Rachel Corrie (1979-2003) RIP

Born: April 10, 1979 in Olympia, Washington, United States
Murdered: March 16, 2003 in Rafah, Palestine

"I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive... Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realise there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with." Rachel Corrie

The Strange Silence of Guardian Australia

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia has posted a thoughtful essay on GA's website: The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the web (9/10/13).

Among the many comments in the thread which followed her piece was this by the courageous director of Sydney University's Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies, Associate Professor Jake Lynch:

"Interesting account of the dispute with Julie Bishop. I wonder if it is at all related to Guardian Australia's refusal to take any interest in Bishop's abuse of her office to stifle dissent on a key area of foreign policy? Before the election, she told Murdoch's Australian newspaper that government research grant money would be withheld from me, and any other academics who support a boycott of Israel - even for projects on unrelated topics. This would, she said, be a 'government-wide policy'. I am about to find out whether it will actually be implemented, since I am up for a Discovery Project grant from the Australian Research Council, with funding decisions due to be released later this month. Education Minister Christopher Pyne would have to write the cheque, if my proposal is approved by fellow academics. Hopefully he will take an approach more in keeping with intellectual freedom.

"Meanwhile, the Australian has continued to pursue the story. One of its reporters, Ean Higgins, has offered occasional news pieces, which have been both accurate and balanced. But another, Christian Kerr, has produced a steady stream of sensationalised and agenda-driven articles, calculated apparently to 'egg on' the Coalition and the pro-Israel lobby.

"Other media have generally left this issue to the Australian. From the Sydney Morning Herald, there has been a deafening silence. The Conversation* refused to run anything on it, despite the topic being of direct concern to academics, who make up the vast majority of its contributors and a big slice of its readership.

"I did get a piece on the ABC's opinion site, The Drum commissioned by its editor, Chip Rolley. As he is the former artistic director of of the Sydney Literary Festival, he has a 'hinterland' of professional achievement in a field other than journalism, which I have guessed might give him more 'bottom' when it comes to resisting criticism from the pro-Israel lobby or Bishop herself. From the rest of the Corporation, there has been an apparent 'pre-emptive buckle'. Producers of two programs on ABC Radio refused my offers to come on and discuss it.

"In short, the story typifies the way such issues develop in a public sphere beset by the narrowness and shallowness of the Australian mediascape, with its ownership patterns referenced here by Katharine Viner.

"I had assumed that Guardian Australia would take on the job of filling in some of the gaps, the 'strategic silences', that result - and the successes she claims in this lecture bear that out. Australian politicians should really not be able to get away with calling people terrorists when they are not, or failing to act meaningfully in response to the evidence of anthropogenic climate change or its connection with the growing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. In these respects, GA has already contributed helpfully to accountability in its short career.

"But repeated attempts to get GA to take an interest in Julie Bishop's stifling of dissent by victimising me, and any others who advocate an academic boycott of Israel, have failed. It has been like striking a match against a wet box.

"We are gathering support on a petition and will shortly try to get some media attention for it, see here: http://www.change.org/petitions/defend-free-speech-and-human-rights-and-support-the-bds Perhaps then the Guardian will decide it can no longer leave this important story to the Murdoch press."

The interesting thing here is that Katharine Viner is the co-editor (with Alan Rickman) of the 2005 play My Name is Rachel Corrie, a moving play based on the writings of the ISM activist crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to defend a Palestinian home. A play, moreover, whose first  performance in New York failed to go ahead due to Israel lobby pressure. Viner is further described in a 2005 interview as having a "fascination with the Middle East, [spending] most of her holidays in places like Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the West Bank, to the point where her brother jokingly dubbed her a 'trauma tourist'."** GA's refusal to report the facts of Jake Lynch's case is therefore puzzling in the extreme. 

[*Described by Wikipedia as "an independent source of news and analysis that uses content sourced from the academic and research community"; **It's good to feel scared from time to time, Julie Tomlin, pressgazette.co.uk, 4/5/05]

Baruch Goldstein Trumps Rachel Corrie

"The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is deeply concerned by the verdict of Judge Oded Gershon that absolved Israel's military and state of the 2003 murder of American ISM activist Rachel Corrie. Rachel was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. Despite the American administration stating that the Israeli military investigation had not been 'thorough, credible and transparent' and the Israeli government withholding key video and audio evidence, Judge Gershon found no fault in the investigation or in the conclusion that the military and state were not responsible for Rachel's death. Judge Gershon ruled that Rachel was to blame for her own murder and classifies her non-violent attempt to prevent war crimes as proof that Rachel was not a 'thinking person'. By disregarding international law and granting Israeli war criminals impunity Judge Gershon's verdict exemplifies the fact that Israel's legal system cannot be trusted to administer justice according to international standards." (From the ISM's response to the Rachel Corrie verdict)

Given that Israel's founding ideology - political Zionism - is a species of toxic, tribal nationalism, the very antithesis of the universal principles and standards enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and that its record in giving the finger to countless UN resolutions is legendary, verdicts such as that in the case of Rachel Corrie (and in many others over the years) are hardly surprising.

