Rachel Corrie's Murder - An Interview with Her Parents (2015)

Paul Jay: Welcome to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. Cindy and Craig Corey are the parents of Rachel Corey, a 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer on March 16, 2003, about 12 years ago almost to the day. Rachel was undertaking nonviolent direct action to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition. They're also the co-founders of the Rachel Corey Foundation for Peace and Justice. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you. First of all, I know it's been 12 years, but as a parent, the searing pain of a loss of a kid, 12 years probably doesn't mean very much.

Craig Corrie: You don't get better, you get stronger. The pain doesn't go away, you just get capable of handling it. And one of the great things for us, we've gone around the country, we meet so many families have had losses like ours. But it's good for us that Rachel was doing exactly what she wanted to do when she was killed. And she was telling us what we could do. She said, come here, come here. And she wanted us to see Gaza. She wanted people to work out for the people of Gaza to try and make a better world there. So she really gave us, we inherited from our daughter, a cause and some friends and something that we could do in her memory.

Cindy Corrie: I think sometimes that Rachel's story, when they meet us for the first time, people feel troubled and a lot of the pain hits them. In a way, we're living with it all the time. It was the worst day of our lives, March 16, 2003. And we continue to live with that. And I remember there was a time when Craig and I were driving from Washington State where we were living to the Midwest to see our family. It's a drive that our families took many, many times. And there was a beautiful moon over the mountains as we were going across the Cascade Mountains. And I wondered if anything would look as beautiful to me again as it had before Rachel was killed. And then somehow, and I can't tell you exactly the point when it happened, all of the color came back into my life. And I think probably for any people that experience a loss, that there are these periods that you have to go through. And And I'm just grateful. I'm grateful that that color is back, that I enjoy life. And I wish that some of the things that we're working on, that the problems would go away so we could work on something else. But we're so supported and invigorated by the people who come and are joining in this work.

Paul Jay: And the work we're talking about is you've been pursuing a legal case, suing the Israeli government, the Israeli army. Just quickly, for people that don't know the basic story, just tell us what happened.

Craig Corrie: Yeah, that's part of our work. But Rachel was killed on March 16, 2003. She went to the Gaza Strip with a group called the International Solidarity Movement. They're a group of people that were formed because the Palestinians had wanted and the UN had called for some human rights observers to be in that area. The US vetoed that. And so some people thought, well, they don't have to be with the UN, it could be anybody. And so people from around the world were going there. And Rachel wasn't in the first wave, kind of the second or third, but she went then in January of 2003. And she headed down to Rafa, I think partly because Gaza is one of the most forsaken places in the world, and Rafa in Gaza was one of the most forsaken. And she lived with those families. She was often slept in their houses. In the house in front of which she was killed, she was standing in front of a wall as a bulldozer came in. at it. But she knew those families. She worked with the older boy on his English, and he tried to help her with her Arabic and stuff. So they were friends. But the Israelis were clearing a swath of land between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Not Israel, but Egypt. And when I say clearing, they were pushing down people's homes. And these homes have several extended, one extended family, so they might have 30 people. in one of these buildings, but in the particular home that Rachel was standing in front of that day, there were two brothers and their five children, and the wives of five children, and these bulldozers would come up that day to the activists' feet pushing, and these are huge bulldozers, D-9, D-10 bulldozers, D-9 in her case, armored, 65-ton bulldozers. They'd come up right to the activists' feet pushing their dirt, and then they would stop. But at five o'clock, a bulldozer came up towards Rachel, and right behind her was the Nasrallah house, and it didn't stop. It went over her, and her friend, say, without picking up his blade, backed up. She somehow survived. For moments after that, she was between the tracks of the bulldozer. It's clear from pictures we've seen. And so she said to her friend Alice, I think my back is broken. But that was her last words.

Paul Jay: What the Israelis were doing, some people have described as collective punishment. And it's important to say hundreds of Palestinians were killed in the same area, and many of them were children.

Cindy Corrie: The Human Rights Watch report raising Rafa reported that from 2000 to 2004, a tenth of the population of Rafa in southern Gaza lost their homes. There were over 1,600 homes demolished. And this was more than collective punishment. It was a certainly many, many, many people suffered. But it was a very deliberate policy to take control of more of that area. As Craig said, it was along the Egyptian border with Gaza, not the Israeli border. The Philadelphia corridor is a very narrow route that by treaty the Israeli military had had access to. But it was very narrow, this Philadelphia corridor, but plenty large for their equipment to move through it. But what they kept doing was to take row after row of houses. This was not directed at families that had particularly had any violence towards the military at all, although you'll read that sometimes.

Paul Jay: Certainly that's what the Israelis have said, that there were snipers and there were various other people shooting at Israeli soldiers, and this is why they're knocking down houses.

