Rachel Corrie’s Parents on the Attack

Craig and Cindy Corrie should try their luck at Saturday Night Live. They make a good stand-up comedy team. Yesterday, right after hearing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from the horse’s mouth, from the Caterpillar driver who was the closest to their daughter when she was discovered dead ‘in a pool of dirt’, they stood before the press and tried to fool us all with their put on: Their daughter, we were asked to believe, died defending the humanity of all of us. Granted, she was the idealist type and had set out to show solidarity with other humans regardless of borders, language or color. The story would have been a touch more believable had Rachel chosen to show solidarity with a less violent group, with a people who still maintain some respect for the image of God in which they, and we all, were created. Why in the world would an idealistic person choose to show solidarity with a nation of deranged terrorists who elect to erect their homes in the path of our victorious IDF, forcing us to clear thousands of them out of our way. I wonder if you, dear neutral reader, can understand, much less accept, the Corries’ claims of their daughter’s humanitarian motives when she had chosen to express them by associating with terrorists. To show humanitarian solidarity, one has to start with humans not with reprobate miscreants like their daughter managed to do.

Take for example the issue of human life itself: Where else, except perhaps in such dismal dead-end dumps as Iraq and Afghanistan, is life so cheap that mothers send their own children to die with the a priori plans to replace them in another nine months? No wonder we Israelis are trying to raise our boys’ ‘exchange rate’ in the battle field beyond the one-to-a-hundred level that we achieved when our hand was forced to hit Gaza the winter before last. Besides, theirs were run-of-the-mill Palestinians of all ages and classes while our boys were high-quality trained soldiers at the prime of their lives. The simplest of cost-benefit analysis will show that we should aim at a higher exchange rate still.

And consider what the Corries have now done out of their own free well as cool-headed, well-informed adult Americans: They decided to sue our government and the IDF for damages. True, their demand for compensations is not that exorbitant: one dollar. But why, in the devil’s name should they choose a pair of Palestinian lawyers to represent them? Does Israel lack smart Jewish lawyers? Now they are getting what they asked for: their lawyers fail to comprehend what the witnesses from the scene of their daughter’s death ‘incident’ are telling them. Worse yet, their lawyers are behaving in the same incomprehensible, rejectionist and greedy manner in which Palestinians have behaved throughout recent history: Again and again our leaders have made them attractive peace offers to resolve the conflict they had initiated with us, all to no avail. From the UN 1947 division plan, to the Camp David agreement, to Sharm-El-Sheikh, to you name it, and they continue to refuse one offer after another. And here, this very day, the Corries’ lawyers, following the same well-established rejectionist pattern, are continuing not to accept whatever explanations our ex-soldiers offer them under oath: One D-9 Caterpillar soldier driver had already told the court that he saw Rachel’s body on the other side of a pile of dirt. The lawyers didn’t seem to be happy with that. Today the driver of the D-9 that killed her tried to please them and said he saw her on this side of the pile of dirt. They still were not pleased. He had said in a previous investigation that, sitting inside the driver’s cabin, he had a three-meter blind spot in front of his machine. The lawyers didn’t seem to be satisfied with that. Now the man tried to humor them by increasing that blind spot to thirty meters. But to no avail. They still sounded like they didn’t believe him. You think a hundred meters would have satisfied them? Not on your life; not Palestinians. You give them a finger and they will take a hand.

The driver had suffered the badgering of the two Palestinians all morning before I caught the tail end of his testimony. The court was so full of government observers, of Corrie sympathizers, and of newspaper reporters that I had no chance of getting a seat till a couple of them had left. The poor man was shielded behind a screen from the vindictive stares of all those goyim and self-hating Jews in the audience. He too was quizzed about that last bit in the video recording of the events of that fateful day, March 16, 2003. Like the commander of his unit and the driver of the second Caterpillar, he also had forgotten most of what transpired that day but knows for a fact that the recorded incriminating broken Arabic single question and answer on the intercom was not of him and his commander or of him and the second driver. This poor driver, like other soldiers at the scene or involved in its investigation later on, had either not seen, not heard, or forgotten most details connected to the event. Besides, Rachel’s birthday happens to fall on the same date as the driver’s. Why should he allow details of a tragic event to intrude on his conscience and rob him of the pleasure of celebrating his own birthday? Imagine Palestinians and other goyim demanding that we remember the time and details of how each of them dies. Golda Meir said it best: We, Israelis, will never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. The Corries don’t seem to comprehend the deeper meaning of such wisdom. Or take the pronouncements of the wise Rabbi from Safad made this very week: Goyim were created to serve us. Go explain that to someone who has deluded himself into thinking he is your equal!