As an indication of the depth of the problem, it is worth revisiting the case of Israel's Anders Behring Breivik, Baruch Goldstein. On February 25, 1994, Goldstein, a member of Rabbi Meir Kahane's terrorist Kach organisation, opened fire on worshippers in a Hebron mosque, killing 29 Palestinians and wounding 125. Only a blow to the head by a fire extinguisher ended the massacre - and his life. 

According to the Wikipedia entry on Goldstein and his massacre, he was "denounced by mainstream Orthodox Judaism" and "widely described as insane by Israelis." One is left with the impression that Israel's reaction was somehow comparable to that of Norway's following Breivik's Utoya Island massacre. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, as Israeli scholar and human rights defender Israel Shahak reveals in his penetrating study, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (1999/2004). Some excerpts from Chapter 6, The Real Significance of Baruch Goldstein, serve to contextualise Judge Gershon's verdict in the Corrie case :

"Israeli policies, directed towards Palestinians, other Middle East Arabs (perceived by Zionists as non-Jews) and people of other nations, are only explainable by assuming that they are based upon anti-Gentile feeling. The anti-Gentile feeling is strongest among the most religious Jews but exists as well in this secular milieu. This is the reason why support for Goldstein in 1994 and 1995 had a sequel in the excuses by many Israeli leaders for the slaughter. These excuses were thinly disguised by mostly hypocritical expressions of shock." (p 98)

"[Yediot Ahronot journalist Nahum] Barnea reported: 'Within hours a whole edifice of rationalization was built, according to which Goldstein [a military doctor] had allegedly been under unbearable mental pressure, because he had to attend so many wounded and dead [persons], including Arabs.' The men who propagated this lie knew that Goldstein had refused to treat Arabs. Barnea continued: 'Thus, the Arabs were made guilty for what he could not avoid doing. The implication was that the Arabs assaulted him rather than the other way around and that he really acted for the benefit of the Arabs by letting them finally realize that Jewish blood could not be shed with impunity.' This brazen lie was maintained as long as possible before being abandoned without apology. The propagation of such a lie reveals the influence of Jewish fundamentalism upon the secular parts of the Israeli establishment." (p 99)

"An even greater example of Jewish fundamentalism's influence upon the secular part of the Israeli establishment can be detected in the official arrangement of Goldstein's elaborate funeral at a time that the deliberate character of the massacre could not be denied. The establishment was affected by the fact, widely reported in the Hebrew press but given little place in the foreign press, that within 2 days of the massacre the walls of religious neighborhoods of west Jerusalem (and to a lesser extent of many other religious neighborhoods) were covered by posters extolling Goldstein's virtues and complaining that he did not manage to kill more Arabs. Children of religious settlers who came to Jerusalem to demonstrate sported buttons for months after the massacre that were inscribed: 'Dr Goldstein cured Israel's ills.' Numerous concerts of Jewish religious music and other events often developed into demonstrations of tribute to Goldstein. The Hebrew press reported these incidents of public tribute in copious detail. No major politician protested against such celebrations.

"President Weizman expressed more extravagantly than others his sorrow for the massacre. Weizman, as reported by Uzi Benziman in his March 4, 1994 Haaretz article, was also engaged in lengthy and amiable negotiations with Goldstein's family and Kach comrades concerning a suitably honorable funeral for the murderer. Kiryat Arba settlers, many of whom had already declared themselves in favor of the mass murder in radio and television interviews and had lauded Goldstein as a martyr and holy man, demanded that General Yatom, the commander responsible for the Hebron area, allow the funeral cortage to parade through the city of Hebron, in order to be viewed by the Arabs even though a curfew existed. Yatom did not object outright to the demand but opposed it as something that could cause disorder. Tzvi Katzover, the mayor of Kiryat Arba and one of the most extreme leaders of the religious settlers, telephoned Weizman and threatened that the settlers would make a pogrom of Arabs if their demands were not met. Weizman responded by telephoning the chief of staff and asking why the army opposed the demand of the settlers. According to Benziman, Chief of Staff [Ehud] Barak answered: 'The army was afraid that Arabs would desecrate Goldstein's tomb and carry away his corpse.' In further negotiations involving Barak, Yatom, Rabin, Kach leaders and Kiryat Arba settlers, Weizman assumed the consistant position, as stated by Benziman, that 'the army should pay respect to the desires and sensibilities of the settlers and of the Goldstein family.' Ultimately, the negotiated decision was that a massively attended funeral cortage would take place in Jerusalem and that the police would close some of the busiest streets to the traffic in Goldstein's honor. Afterwards the murderer would be buried in Kiryat Arba along the continuation of Kahane Avenue. According to Benziman, Kach leaders at first rejected this compromise. General Yatom had to approach the Kach leaders in person and beg them abjectly for their agreement, which he finally secured. Yatom also had to obtain consent from the notorious Kiryat Arba rabbi, Dov Lior. As reported in the March 4, 1994, issue of Yerushalaim Lior declared: 'Since Goldstein did what he did in God's own name, he is to be regarded as a righteous man.' Benziman explained the conduct of Weizman and his entourage: 'After the fact the officials of the presidential mansion justify those goings on by the need to becalm the settlers' mood. After the funeral the army provided a guard of honor for Goldstein's tomb. The tomb became a pilgrimage site, not only for the religious settlers but also for delegations of pious Jews from all Israeli cities." (pp 100-102)

