Rachel Corrie, U.S. activist killed by Israel bulldozer, brought it "upon herself," court says

CBS News

An Israeli court ruled Tuesday that the military was not at fault for killing a U.S. activist crushed by an army bulldozer during a 2003 demonstration, rejecting a lawsuit filed by her parents.

The bulldozer driver has said he didn't see 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist, who was trying to block the vehicle's path during a demonstration in the Gaza Strip against the military's demolition of Palestinian homes.

The military deemed her March 2003 death an accident, but Corrie's parents said the driver acted recklessly and filed a civil lawsuit two years later.

Explaining the district court's ruling, Judge Oded Gershon said Corrie "put herself in a dangerous situation" and called her death "the result of an accident she brought upon herself." He said the military conducted a proper investigation and rejected the Corrie family's request for a symbolic $1 in damages and legal expenses.

Corrie's family, who flew in from the U.S. for the verdict, lamented the court's ruling. Their lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein, said he would appeal the ruling to Israel's Supreme Court.

"We are of course, deeply saddened and deeply troubled by what we heard today," said her mother, Cindy Corrie of Olympia, Washington. "I believe this was a bad day. Not only for our family but for human rights, the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel."

Corrie's sister, Sarah, held up a picture of her sister lying lifeless in bulldozer tracks. The family's lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein pointed at it: "How did the bulldozer not see her?" he asked. To say that the driver did not see her "is lies to the living and also lies to the dead."

The home demolitions were part of an unsuccessful campaign to halt thousands of attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers in southern Gaza, along the border with Egypt, in the preceding 3 ½ years. On the day Rachel Corrie died, she and other activists had entered a closed military zone to protest the demolition policy.

According to the U.N. agency handling Palestinian refugees, the military had left more than 17,000 Gazans homeless in the four years after a Palestinian uprising against Israel erupted in September 2000. The demolitions drew international condemnation at the time.

In her death, Corrie became the embodiment of what Palestinian activists say is Israel's harsh repression of nonviolent protest to occupation. Israel says by entering conflict zones to try to interfere with military activities, activists recklessly choose to risk their lives.

Her parents have relentlessly pursued her case since going to court in 2005 after a military investigation cleared the driver.

They say they have spent $200,000 to fly in witnesses, attend 15 hearings and translate more than 2,000 pages of court transcripts.

At the news conference, Cindy Corrie read a passage from one of her daughter's letters, biting her lip as her husband, grim-faced, held a microphone for her.

"Life is very difficult. Human beings can be kind, brave and strong, even in the most difficult of circumstances," Rachel Corrie wrote. "Thank you for existing, for showing how good people can be, despite great hardship."

The Corrie case was the first civil lawsuit of a foreigner harmed by Israel's military to conclude in a full civilian trial. Others have resulted in out-of-court settlements.

Rachel Corrie's parents describe ruling as 'bad day for human rights' - video

Guardian

Cindy and Craig, the parents of Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli military bulldozer in 2003, say the judge's ruling that Israel wasn't responsible for her death has 'deeply saddened and deeply troubled' the family. Cindy Corrie told a press conference it was a bad day for human rights, humanity and the law

‘No amount of reading and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality’— Remembering Rachel Corrie

MondoWiess

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, the peace activist whose life was cruelly cut short in 2003 by the Israeli military when the IDF crushed her with a bulldozer. Corrie was just 23 years old when killed while volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Gaza, but her memory continues to inspire many long after her death.

To those who knew her, Corrie was thoughtful, sensitive, and courageous. The ISM remembered Corrie:

It rained on Kufr Qaddoum where attack dogs clenched in their jaws the peaceful freedom fighters of Palestine, an image reminiscent of a segregated America.

It drizzled as the folks of Al Ma’sara demanded the wall to fall, an echoing cry humanity heard from Germany.

Puddles formed along Shuhada Street in Al Khalil where Apartheid still lurked despite South Africa’s continued victories.

And it watered on Gaza, where the dust never seems to settle between the murderous attacks of the Zionist military.

It is fitting to honor Corrie with a poem, as she is known for her letters and emails from Palestine to her family, compiled in a book edited by her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie. So let us remember Corrie with an excerpt from an email sent by Corrie to family and friends, while in Rafah.  The email was published in Let Me Stand Alone:

Hi friends and family, and others,

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me – Ali – or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me, 'Kaif Sharon?' 'Kaif Bush?' and they laugh when I say, 'Bush Majnoon', 'Sharon Majnoon' back in my limited arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn’t quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: “Bush mish Majnoon' … Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say, 'Bush is a tool,' but I don’t think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago.

