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Craig and Cindy Corrie receive a portrait of their daughter from the Original Terrorist

An Israeli court has ruled (an English summary of the decision is here) that the death of Rachel Corrie in 2003 was accidental. Some of the critical points made by the judge are the following:

• The incident happened in a place that was a “site of daily warfare,” which civilians were forbidden to enter.
• While supposedly a nonviolent organization, “[The ISM] exploits the dialogue regarding human rights and morality to blur the severity of its actions, which are, in fact, expressed through violence.”
• The bulldozer was “leveling the ground and clearing it of brush in order to expose hiding places used by terrorists, who would sneak out from these areas and place explosive devices with the intent of harming IDF soldiers,” and not destroying Palestinian homes.
• The IDF tried to distance the activists from the bulldozer, warning them, exploding stun grenades and firing warning shots, but they did not comply.
• Corrie was not visible to the driver (see here and here).

Here is the judge’s description of the actual event that caused her death:

When the decedent saw the pile of dirt moving towards her, she did not move, as any reasonable person would have. She began to climb the pile of dirt. Therefore, both because the pile of dirt continued to move as a result of the pushing of the bulldozer, and because the dirt was loose, the decedent was trapped in the pile of dirt and fell.

At this stage, the decedent’s legs were buried in the pile of dirt, and when her colleagues saw from where they stood that the decedent was trapped in the pile of dirt, they ran towards the bulldozer and gestured towards its operator and yelled at him to stop. By the time the bulldozer’s operator and his commander noticed the decedent’s colleagues and stopped the bulldozer, a significant portion of the decedent’s body was already covered in dirt.

The decedent’s entire body was not covered in dirt. In fact, when the bulldozer backed up, the decedent’s body was seen to free itself from the pile of dirt and the decedent was still alive.

The decedent was evacuated to the hospital [in Gaza] and after 20 minutes, her death was declared.

Dear Craig and Cindy Corrie,

As a parent, I can’t imagine an experience that could compare with the loss of a child. I know that if it happened to me I would be desolated. I thought about the possibility constantly during the period of the Second Intifada, when my son volunteered to serve in a special counter-terror unit and traveled around Israel on a daily basis to try to intercept terrorists — many of them sent by the same Hamas organization that your daughter defended — on their way to kill Israelis.

Some of these succeeded despite the efforts of my son and his comrades, and hundreds of Israelis, many of them children with parents like you and me, were burned to death, penetrated by nails and ball bearings, or had their lungs destroyed by blast.

I thank God that my son survived, that the bullets, grenades and mortar shells that were deliberately aimed at him missed. Other Israelis, soldiers and civilians, were not so lucky.

You’ve worked hard to place blame on Israel and the IDF for your daughter’s death. That’s understandable, because if Israel wasn’t responsible, who was? I can only suppose that you struggle to keep from blaming yourselves.

You [Cindy] told the Guardian,

It felt a little unnerving … At first we hoped it wouldn’t happen. But Rachel was 23 years old, and was very much making her own decisions, as we thought she should. We had always supported our kids in whatever steps they wanted to take. Some people say: ‘Why did you let her go?’ That was not ever something I felt was my role.

You’re right. I didn’t tell my son not to do what he did, either.

So whose fault is it? The court said that the immediate responsibility lay with Rachel:

The decedent put herself in a dangerous situation. She stood in front of a large bulldozer in a location where the bulldozer’s operator could not see her. Even when she saw the pile of dirt moving towards her and endangering her, she did not remove herself from the situation, as any reasonable person would have.

But if I had to blame someone for making this terrible event happen, it would not be the bulldozer operator, the IDF or Israel, which is in a life-and-death struggle with its enemies. I would blame the ISM, which specializes in brainwashing Western young people, sending them into a war zone and placing them in harm’s way — in full knowledge that the Palestinian cause will benefit if one of them is injured or killed.

Rachel made a choice and took a side in a conflict that she did not fully understand. She had a right to do that, but to a certain extent she was manipulated and exploited.  She chose the wrong side, and she paid a terrible price.

You have chosen to honor her memory by taking her side.  As I said, it’s understandable, but it doesn’t validate the ideology that got her killed in order to further its goals of still more death and destruction.

