While criticizing Kos’ recent remarks, Mark Kleiman says he’s “prepared to defend” his response to someone calling Rachel Corrie a peace activist:
“Peace activist” my Aunt Fanny! Rachel Corrie never called for Palestinians to make peace with Israelis. She only wanted the Israelis to stop hitting back. She was an unarmed participant in the armed struggle to kick the Jews out of Israel.
Her death, like the death of any human being, was a sad thing, but there’s no evidence that the man driving the bulldozer intended it.
I feel a lot sorrier for the people — Jews and Arabs — who weren’t deliberately getting in the way of earth-moving equipment in support of a terrorist campaign, and who died at the hands of Rachel Corrie’s beloved Palestinian “resistance” for the crime of taking the wrong bus.
1. Did Rachel Corrie support terrorism?
I can’t imagine that Mark will be able to defend most of what he wrote without resorting to guilt-by-association. Nothing in Corrie’s writings indicated that her goal was “to kick the Jews out of Israel”; rather, she wrote that she’d welcome “a democratic Israeli-Palestinian state within my lifetime,” which isn’t consistent with the kind of anti-Semitism Mark implies Corrie supported.
Mark states that Rachel opposed all Israeli self-defense. From Rachel’s writings, it’s clear that she was passionately driven by Israeli actions against ordinary Palestinian civilians; there’s no evidence that she opposed Israelis firing back when fired upon.
If Israel had been respecting Palestinian human rights all along - by not allowing settlers to steal Palestinian land, by not destroying the orchards and homes of Palestinians who have not been convicted (or in most cases, even accused) of terrorist acts, by not engaging in collective punishment of Palestinians, and by not using the IDF to terrorize many innocent Palestinians - if, in other words, Israel had kept to the green line and attacked only those Palestinians who made armed attacks on Israelis - then it seems unlikely that Rachel would have been protesting Israeli actions.
Rachel never wrote clearly about terrorism; Mark may consider this evidence that she must have supported terrorism. This is as illogical as assuming that pro-Israel writers who never mention collective punishment must favor collective punishment.
Rachel died protecting the house of Samir Nassrallah, a Palestinian pharmacist. Despite the fact that the Israelis have presumably investigated him following Corrie’s death (since evidence that Corrie was defending a terrorist would be very helpful to Israel), there is no evidence that Nassrallah is a terrorist or provides support for terrorism; nor is there any evidence of smuggling tunnels under his (no longer existing) house, as some folks have claimed. The most that can be said against him is that he provided a floor for human rights activists like Corrie to sleep on, and that he’s been a critic of Israel. And that he’s Palestinian.
So in what way was defending Nassrallah’s home “support of a terrorist campaign”? Mark’s statement is only coherent if any Palestinian criticism or resistance to Israel - no matter how peaceful, no matter how unarmed – is defined as a terrorist act. (It’s all part of the resistance, after all). Palestinians have no human rights, and anyone who defends their human rights is defending terrorism.
Or, I suppose, Mark has some solid evidence showing that Nassrallah is a terrorist or actively supports terrorists (funny how he has evidence the IDF apparently does not). In which case, I trust he’ll share that evidence soon.
Finally, it’s possible that Mark considers the International Solidarity Movement, of which Rachel was a member, a terrorist organization. However, it’s been eleven months since the IDF raided the ISM office in Beit Sahour, taking all their files and computers. No charges have been filed, nor has any evidence linking the ISM to terrorism been released - which suggests that no such evidence exists.
2. Was Rachel Corrie’s death justifiable?
Since the Israeli military has refused to allow an independent investigation of Rachel’s death, it’s impossible to know if she was deliberately murdered. However, I don’t think that’s the relevant issue.
As I wrote shortly after Rachel’s death, the question is, does the IDF run its bulldozing operations in a way that puts the highest possible priority on not risking civilian lives (not just peace activists, but also Palestinian civilians)? I think it’s pretty clear that they do not. Amnesty International rightly pointed out that Rachel’s death was one of a series of civilians killed by IDF bulldozers. From The Independent (February 6 2003):
Kamla Sa’id, 65, was found dead in the rubble of her family home after Israeli army sappers dynamited it during a raid on the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources said. Doctors at the nearby Al-Aqsa hospital, where she was taken, said she died of a crushed chest.
