A commenter has requested that Harry’s Place host a thread about today’s verdict on Rachel Corrie’s death. What has most struck me today is the extreme predictability of responses. The jibes of Socialist Unity – ‘Israel finds Israel not guilty’ on the one hand, and the sheer nastiness, identified by @steve4319, of a few who support the verdict too.
When I asked, on Twitter, if anyone had read anything which surprised them about this case, perhaps made them change their mind, someone linked to this report, where is is noted that an expert testifying on behalf of Corrie’s parents conceded that the driver would not have been able to see her.
This was in fact the issue which had most stuck in my mind from my own previous reading about the case – the visibility evidence, put forward in defence of the driver, struck me as quite convincing.
Of course there are many issues raised by the case – the motivation of people like Rachel Corrie, the precise reasons for those demolitions, for example. But it seems that the main questions pivot around what one man, the driver of the bulldozer, saw and knew in the moments leading up to her death. Unlike the Guardian I don’t lay claims to omniscience so I can’t be sure whether or not her death was simply a ‘terrible accident’ or whether that assertion is just a ‘fiction’ which has been dishonestly ‘perpetuated’.
Finally here are links to two contrasting pieces on the case, one by Brendan O’Neill and one by Steve Hynd.