Technorati Tags: Rachel Corrie, Craig and Cindy Corrie, Israel

I don’t think I’ve ever published a poem before. This one was sent to me by Shalom Freedman, who, in addition to being a frequent commenter on this blog, has written several books on Jewish and moral subjects as well as poetry, reviews, etc.

It is an indifferent cruel and stupid world

by Shalom Freedman

It is an indifferent cruel and stupid world —
The Ayatollahs preach genocide
And a hundred nations are hosted by them —
The U.N. Secretary General dignifies them by his presence
Though they have consistently deceived and lied to him and his predecessors —

They preach a medieval  doctrine of  world domination
as they conceal their race for weapons of mass destruction
and are traded with and toasted by the Chinese and Russians —

They promise to continue the Nazis work by other means
And the allegedly non-aligned do not contend with them —

Shame on these racist haters
And shame on their collaborators
Shame on Humanity
For our having such contemptible creatures among us.

Sometimes the truth is more than just ‘inconvenient’. Sometimes it is downright unpleasant, even ugly. But nevertheless, it is what is and we need to deal with what is, not what we would like it to be.

Martin Sherman sees the unpleasant truth and, unlike so many others, draws the logical conclusions. He has written a series of articles in the Jerusalem Post in which he has exposed the sheer insanity of the Left’s two-state solution (TSS), as well as the failure of the Right to propose real alternatives.

Now Sherman has taken up the challenge to provide a practical alternative. In his most recent article — which I urge you to read in its entirety, since I can’t do justice to it with a few snippets — he writes,

To survive as the permanent nation-state of the Jewish people Israel must address two fundamental imperatives:

• The geographic imperative
• The demographic imperative

It is self-evident that if either of these is inadequately addressed, Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people will be gravely jeopardized, eventually becoming unsustainable.

The mainstream discourse invariably – and deceptively – presents Israel’s only choice as being between accepting the TSS – which would make Israel untenable geographically, or the OSS (one-state solution) – which would make it untenable demographically.

Neither comprises an acceptable policy-paradigm for anyone whose point of departure is the continued existence of Israel as the permanent nation-state of the Jews.

This, as we will see, compels us to the inexorable conclusion that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there can – and eventually will – prevail either exclusive Jewish or exclusive Arab sovereignty…

While addressing the geographic imperative requires Israel to maintain control of all Judea and Samaria (or at least of sufficiently large segments to make the TSS unviable), addressing the demographic imperative means that the Arab population of these areas cannot be permanently incorporated into the population of Israel…

We are left to confront a brutally simple choice: Either forgo the Jewish nation-state or address the need to significantly diminish the scale of the Palestinian-Arab population.

Whether one relates to this stark dilemma with a sense of moral outrage or equanimity will not affect the inexorable logic that led to its deduction, or the necessity to acknowledge its inevitability. Trying to evade the bleak nature of this inescapable choice by reformulating it in less forbidding terms would be no more than an exercise in hypocrisy or self-delusion…

So, for those who find the prospect of forgoing the Jewish nation-state unacceptable, the grim decision is whether to address the problem of diminishing the Palestinian-Arab population by coercive or by non-coercive means.

Right now the screaming about racism, transfer, ethnic cleansing, etc. begins. I won’t discuss why this automatically follows any discussion of Arabs moving but not Jews, nor the numerous Palestinian expressions of their intention to have a Jew-free state if the TSS is implemented. I’ll only emphasize that the alternative is no Jewish state at all.

If your idea of morality is such that yet another Jewish diaspora — undoubtedly accompanied by a bloody war — is preferable to some Arabs living between the river and the sea moving to one of the 22 Arab Muslim states in the region, then you have chosen sides and I don’t have anything to say to you.

Sherman believes, and promises details in a forthcoming article, that a non-coercive population transfer — yes, I am using that word because that is what it is — is the morally preferred option and that it can be made practical.

I have my doubts about the practicality of such a solution. But I am convinced that Sherman is right and that survival of a Jewish state requires both geographical and demographic domination of the area between the river and the sea. I remain to be convinced that this can be accomplished peacefully.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, Israeli-Arab conflict, Martin Sherman

Why does Iran issue ugly threats against Israel on an almost daily basis, saying that Israel will be annihilated, that it is a cancerous tumor that must be cut out, and so forth? After all, if they want to avoid an Israeli attack, shouldn’t they be a little less open about their intentions?

