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.