Rachel Corrie's Trial in the NYTimes

From what I know, which is not minimal, Ethan Bronner's piece on the Rachel Corrie trial taking place in a civil suit in Haifa, urged by an US government official (Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell), is relatively fair.

But this last punchline is misleading:

Cindy Corrie added, “An Israeli colonel said at this trial that there are no civilians in a war zone. But there are. If that hadn’t been the army’s attitude, maybe my daughter would still be with us.”

What the officer meant to say, and was a bit garbled by his poor grammar, was that once an area is declared a military zone, as was that specific strip of land where the bulldozer was working, an area that was a terrorist hotbed, it is the responsibility of civilians not to be there. Any protests are at their own risk, especially if not coordinated as happens in other places.

This, of course, is beside the actual point of how and why Rachel Corrie died, whether she was a 'peace' activist or a supporter of Arab violence against Jewish civilians and other issues.


See, though, here and also here.


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