Maybe this News item will help us understand:

[Der Spiegel’s] investigative report said that a few months after the Munich Massacre, then Foreign Minister Walter Scheel held a secret meeting with representatives of the terrorist organization in order to create what was termed a “new basis of trust.”

The German government, according to classified documents obtained by Der Spiegel, did not demand that the terrorists completely stop terrorist activities, but only asked that they avoid attacking in Germany. In return, said the report, the terrorists sought to upgrade the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) political status.

German authorities also avoided prosecuting those involved in the terror attack on the Israeli athletes, the report said. Three of the terrorists who were captured alive were released after two months, after terrorists from “Black September” hijacked a Lufthansa plane.

It is typical for terrorists to try to split the nations opposed to them by promising immunity against further atrocities to one or another country. The Iranian regime employs terrorism as a major part of its foreign policy, so why shouldn’t it take the same approach to diplomacy as Black September?

By effectively making their nuclear program appear to be primarily a threat against Israel, Iran sends a message to the  Europeans and the US that they are safe. We are just going to kill some Jews, they suggest, and you don’t want to go to war over Jews, do you?

I’m sure the message is being transmitted explicitly in private as well, along with threats that if the US and Europe do not go along, then bad things could happen to them as well. And there are a lot of bad things that Iran can do cheaply.

The Iranians know that they can’t persuade Israel that a nuclear weapon in their hands is not an existential threat. But they may be able to persuade the US and Europe that the real problem is not an Iranian bomb, but the Israeli reaction to it. And that is what they are trying to do.

Their objectives are a) to prevent a US attack and b) to get the US to prevent a Israeli one, until their program is complete.

This is exactly why the Israeli doctrine that its defense must not be placed in the hands of any other nation or organization is so important, and must not be abandoned under any circumstances.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, terrorism

Daniel Gordis wrote,

An honest American broker would no longer ignore blatant Palestinian myopia. Just this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared Jerusalem a Muslim and Christian city, insisting that there will be no peace until the Jewish occupiers depart. The Jews, he said, wish to “destroy the Al Aqsa mosque and build the alleged Jewish temple.”

Gordis is  correct of course, although I would not use the word ‘myopia’, which implies a defect of vision, a handicap. The Palestinians talk like this deliberately, because they use language to create reality.

Their concept of truth is not what the philosophy teachers call a ‘correspondence’ theory. Rather, it is an ideological one. It doesn’t matter if in fact there was a Jewish Temple, because the concept of an objective historical fact is meaningless to them. If a proposition supports Islamic or Palestinian national objectives, then it is only right that people should believe it, that contrary archaeological evidence should be destroyed, that friendly academics should write books and articles repeating it.

When Palestinians say ‘there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem’ it is not a proposition that can be true or false in the usual sense, it is an action — a verbal act of jihad, as it were. It is a seizure of the historical narrative.

They are not even lying. Is it a lie to tell your enemy to go to hell?

This is something that most Westerners don’t understand. It isn’t that Arabs are stupid, uneducated or ‘myopic’. They are simply using language in a wholly different way than what we think of as discourse about history.

But there’s more. Gordis continues,

In Palestinian discourse, even the Temple is “alleged.” Compare that stance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s politically risky acknowledgement of Palestinian rights to a sovereign national homeland.

Let’s indeed compare them.

If the Palestinian position is an act of verbal jihad, Netanyahu’s is an act of verbal submission. To Western ears the Palestinians are simply ignorant, while Netanyahu’s position comes across as  reasonable, willing to compromise, to honor everyone’s rights, etc. A laudable statement made from a position of strength. But an Arab hears weakness and lack of resolve.

Palestinians are often reported to be ‘frustrated’. Maybe some of the frustration comes from the mixed message they receive from Israel. Israelis speak submissively, but then they don’t submit!

We are not going to adopt their theory of truth, but we need to understand the “performative” subtexts of both sides’ statements, respond clearly to theirs and make ours unambiguous.

In the case of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, for example, Israel should both make policy statements and take concrete actions to strengthen Jewish sovereignty there.

The so-called ‘peace process’, in which Israel makes successively more submissive statements in response to Palestinian aggression — verbal and physical — needs to end.

Here, Israel can follow the example of former US Secretary of State James Baker: give the Palestinians Netanyahu’s phone number, with instructions to call when they are prepared to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian theory of truth