Rachel Corrie's family claim Israeli military withheld vital video evidence

Guardian
Harriet Sherwood

The family of Rachel Corrie, the US activist killed in Gaza while protesting against house demolitions in 2003, on Monday claimed the Israeli military authorities withheld video evidence during the Corries' civil lawsuit and misled US officials on crucial details.

Craig Corrie, Rachel's father, told a press conference in Jerusalem that the footage from a surveillance camera near the scene of his daughter's death submitted to the court was "incomplete". Additional video material obtained by the family showed Rachel's body in a different spot to the place identified by some military commanders, he said.

He also alleged that the Israeli military had misled US officials on the position of Rachel's body when she was killed.

Rachel, from Olympia, Washington state, was killed while attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah area of Gaza from being demolished by Israeli troops in March 2003. Her family and other activists who witnessed the incident say she was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.

Following Rachel's death the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation.

An internal Israeli military investigation, which was never published nor released to the US government nor the Corries, concluded that the two soldiers who operated the bulldozer had not seen Rachel and that no charges would be brought. The case was closed.

In March last year the Corrie family launched a civil case, accusing the military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence. Hearings in the case ended on Sunday and a verdict is due to be delivered next April.

US collusion in the Gaza blockade is an affront to human rights

Guardian
Cindy Corrie

My daughter's death shows the cruelty of an America that won't protect its own and is complicit in harming Palestinian civilians

When Greek authorities prevented the US ship the Audacity of Hope leaving its port in Athens this week, they dealt a blow to a group of brave and principled Americans who were trying to carry thousands of letters from US citizens to those who wait on Gaza's shores.

I know many of the people who were on this boat, and my family's letter was part of their cargo. In 2003 my daughter Rachel Corrie made her journey to Gaza and was run down and killed by a US-made Israeli military Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer. She was trying to protect a Gazan family and their home, one of thousands illegally destroyed in Israeli military clearing operations.

Now my family is on a parallel journey with those activists as we return this week to Israeli court to confront Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, the commanding officer of the Gaza Division's Southern Brigade in 2003. His testimony should shed light not only on actions of troops responsible for Rachel's killing but also on the Israeli military's broad failures as an occupying power to protect civilian life and property.
This week's flotilla was travelling to Gaza, as Rachel did, to stand with Palestinians against oppression and illegal occupation and for a just, enduring peace.

Some liken the action to those of "freedom riders" who 50 years ago journeyed bravely to the American south to oppose racist laws that kept blacks and whites from sitting together on buses. The flotilla participants are pursuing Israeli and US policy that provides access and egress for Gazans commensurate with what other peoples enjoy in their homelands. They demand freedoms for Gazans that we in the US celebrate for ourselves but are complicit in denying to Palestinians.

A senior administration official in 2010 told our family that the blockade of Gaza was a "failed policy". He emphasised that the attack on the first flotilla that claimed nine lives (including a US citizen) was tragic, but had created movement for lessening restrictions for Gaza.

Some members of Congress have declared the "imprisonment" of Gazans a greater threat to Israeli security than rockets from Gaza. Nevertheless, a year after the Israeli commando attack on the Mavi Marmara, the US has been unwilling or unable to influence Israel to make many of the changes still needed.

In 2003 Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon promised President Bush a "thorough, credible, and transparent" investigation into my daughter's killing. The US government's position continues to be that the promise has gone unfulfilled. In 2008 the Department of State wrote: "We have consistently requested that the government of Israel conduct a full and transparent investigation into Rachel's death. Our requests have gone unanswered or ignored."

Israel has no intention of finding justice for Rachel Corrie

“Thorough, credible and transparent” means “collusion, sabotage and deceit” in Israel.

 

The Palestine Monitor has witnessed nearly half of the Rachel Corrie family’s civil suit against Israel. Since last March, we, along with Al Jazeera, Electronic Intifada, Haaretz, Ynet and many others, have brought the world shameful stories from Israel’s halls of justice in Haifa: witness contradictions, investigative negligence, tampered evidence, amnesiac witnesses, judicial prejudice and continual perjury. Through public, political and now judicial pressure, our hope was that Israel would finally explain how Rachel Corrie died. We know they can - they have the video and audio tapes and nearly a dozen eyewitnesses.

But now we know they won’t, ever.

At the last court session, we heard two witnesses - men present when Rachel fell beneath a nine-ton steel blade. Both gave testimony after the event, sworn statements in affidavits, and (one would assume) felt some guilt some eight years after their collective actions led to a grisly, high-profile death. However, on 6 April—as in all the previous court dates—these witnesses denied having even the most basic knowledge of the incident: one said he couldn’t remember Rachel Corrie’s name, the other couldn’t recall the time of year his team found her mortally wounded.

