The truth is forthcoming even if justice isn't

The news from Israel that Rachel Corrie’s family will not be receiving any compensation from the Israeli government, after it was ruled that her death in 2003 was a ‘tragic accident’, can hardly be surprising, even if the Corrie family do find it ‘deeply troubling’.  The Israeli Defence Force is far and away the most popular organisation in the country and the fact that almost all Israeli citizens have served in it, make any criticism of it abhorrent to many in Israel.  The judge would have served in it and having decided that she was ‘defending terrorists’ (highly debatable given that she was standing in front of a house, unless one regards all Palestinians, indeed Arabs as a whole, as terrorists and their assets as fair game), it was a matter of simple process to rule that the bulldozer driver had not seen her when ploughing straight over her.  The judge’s conception of her defending those hostile to Israel was key to his decision, yet he was just the endpoint of a highly partisan military review that initially sought every angle to show that Corrie had not been killed by an Israeli.

Let us consider another example from the same operation.  A senior colonel in the IDF had a Palestinian suspect hauled into an empty home to question the detained man.  Suddenly, an overzealous bulldozer driver ploughed through the wall, killing the colonel and the Palestinian.  Of course, no tears would have been shed for the Palestinian, irrespective of his innocence, but I’m sure that the bulldozer driver would have been disciplined and compensation paid to the widow and the family.  This was also a ‘tragic accident’.

The trouble with having a siege mentality of many decades is that you are distrustful of the entire world and especially those countries closest to you.  A former Israeli president thought that racism was rife in the nation and this has only been heightened by an influx of over a million people from Eastern Europe and the former USSR, who have only tenuous connections to being Jewish (leading to the children of some daubing a synagogue with swastikas).  Even when Palestinian negotiators gave up the right of return and East Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rejected the terms, even though they gave Israel all that she had desired, something for which she was much mocked by her gleeful successor.  Yet, Israel is becoming more extreme and the hardline Likud-led coalition is one of the popular governments in Israel’s history, confounding expectations of a rapid demise.

It is this right-wing nationalism that rankles in Europe, both at large and in the Jewish diaspora (though not yet in the USA).  The ‘useful idiots’ that absolve Israel of doing wrong, ever, accusing (usually with libel) those who dare to speak out as either anti-semitic Gentiles or self-loathing Jews, are the true, if unconscious, anti-semites for they undermine Israeli credibility and over time this will just leave Israel more isolated and in turn it will become more prickly.  It is a downward spiral to which one cannot see an end and that is sad, because after centuries of anti-semitism, culminating in the first half of the twentieth century, the right of Israel to exist is unanswerable – it has to be.  Yet when injustices are perpetrated, they have to be open to criticism.  I fear that the Corrie family will find no greater succour in their appeal to Israel’s supreme court.