BEIT SAHOUR: On Tuesday, Cindy and Craig Corrie, the parents of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist Rachel Corrie, spoke to a polyglot crowd of around fifty Palestinian and international activists and journalists. The event, hosted by the Alternative Information Center, was in Beit Sahour, a West Bank village situated on the outskirts of Bethlehem. ISM members regularly participate in demonstrations and displays of civil disobedience in order to prevent housing and well demolitions. They engage in nonviolent acts of protest in support of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On March 16, 2003, Corrie died in the Gaza Strip's Rafah refugee camp while attempting to stop a housing demolition. She stood in front of the Nasrallah home as an armored Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bulldozer approached. The driver, claiming there was a blind spot that rendered him incapable of seeing her, ran her over and killed her. The Corrie family filed a lawsuit against the IDF for one dollar and legal fees, seeking what they describe as simply justice. On August 28, Israeli Judge Oded Gershon rejected the Corrie family's lawsuit against the IDF, concluding that Rachel's death was an accident for which the state could not be held legally responsible. “I rule unequivocally that the claim that the deceased was intentionally hit by the bulldozer is totally baseless. This was an extremely unfortunate accident," Gershon stated. He continued, “I reached the conclusion that there was no negligence on the part of the bulldozer driver. I reject the suit. There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages. She [Corrie] did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done. She consciously put herself in harm's way.” The Corrie family spoke for roughly an hour about their efforts to obtain justice since their daughter's death: their legal efforts in US and Israeli courts, their IDF's broken promise to conduct a credible investigation into the event surrounding her death, and the difficulty they had faced trying to co-opt the support of the US government. “We will continue," said Craig Corrie. “Judge Gershon accepted the testimony that the bulldozer had a blind spot. The real blind spot is [Israel's] towards humanity."