Judge Oded Gershon did not hold them accountable when they obviously contradicted earlier sworn statements and both men were hidden behind a so-called security wall, hiding giveaway body language and emotive faces or eyes. With the pleading gaze of grieving parents and sister - would these witnesses have blamed Rachel for her own death, as they did, and profess to forgetting much of her infamous end?

Rachel’s mouth was ripped open and her body was savagely broken. Perhaps the shock wiped the Israeli soldiers and engineers memories. Perhaps their plentiful deployment of the phrases “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” was in their pre-trial briefing with military and judicial officials. Are they under orders - or threat? Or are they simply lying?

If they were concealing the truth, however, it wouldn’t matter.

Yesterday, the commander of the bulldozer team that killed Rachel slipped up. After he asserted he was at the scene of the crime and not in a military command bunker, the courtroom gasped. Just an hour before he had said the complete opposite. The Corrie family lawyer Hussein Abu Hussein checked his notes, peered over his silver frames, and asked the witness to clarify. He repeated his statement, perjuring himself before the court, the judge, the family and the silver menorah of the Israeli justice system. But Judge Gershon seemed not to notice.

The oath he’d administered - sworn before God and the Jewish state of Israel - lay broken before him, but you wouldn’t know it by the judge’s impassive face.

“It’s as if he’s already made up his mind,” a lawyer present at the trial said about the judge.

This entire trial has been a sham. No one requires the witnesses to answer truthfully. A former military judge, Gershon openly favors the state defense attorneys. The chamber is woefully small, limiting the amount of foreign press, translators and representatives. No translators are provided by the state for the family, journalists or foreign officials. Gershon has routinely stretched and changed trial dates, with scant thought for the economic and emotional toll on Rachel’s family.

It is beyond clear the state of Israel will not try to understand March 16, 2003. Why should they show any remorse or respect for a young woman deemed “an enemy combatant” by one witness?

The valiant efforts of Abu Hussein and Jamal Dakwar, the Corrie’s lawyers, have exposed a criminally negligent military investigation and many facts - effectively establishing the closest thing to the “thorough, credible and transparent” investigation Ariel Sharon promised George W. Bush. But the fact is that, as of now, Israel simply doesn’t care.

While waging another Gaza campaign, again, why would they?

Unless something radically changes in the stance of the US government or Israel, the Corrie family won’t get the symbolic one dollar and recognition they are asking of the political system that killed their daughter. And while the trial continues, the policy Rachel died fighting - Israeli demolition of impoverished and occupied communities - rages on.

Let it be very clear. You won’t find justice in Israel.

Report: Israel training to block Freedom Fleet

South Lebanon

Bethlehem - Ma'an - Israel's naval forces are allegedly in training to prepare to seize eight boats scheduled to dock in the Gaza Strip on 24 May from Europe, Arabic-language media reported on Wednesday.

"About half of the Israeli naval forces will participate in an operation that was approved by the cabinet. [Israeli] Defense Minister Ehud Barak will supervise the operation," an Israeli official told the Arabic-language satellite TV station Al-Hurra.

An Israeli security source told Ma'an that authorities will prevent the arrival of the boats "at any price."

The Freedom Fleet is scheduled to set sail from the UK, Greece and Turkey. The European Free Gaza campaign said Israeli authorities informed them that the flotillas would be prevented from docking in Gaza.

The boats will be loaded with prefabricated homes, cement, and medicine and will be accompanied by 600 individuals in a bid to break the siege on Gaza.

On Sunday, Jamal Al-Khudari, head of Gaza's Popular Committee Against the Siege, said Israeli threats to open fire at the boats reveal Israel's weakness.

"Such threats reflect the occupation's failure and embody state terrorism against peaceful individuals who come to support a people under siege and aggression," a statement issued by Al-Khudari said.

Under international law, the activists attempting to dock in Gaza have the right to participate in breaking the siege, Al-Khudari added, saying the threats will not deter participants from arriving in Gaza.

The popular committee organizer said the group was coming well-equipped, and would be ready should the Israeli navy surround them for a long period of time.

The Freedom Flotilla announced plans in late April, saying a group of ships would depart from several corners of the Mediterranean and gather in international waters with the intent to deliver some 5,000 tons of building and medical supplies to the population under siege.

According to flotilla organizers, 600 activists will sail three cargo ships and five passenger boats for Gaza in what a statement called the "biggest internationally coordinated effort to directly challenge Israeli's ongoing occupation, aggression, and violence against the Palestinian people."