Listening to the man behind the screen I conjured an image of him: judging by the quality of his voice and hesitant speech pattern, I judged him to be small of build; he has a smallish head with congenital absence of the pinnae, the external ears; he wears thick glasses; and he is dark skinned. I reached these conclusions not only on the basis of the quality of his speech, but more on the basis of its content. First the absence of the ears: You, the laity, do not appreciate the significance of the outer ear and the importance of the extent of its flare in gathering the sound vibrations in the ambient air and funneling them into the ear canal and onward to the middle ear. The ear is a complex and sophisticated piece of detective instrumentation. It is the ultimate listening device. One is tempted to think it must have been invented by Israeli scientists for the use of the Mossad. But it all is dependent on the pinna and if that is missing the hearing is minimal, as is the case here. As to the thick glasses, they are needed for the rapidly receding visual acuity. If in seven years the man’s blind spot expanded from three to thirty meters, he is as blind as a bat in the bright sun; ergo the thick glasses. And as to the small head, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps I am giving a literal meaning to the figurative Hebrew slang term of ‘rosh katan’ – meaning small head – used to describe one who doesn’t bother himself with the deeper meanings of things or one who follows orders without questions asked. That is exactly how the driver responded to the lawyer’s questions about the standard instructions in the military manual on operating a D-9 Caterpillar. It is stated in the manual that the driver should not operate the machine when civilians are present within ten meters from it. Our man said that he had received orders from his commander to ignore that warning and to continue working and he did. In Hebrew we call that kind of unquestioning obedience of one’s superiors ‘rosh katan.’ I guess you could also call my own simplistic interpretation of the figure of speech to mean an actual small-size head a second level of small-headedness. As to the man’s skin color, he seemed to be a bit cowed by the Arab lawyers. No true blood Ashkenazi would be. Sephardim usually have dark skin. The riddle is solved.

The spiteful streak that Cindy Corrie displayed in addressing the press when her turn came up went beyond all limits of fairness. First of all, she repeated in so many words the same claim that her husband had made of their daughter having felt empathy with the Palestinians as human beings. That, of course, puts Rachel in her own parents’ mind at the same level of scum as her subjects of empathy, the Palestinians. I am not sure how can parents say such an insulting thing about their own dead child. If that proves any thing, it proves that the Corries are a self-hating breed. Except that our media in Israel, in line with our top historians, our top opinion leaders and our top Rabbis alike, have appropriated this term for our exclusive use. It is akin to the usage of holocaust or shoah: When the Armenians wanted to stake a claim to the term to describe what the Turks had committed against them in the early decades of the twentieth century, we objected and put an end to their cheap attempt. And here too: whoever heard of a self-hating Palestinian or of a self-hating Moslem. It is redundant. You just use the identifying genre of Palestinian and the ‘hate’ element is automatically implied. The term self-hating’ dangles precipitously when cut off from its natural ending of ‘Jew.’ What gives it its zing is the contradiction of the adjective with the subject. We invented self-hating, as a concept to describe our own renegade anti-Zionists. To use it out of context to characterize the behavior of anybody else is to rob it of significance and us of our exclusive right to a discovery. Too bad such concepts are not covered under international intellectual property laws and conventions.

Then there is Cindy’s claim that putting the driver behind a screen and his never expressing a word of remorse or apology robbed her of the chance to empathize with him as a human being. I beg to differ, at the risk of being accused of narrow partiality towards my co-citizen: Who should be apologizing to whom, I wonder? The man said more than once during the court session that he was surrounded by terrorists. In Israel, and especially in the IDF, we are realists. We call a spade a bloody spade and don’t beat around the bush with such terms as ISM and the like. You don’t empathize with a terrorist unless you are one yourself. All the terror sympathizers who come from the end of the world to terrorize a diligent member of the most moral army in the world carrying out the orders of his commanders to clear another swath of our holy land, the land of our ancestors promised to us by our God, of the haphazard anthills the Palestinians call their homes, should stop their rabble-rousing or accept the consequences.

The late Prime Minister Sharon (I use the term ‘late’ here in the rosh-katan sense of him being delayed or ‘late’ in the process of crossing over from this life to the next) had officially promised the late President George W. Bush (ditto, but just an expression of a wish; it applies to Tony Blair as well) to conduct a “thorough, credible, and transparent” investigation of the Rachel Corrie ‘incident.’ We did exactly that. Twice! And no one in the world believes us. But that has been our story with the international community since day one: No one believes Israel. That is not all that terrible. Not as long as the world needs us in the basic spheres that make it go round: Arms, money and influence with America.

A bright young journalist asked the Corries’ lawyer, Hussain Abu-Hussain, about the significance of the toy blue whale that he used to represent Rachel’s body as he tried to have the Caterpillar’s driver recreate her ‘death incident’ scene from memory. Hussain blew it: He said that he just stopped by at a kindergarten and picked up the first toy he found. Think of the symbolic possibilities though: The free spirit of the blue whale darting, like Rachel, across the oceans. And the threat of extinction of the species.