The Israeli army said it was checking the reports of Ms Sa’id’s death, and claimed soldiers had carefully checked the building before demolishing it. Ms Sa’id would not be the first Palestinian to die in this way: there have been previous well documented cases. One of her stepsons, Khaled Sa’id, said: “Israeli troops were acting in a brutal way, they got us all out of the house so fast and in an aggressive manner, they gave no chance for us to see who was out and who was in.” He said Ms Sa’id was partially deaf and could not hear warnings from the soldiers to leave the house.
The Israeli army demolished the house because it used to be the home of another of Ms Sa’id’s stepsons, Baha Sa’id, who killed two Israelis in an attack on the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in September 2000 before being shot dead.
There have been other occasions when Palestinians were crushed to death when the Israeli army demolished their homes on top of them. One of the best-documented cases was in Nablus in April last year, when eight members of the al-Shu’bi family died because an Israeli soldier bulldozed their house, despite warnings from neighbours that there were people inside.
In December, just a few miles north of Ms Sa’id’s home, Ashur Salem, a 68-year-old man, was crushed to death when Israeli soldiers blew up his house, according to witnesses. His son said when he found the old man’s body, his head was “like a bar of chocolate, it was only two centimetres thick”.
But there have also been instances when Palestinian claims that people had been crushed to death in house demolitions turned out not to be true. There was a case in Jenin where Palestinians assumed a missing relative had died, only for him to later turn up alive.
The Israeli army routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinian militants, even after their deaths, claiming the suffering it inflicts on their families acts as a deterrent. International human rights groups have condemned the practice as collective punishment, which is outlawed under the Geneva Conventions.
In practice, the relatives of suicide bombers and other dead militants are often provided with new homes by the militant groups, while their neighbours, whose homes are often also damaged or even destroyed in the course of the demolition, are the ones who are left homeless.
Recently there has been a spate of demolitions of houses and shops in the occupied territories whose Palestinian owners are not connected to any militant groups or attacks on Israelis, on the basis that they were built without the correct permits.
The IDF’s bulldozing methods have demonstrated a pattern of reckless disregard for civilian life. (And before anyone asks: yes, I think Palestinian terrorists are worse. But I also think the IDF should be held to a higher standard than “better than people who bomb buses.”)
There is only one responsible way to bulldoze an area when civilians (protestors or otherwise) are present; you park the machine a safe distance away until police or soldiers have detained the civilians, and only when you know that every single civilian is safely out of the area do you proceed. To do otherwise - to plow a bulldozer into an area which may contain civilians - is morally wrong.
Several people have excused what happened to Rachel Corrie by pointing out that Israeli bulldozers have unusually large blind spots. But that only makes things worse. Larger blind spots make it more likely that a civilian will be killed, and make it even more essential that the area be completely cleared of civilians before bulldozing begins.
Mark’s implication that the IDF is free of blame if Corrie wasn’t intentionally murdered is, to my mind, grade-school morality. The IDF has the ability and the responsibility to make civilian safety a priority; they have to do more than merely refrain from actively murdering protestors.
(Note: What I wrote above is recycled from a post written shortly after Corrie’s death.)
3. Was Rachel Corrie a “peace activist.”
I think calling Rachel a “peace” activist may be a misnomer, if by peace activist you mean pacifist. She clearly supported the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance in the occupied territories, which is not an unreasonable view (as long as it doesn’t extend to supporting killing unarmed civilians or blowing up buses). Nonetheless, Rachel’s actual activities consisted of non-violent protests to protect human rights; since she was there to support human rights, not peace, it’s more accurate to call her a human rights activist.
(On the other hand, one could argue that there can’t be peace as long as Palestinians lack basic human rights, and so activism for human rights is activism for peace.)
I don’t agree with everything Rachel wrote; the situation in Palestine is more complex than her writing (or Mark’s) indicates. Still, it’s easy to understand how someone could lose track of nuance living with Palestinians suffering under Israeli collective punishment. In the end, I think that human rights activists who die unarmed, in the protection of the rights of noncombatants, are heroes, and deserve admiration and respect.
I’ve often enjoyed Mark’s writing, and I’m not going to do anything silly like delink him (like he’d even notice!). Nonetheless, his comments about Corrie - and his implication that because some Palestinians blow up buses, all Palestinian resistance should be considered terrorism - deserve nothing but contempt.