The great Joel Beinin at MERIP offers a startling conclusion from the groundbreaking showing of Rachel at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: "More and more American Jews find themselves attracted to the moral commitment that animates Rachel, and left cold by the tactics of pressure groups that spend so much money to shut down debate over Israel and its occupation policies. And that is why the pressure groups are beginning to fail."
Along the way, Beinin reports on Simone Bitton’s film’s findings about Corrie’s killing:
Rachel devotes very careful attention to the circumstances of the protagonist’s death. Like a forensic detective, Bitton gathered pertinent oral testimonies, documents, photographs and video footage. Only the voices of those directly involved are heard: Corrie’s ISM colleagues and Palestinian friends and hosts in Rafah, ISM co-founder Andoni, the Israeli military police officer who investigated the case, the Tel Aviv coroner who examined the body, and Jonathan Pollak, a member of the Israeli group, Anarchists Against the Wall (and brother of filmmaker Shai Carmeli Pollak), who put up Corrie’s colleagues in his Tel Aviv home after she died. Rachel Corrie herself is heard as well, through a narrator’s readings of her e-mails home.
There are no abstract political proclamations. Conflicting testimonies are juxtaposed. It is notable that, of all the persons interviewed, Andoni is the only one who considers that he may bear some responsibility for Corrie’s death, since he trained her and sent her to Rafah. Simone Bitton proceeds like an attorney questioning witnesses, sans speeches to the jury or inferences from the testimony. This technique makes the film a powerful documentary record whose value goes far beyond Bitton’s obvious sympathy for Corrie and her questioning of the official story.
That story — “It is clear the death of Ms. Corrie was not caused as a result of a direct action by the bulldozer or by its running her over” — does not hold up well under Bitton’s lens. On camera, the Israeli military police officer who led the investigation expresses a twinge of doubt about his own conclusions. He admits that he did not visit the site of the Nasrallah home and relied primarily on the testimony of soldiers. Among the eyewitnesses he did not interview were the ISM volunteers who saw the bulldozer run over Corrie from a distance of as little as ten yards. They maintain that their comrade was quite purposely run over, not once, but twice. The official claim that the bulldozer driver did not see Corrie because she was behind a pile of dirt is definitively disproved by Israeli army video footage that shows her standing on top of the mound, wearing a highly visible reflective orange jacket, as the bulldozer approached..
It is not only the Israeli officials whose conduct is suspect, the film goes on to show. The coroner acknowledges that the Corrie family had a right to be present at the autopsy; since they could not attend, it would have been proper for the US embassy in Tel Aviv to send a representative. Yet embassy officials, despite the request of the Corrie family that they witness the procedure, told the coroner that they were not interested in doing so. Therefore, he proceeded on his own.
The Corrie family has tried persistently to get the US government to mount its own inquiry. A resolution introduced by their congressman, Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), directing the Department of Justice to open an investigation received 78 co-sponsors but died in committee. John McKay, the former US Attorney for western Washington and one of eight US attorneys fired by the Bush administration in 2006, told the Corries, “There will never be a US investigation into Rachel’s case.” The US government remains loath to intercede despite its own position, recorded in a letter to the Corries from former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson and never rescinded, that Israel’s investigation was inadequate.
Did the bulldozer driver, whose name is kept confidential by the Israeli army, intentionally kill Rachel Corrie? The film is agnostic on this point.