I could go on - there's lots more in Shahak's account - but I'm sure you've got the picture. Pro-Israel propaganda notwithstanding, Israel always was, is now, and will continue to be - this side of apartheid - a deeply tribal society in which Gentile-killers will always get special treatment. As an ethnographic state born of a monumental act of injustice to the Arab Palestinians in 1948, it simply cannot be relied upon to dispense justice to its victims, Palestinians or otherwise.

Anticipatory Compliance

"The thing about Murdoch is that he very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors. Instead, by way of discussion he would make known his personal viewpoint on a certain matter. What was expected in return, at least from those seeking tenure of any length in the Murdoch Empire, was a sort of 'anticipatory compliance'. One didn't need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one's long-term interests." (Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife, Bruce Dover, 2008, p 149)

Anticipatory compliance (or self-censorship) is a reflex all too familiar to those in the mainstream media who write about the Palestine/Israel conflict. Apart from those at News Limited who actually believe their own pro-Israel propaganda, whenever the subject of Israel's decades-long abuse of the Palestinian people arises, editors and journalists will do what they do in the certain knowledge that, should they breach the red lines laid down by Israel lobby spinmeisters, there will be consequences: angry phone calls, letters, emails, even meetings with management. Is this kind of heat worth it? they'll be asking themselves. Punches will be pulled and difficult questions avoided. The result will be that our understanding of the underlying dynamics of the conflict will be compromised. We'll relegate it to the too-hard basket and concentrate instead on other, clearer, safer crimes, such as Tibet and Zimbabwe. And the relentless, bloody process of wiping Palestine off the map, Palestinian by Palestinian, dunum by dunam, begun in earnest by the Zionist movement in 1948, will continue apace.

Veteran BBC journalist Tim Llewellyn put it thus: "This [unconscious pro-Israel bias] is also evident in insidious self-censorship, in which a reporter senses a way of pre-empting the anxiety of his bosses or the ire of the Israelis or both by crafting his story in a bland and therefore misleading manner: 'Land which the Palestinians say is occupied...'; 'disputed' instead of 'occupied' territories, a phrase that still crops up on the BBC, though the circumlocution is legally and morally indefensible; the misrepresentation of the numbers of Jewish settlers on the West Bank and in Jerusalem; the failure to get into the public British consciousness the nature of the vast Separation and Enclosure Wall Israel is building around and into Palestinian territory, dividing and isolating its people and further damaging their already enfeebled economy. This is still called by the BBC 'a security barrier', conjuring up in the viewer's or listener's mind the image of a temporary structure the local police might put up to fence off a crime scene or to deter football hooligans." (Introduction to Publish It Not: The Middle East cover-Up, Christopher Mayhew & Michael Adams, 2006)

A text book example of anticipatory compliance cropped up in The Australian of 26/4/08:-

Sian Powell's Gaza power play was a feature article on the staging (Belvoir St Theatre, May 14) of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie. Its eponymous subject was callously murdered by an Israeli army bulldozer driver in 2003 while trying to protect, along with fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian home from demolition.

Right at the outset Powell feels compelled to play the faux balancing game: "Playwright Harold Pinter, among others, wrote to defend the play, while a website called Rachel Corrie Facts has been set up to correct the work's 'factual errors and myths'." Not even the qualifier 'alleged' is allowed to intrude on the fiction that RCF is anything more than just another tiresome pro-Israel propaganda site out to sow confusion. "The play has dipped into that most prickly subject," Powell writes, "Middle Eastern politics. Corrie drew derision and admiration during her short life: the play has had the same effect." "Derision" - whose derision? Powell dare not spell it out. The illusion that Corrie's detractors may have had a genuine reason for objecting to the play, as opposed to an axe to grind, is thus created. The play "is sure to draw fire," she adds.

But that's just for starters. Powell quotes an almost apologetic Shannon Murphy, director of the Sydney production: "I actually think it's been blown out of proportion... It's more a coming-of-age story." Although Murphy is described as being "so taken with the play," Powell says this is because it is "a play rather than as a political polemic."

