I overlooked this story, about a month ago, by Bradley Burston in Haaretz on Friday, 17 March, entitled: “Who remembers the name Rachel Corrie?”
Burston answers his own question: “In Israel, hardly anyone. But to many a pro-Palestinian American or Briton – and to many of their pro-Israeli antagonists – the mere mention of the name is enough to make the blood boil”.
The article was written on or about the third anniversary of her being crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house in the southern Gaza Strip. But, Burston’s article is as much if not more about the instrument of her death — as he wrote, “a mammoth IDF armored bulldozer”, a “behemoth” — than about Rachel Corrie herself.
In his article, Burston continued: “Of all of the tragedies and casualties of the intifada, in which more than 4,000 people were killed over five years, the case of Rachel Corrie still stands apart, the subject of intense world interest and fierce debate. So passionate are many of her admirers, that one commentary, entitled ‘Heroine of the Palestinian Struggle’ in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, likened her to Anne Frank. So bitter are many of those who speak in rebuttal, that some have been known to suggest that either in provocation or in recklessness, ‘she had it coming to her’. So divisive is the debate, and so disputed the circumstances of her death, that the case has become a kind of unflattering magic mirror by which we can see sides of ourselves we would rather avoid”.
Corrie, as Burston wrote, was a “23-year-old native of Olympia, Washington, who had come to the Gaza Strip to protest against IDF demolitions of Palestinian houses.” She was wearing a neon-orange jacket when she was crushed to death — but the IDF driver said he could not see her.
Burston asks us to “Consider, instead – accept, for the moment – only the conclusions of the IDF probe, which found that the D9 driver could not have seen Rachel Corrie in front of him, and that the local commander, fearing Palestinian sniper fire, ruled out the standard procedure of posting spotters to make sure that no bystanders were hurt as the bulldozer advanced. Was the Israeli army, then, to blame for the death of an unarmed protester? The answer is yes … Anyone who has been inside the cab of an IDF D-9, fitted as it is with double-glazed bulletproof slit window ports obscured by giant piston lifters and, often as not, a coating of silt, has good reason to believe the testimony of the bulldozer driver who he said he couldn’t see Rachel Corrie”.
Burston said “there is no reason to doubt the word of the IDF commander who said the risk of Palestinian sniper fire was appreciable at the time he ordered his spotters to stay inside armored vehicles”.
While he places the ultimate blame on the second Palestinian intifada — which he said corrupted both Palestinians and Israelis “into excusing or extolling the killing of non-combatants” — Burston argued that “Nonetheless, this, for us as Israelis, is the fundamental lesson of Rachel Corrie’s death: Incidental killing is no less tragic than intentional killing … For years we stood by and bit our lips as large numbers of Palestinians – children, the pregnant, and the elderly among them – were incidentally killed along with, or mistakenly killed instead of, the terror warlords we had wait-listed for assassination. A turning point of sorts came in July, 2002, when a one-ton bomb dropped from an air force warplane turned a Gaza City residential block into a crater, killing senior Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, but also causing the deaths of 13 other people. The shock wave of the attack was such that more than two dozen reserve pilots would later sign a letter of refusal, and the army as a whole undertook a re-examination of the doctrine of overwhelming force. To be sure, the efforts to reduce civilian casualties were sincere. In the first two years of the uprising, non-combatants made up roughly half of all the deaths from Israeli assassination air raids, air force chief Eliezer Shakedi said this month.“. And, Burston added, “incidental deaths still occur with frequency, a result, in no small part, of the nature of combat in West Bank refugee camps, villages and urban areas”.
Burston wrote: “Incidental death. It’s what we’ve learned to live with, the price of our security. We know we can’t root it out altogether. But we have to look at it differently, honestly in order to limit it as best we can. Part of it starts with us. ‘They had no business being there’ is no excuse for what the Pentagon long ago christened collateral damage. We’ve learned much. But we’re still not there. We should have saved Rachel Corrie’s life that day, either by sending out a spotter or delaying the bulldozer’s work. Right now, somewhere in the West Bank, there’s an eight-year-old whose life could be saved next week, if we’ve managed to learn the lesson and are resourceful enough to know how to apply it”.
Of course, there are lives that could be saved (and could have been saved earlier this year) in Gaza, too.
For some reason, the story of how the D-9 bulldozers operated in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead has not interested very many journalists, or their editors. There has, inexplicably, been no interest in Yaakov Katz’s report in the Jerusalem Post that unmanned D-9 bulldozers were used in Gaza — unmanned, to save soldiers’ lives. The IDF does not help, of course. Last week, I was finally told, after a series of phone calls with their press liaison office, that there is no one who is willing to talk to me about it. But an unnamed IDF official said recently to Haaretz’s Amos Harel: “What did they think would happen? … What were 100 bulldozers going to do there?” See our earlier report on this here .
There were two stories, so far, about deaths caused by D-9 bulldozers (it is not clear whether they were manned or unmanned) during Operation Cast Lead: In one story, a man and his son were shot inside their house, while his wife and their daughter were shot and wounded outside.
The IDF soldiers insisted that the two females keep their distance, and in front of their eyes the bulldozer brought down the house on top of the man and his son. In another reference I saw, a man watched as an IDF bulldozer brought down a house on top of his wounded wife.
There has been no investigation about this — not by the press, and not by the IDF.
Burston’s article, about D-9 bulldozers — used without accompanying spotters — civilian casualties, incidental deaths, and more, can be read in full here.