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Rachel and the bulldozer, March 16 2003 (photo: Joe Carr / wikimedia)
Photo of Rachel Corrie covered with her flag in a Palestinian morgue, ©pinky_again.
On August 28th, Israeli judge Oded Gorshen will read the verdict in the civil lawsuit brought against the Israeli government for wrongful death, when young Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza by an Israeli army bulldozer:
The lawsuit, filed in 2005 on behalf of the Corrie family by attorney Hussein abu Hussein, charges the State of Israel with responsibility for Rachel’s killing and failure to conduct a full and credible investigation in the case.
The lawsuit is just a small step in our family’s nearly decade-long search for truth and justice,” said Craig Corrie, Rachel’s father. “The mounting evidence presented before the court underscores a broken system of accountability – tolerated by the United States in spite of its conclusions that Israel’s military investigation was not ‘thorough, credible, or transparent.’”
Yesterday, the American ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, restated a position that the US Government has long held:
Israel’s investigation into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie was not satisfactory, and wasn’t as thorough, credible or transparent as it should have been, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told the Corrie family this week.
The U.S. government’s position is not new to the Corries, but their attorneys said that hearing it only a few days before the verdict was “important and encouraging,” because it signals to the Corrie family that the U.S. government will continue to demand a full accounting from Israel about their daughter’s killing, regardless of how Judge Oded Gershon rules.
Throughout the trial, which has lasted about a year and a half, Israeli government witnesses have brought out disturbing aspects of why ambassador Shapiro might be so concerned. The Israeli government has withheld key video and audio evidence from the operational area at which Corrie was killed. The coroner assigned by the IDF to perform the autopsy on Corrie’s body turned out to be a character from a panel in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. All of the non-IDF witnesses clearly testified to what appears to have been gross negligence on the part of the Israeli soldiers and commanders that morning.
Here are the trial archives at the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. The archives contain most of the important articles and press releases through the course of the trial.
Here’s my diary at MyFiredoglake at the conclusion of trial testimony, which gives a short history of important aspects of the proceeding.
I’m not optimistic about the verdict. Israel is rapidly descending into a pit of racist hatred, military hubris and religious weirdness that is even worse than what is going on in our own country.
18 Comments
Mahalo, ET, for all that you’ve done for the Corries and keeping Rachel’s memory alive all these years…! Please relay my sympathy to the Corries when you next talk to them…! *g*
Recommended. On a very related topic:
Read in full: Israel breaks silence over army abuses – Middle East – World – The Independent
mfi
Breaking the silence is what we all need to keep doing, Mark. The horror stories about kids in the custody of the IDF are only getting worse, week by week.
This article at Mondoweiss this afternoon troubled me. Mostly through the links it provided to comments by settlers airing their feelings about what they would like to do with young Palestinian girls – far younger than Rachel Corrie.
From this stream: כולנו נגד השמאל הקיצוני (translated by Dimi Reider:
I’m at a loss for words.
Thanks, CT. Hopefully, Craig, Cindy and the rest of the family will see justice. Ten years ago today, Rachel was headed to Burning Man.
In the summer of 2003, I did a lot of background research on her as I was beginning to memorialize her. I’ve never written about what I was able to learn about her time at Evergreen College, and in the Puget Sound alternative community. I was hoping someone like Phan Nguyen might do that. Maybe he will. Maybe I’ll find the time.
As time goes by, her resistance to the startup of our all war all the time paradigm strikes me as more resonant, rather than less.
I’m not at a loss for words at all ‘nor am I even slightly surprised that’s what racist thugs are like and that’s what Israel is a racist thug state in which racist thugs behave disgustingly.
Even a cursory glance at its history shows that in its treatment of the original inhabitants that Israel always has been a racist thug state it’s just that the thuggery, and racism, and viciousness is becoming more blatant and more pronounced. If you want to know what a society’s core values are you only have to examine how their soldiers behave – I saw and heard plenty of viciously racist thuggery from the Israeli soldiers who repeatedly illegally invaded and occupied Lebanon what they’re doing now to the Palestinians is not even remotely surprising to me, disgusting yes, surprising no. They’ve done it before – repeatedly.
mfi
I was raised a Zionist by a mom who always called Jews “God’s Chosen People.” My great friend, the late James L. Acord, grabbed me off a tug boat in late 1982, and took me to an art exhibit of drawings by Palestinian kids orphaned at Shatila in Beirut.
Even that wasn’t enough to make me into an activist. And even getting blacklisted as an artist 22 years later for daring to create a work of tribute to Corrie, I kept believing there might be a creative solution to the enormous problem the creation of Israel has presented humankind.
I’m beginning to see that beyond Israel having become the most dangerous adversary the USA has had since the end of the Cold War, our partnership with them since the early 1980s damns us both irrevocably.
My parents were from an IRA background on my father’s side (grandfather fought in our war of independence) and Anglo-Irish loyalists (other grandfather fought on the loyalist side during our war of independence). Both parents recognised racism and its attendants evils when they saw it and raised me accordingly.
Like many I was predisposed from everything I read and heard in Israel’s favour. Then the army sent me as a young and inexperience felix to Lebanon as a peacekeeper and I saw how viciously racist and thuggish the Israeli soldiers were in their treatment even of the allies in Lebanon. No difference between them and their South African and Rhodesian allies in how they treated others not of their tribe and race. None.
Yes, fortunately for everyone else America and its Israeli front men are both entering their decline. A long long long period in which Yankee goes home and damned well stays there will be very good for you and even better for the rest of us.
mfi
mfi
— again, Amen.
BTW, the Anchorage Youth Symphony performed my The Wild Coast this summer in Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Vienna and finished at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Still waiting for my recording of the Bratislava concert, which went very well.
Nice to get some unabashedly good news for a change. I hope you’ll post it up to YouTube when you get it. Would you consider doing a short guest posting at my place introducing your The Skies Are Weeping – Cantata in memoriam Rachel Corrie?
mfi
Thanks for keeping us firepups appraised of this whole sordid affair.
I admire your passion and activism.
ps I should be an editor, I recommended the post before taking the family to church and here it is frontpaged on my arrival home:)
Yes. When?
Is a US ambassador actually criticizing Israel over an inadequate investigation into the murder of an American citizen? I am genuinely surprised by this, given the lengths the US government went to to whitewash the killing and maiming of Americans on the USS Liberty in 1967. Will Israel criticize Ambassador Shapiro of insubordination toward the US’s Israeli overlords?
Whenever you can :-). If you mail it to me as a word document I’ll format it for my place. Embed the video. But otherwise do no editing.
mfi
And yet we still tolerate legislators like Joe Lieberman who have always put their allegiance to Israel ahead of their sworn allegiance to the U.S.
It is such an ironic shame that Israel should sink to being the planet’s moral cesspool, given the history of its creation. And I have no doubt that even here I will be held anti-semitic by some for saying so.
That has been the position of the State Department since 2005:
Thank you for this. When I read about Rachel Corrie, and saw no response by our government, that was the beginning of my awareness that they really don’t give much of a rat’s ass about “we the people” contrary to their rhetoric. That awareness has only expanded over the years. I occasionally think of Ms. Corrie and thank her for her service to our country and the peace movement.
Thanks for the response. The US government is still being weak. Foreign aid to Israel should have been shut down, but 98% of Congress is owned by the Israel lobby.
The median annual income of Israelis exceed that of Americans. So, why are we giving them foreign aid?
To subsidize our weapons industry and theirs.