court,” it is true that the military can escape “deprecation at judicial level.” “The long arm of the law often fails to reach a State’s military; regrettably, the law is not always above them.”
This verdict is a terrible whitewash
The judge, said The Guardian’s editorial, hasn’t deviated “from the official line.” He ruled that the driver hadn’t seen Corrie, and that the initial investigators, who were 19 years old and “repeatedly failed to take statements from witnesses, follow up discrepancies or even issue maps of the scene” were “credible and thorough.” This verdict has spread the whitewash over her death “yet further,” since in the eyes of the court Corrie was “a human shield protecting terrorists.” Four hundred children died in Gaza at the hands of Israeli soldiers during the second intifada – and they have no recourse to legal redress.
A hard verdict, but a just one
The Corrie family will find this “hard to bear,” said The Times (£), but the “judment accords with sense and compassion.” The bulldozer’s cab was high up – Corrie would have been hard to spot. At least Israel “has undertaken a military investigation.” Israel has to protect its own citizens, and The International Solidarity Movement, “which organised the protest in which Corrie died,” simply endangers “its own volunteers. Tragically, Corrie was a victim of that insouciance.”