In her gloss on Corrie's life, Powell notes that "as a college student she joined the International Solidarity Movement," parenthetically adding the words "dubbed a pro-Palestinian front." The identity and motives of the dubbers is left to the reader's imagination. Whoever they are, Powell must placate them. The vital and heroic work of the ISM is ignored and its integrity impugned.

She quotes Corrie, mere days before her death, saying, "I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive... Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realise there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with." But this chilling insight into the dark heart of the matter is subverted when Powell goes on to quote Murphy (still in apologetic mode): "'Up until she died she was still trying to grasp what was happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians'... adding that Corrie was angrier with US foreign policy than she was with Israel." (But of course, who in their right mind could possibly blame Israel?)

"Trying to grasp what was happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians"? Really? Corrie knew exactly what was happening. A military machine, the IDF, Jabotinsky's implacable "iron wall of Jewish bayonets," was all around her, destroying Palestinian lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and had been since 1947-8. To suggest that Corrie wasn't quite up to speed on this is either not to understand her words - or else an exercise in anticipatory compliance.

Powell can't even concede that Corrie was murdered: "She was killed in hotly disputed circumstances. It is certain, though, that Corrie was trying to prevent an armoured Israeli D9 bulldozer from working in Rafah... where she believed Palestinian houses were at risk. She was killed either by the bulldozer's blade or by rubble and debris moved by the machine."

So Corrie's death was an accident! An Israeli bulldozer (no human agency is indicated) was quietly working away minding its own business when Corrie, who only "believed" that some houses (whose houses?) were at risk, simply got in the way. Now where could she have gotten the idea that Palestinian homes were at risk? She couldn't possibly have gone to Gaza knowing that over 3,000 Palestinian homes had been toppled in the previous 2 years, or to Rafah knowing that the Israelis were busy bulldozing a 400m corridor separating Gaza and Egypt through people's homes, now could she? Let us hope that the silly girl didn't traumatise the poor driver too much.

And anyway, "an Israeli Defence Force investigation found that Corrie had not been run over by the dozer and that the driver probably had not been able to see her." Well, that's that then. End of story. The Israelis wouldn't lie now, would they? And this in spite of Powell's earlier claim that the circumstances of her death were"hotly disputed."

As if that wasn't enough to keep the Zionist media pack from the door, "Murphy believes Corrie's death was accidental... 'She slipped and she was trying to scramble up, and it crushed her. It was an accident... No charges have been laid, that's for sure'." This, if correctly reported, is bizarre. Here we have Murphy, described as "so taken" with the play and Corrie's story, apparently unaware of the eyewitness testimony of Corrie's fellow activist, Joe Smith: "Rachel [dressed incidentally in a bright orange jacket with reflective stripes] was kneeling 20 metres in front of the bulldozer on flat ground. There was no way she could not have been seen. We only maintain positions that are clearly visible. She had been doing this all day but this time the driver did not stop. Once she had fallen under the bulldozer, the driver stopped when she was under its middle section and reversed." (Israeli report clears troops over US death, The Guardian, 14/4/03)

Unaware too, it seems, of the words of ISM spokesman, Tom Wallace: "The conclusions are outrageous. If they found that the driver was not culpable what did they find to explain this? How could they find a driver who had run someone over in a slow and deliberate manner in no way responsible?" (TG, 14/4/03)

Anticipatory compliance. Anything to avoid drawing fire from you-know-who.

Rachel Corrie knew exactly what was going on around her and could have had no illusions whatever about the dangers of standing up to the uniformed thugs of the IDF. Whether shooting, shelling, firing missiles or bulldozing, she would have known that the Israeli military is committed to one thing and one thing only - the ethnic cleansing of Palestine - and that nobody, not even a white American woman, would be allowed to stand between it and its historic mission. Rachel Corrie may have been born in the US, but she was murdered in Palestine as a Palestinian.

The psychopathological mindset she was up against becomes clear when one reads the testimony of Moshe Nissim, the driver of one of the bulldozers that flattened the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002: "Do you know how I held out for 75 hours? I didn't get off the tractor. I had no problem of fatigue, because I drink whisky all the time. I had a bottle in the tractor at all times... For 75 hours I didn't think about my life at home, about all the problems. Everything was erased. Sometimes images of terror attacks in Jerusalem crossed my mind. I witnessed some of them. For 3 days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more. They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible... Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding?...I didn't give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn't just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders." (Quoted in Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, Tanya Reinhart, 2003, pp 163-164)

It's time the media - and the rest of us - stood up to the Israel lobby's bulldozing of honest reporting and freedom of expression. Acts of anticipatory compliance only reward the bully and diminish us as human beings. Rachel Corrie's courage, and that of her fellow activists in the ISM, is an example to us all.