Cindy Corrie: This was during the height of the Second Intifada. And certainly there was resistance there, and there was violence there. But I think it gets very distorted in the reports, actually, because there were actually more Israeli soldiers, for example, killed in the West Bank during that period than there were in Gaza. The clearing that was happening, you have to remember that there were 8,000 settlers in Gaza at the time, and I forget the number, but between 20 and 22 settlements, I think around 22 settlements. A lot of them were in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. One of the things that made Rachel really sad was that children that she lived with who were living under the most terrible conditions. Many of them hadn't seen the ocean. Craig and I have been there. Mediterranean Sea is very nearby. It's beautiful. And when I went there, when emotionally it was just really, really hard. When I would finally get up north and be able to see the Mediterranean, it was like a breath of fresh air. And Rachel felt sad because the children she was living with hadn't seen it. They'd be five, six, seven years old, but because the settlements had access to the ocean, Not the Palestinian families, there was this limitation. So Israeli policy at the time was to take more and more of this area. There's a famous quote from a colonel, I believe, Yom Tov Samia, on Israeli army radio, that said, no matter what happens, each time there's any resistance, we need to take another row of houses. So there was definitely an expansionist plan. with that whole area at the time. I just think it's important for people to know that it wasn't like they targeted one house and took down that house for punitive reasons. They were taking all the houses in the area. In our court case in Israel, our attorney asked the deputy battalion commander, how far did the Philadelphia corridor go? And he said, up to the next row of houses. I think it means it keeps getting bigger as we knock down houses. Yeah, exactly.

Craig Corrie: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things, as you say, they would like you to think they're terrorists in those homes, that the home that Rachel stood in front of, the one she was killed in, that family later came to the United States, or the younger brother, his wife and a baby that was born after Rachel was killed. Well, to get here, they had to go to Tel Aviv to get a visa. And so after, sometime later, after Rachel was killed. The house has been knocked down. But even after that, the Israeli military give a pass to this family that was in the house to go walk freely in Tel Aviv for a day, go to the U.S. Embassy. And of course, the U.S. Embassy does not give a pass to a Palestinian male, 34 years old, easily to come to the United States. But they got that. They traveled in the United States. And so Israel and the United States had nothing against the family that Rachel stood in front of their house. But Rachel was killed.

Paul Jay: When Rachel left to join the, it was under the auspices of the International Solidarity Movement, right? Yeah. what motivates her to go. I mean, a lot of people on the left and generally who see what's wrong with what's going on, not just with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but many such things, they don't get up and go. And they don't get up and put their body on the line.

Craig Corrie: Rachel, I think from a very early age, was somebody I thought was really remarkable as I look back on it. She refused to look away from marginalized people. So she wrote as a 12-year-old about the homeless in Olympia, our hometown, and how we would give them a dollar so we didn't really have to look at them. How we would... would support them from afar, but didn't want to be close enough to smell their breath. She worked with mentally ill people when she was in high school and through college. And so I think that it makes, in a very broad sense, some sense for her then to choose to go, because there really is nobody more marginalized than somebody in RAFA. Specifically, I think the attacks on September 11 she realized that that there was some, you know, there's something going on. She's aware of the world, like most of us. And she didn't buy George W. Bush's excuse that they hate us for our freedom. So what she literally said is, I would like to go somewhere and see what it's like to be on the other side of my tax dollars in U.S. foreign policy. So she found out about the international solidarity movement. Some of her professors had been to Israel. One was Israeli, had been in the Israeli military, and also then was one of the founders of Women in Black, who in Israel stand silently in black trying to bring attention to the occupation. So she had some knowledgeable people. She learned Arabic. She took that in school before she went. So she knew people that were knowledgeable in that area and young people that had been before. But Eventually she went.

Paul Jay: Did you have a sense of how dangerous it might be?

Cindy Corrie: You know, Craig and I were living in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time because of a job change for Craig. And I remember when Rachel first told me that this is what she was thinking about doing, I went to the internet and started to look for some other options. We have family connections in India. I knew that she had a really strong need to do meaningful things in her life. And she had an international focus, an international bent. She was very privileged. I mean, she felt like a very privileged person growing up in Olympia, Washington, and in a middle-class family where she had lots of opportunity. She was able to travel to Russia as a high school student. She was there for six weeks. We had exchange students in our home. And we had, after the Soviet Union broke up, we had a student from Russia that came with her teacher and several other students. And then Rachel was one of several high school students that went back and spent six weeks in Yuzhno-Sokolinsk in Eastern Russia. And so she had that experience, and that really changed her outlook. Because here, you know, there was all this negative in our media and so forth, and coming from our government about the Soviet Union and about Russia. And then Rachel met the people. and fell in love with the people there. And after that, she spent some time in Belize. She had a high school trip to Eastern Europe. So her perspective at a very young age had become pretty global. And she just had a strong need to be out there in the world. That said, And she didn't want to frighten us. She did educate us. I think Rachel really brought us to the issue. I think we were like a lot of American families who had always heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was always in the news, particularly the Jewish-Israeli perspective. And that's the one that we identified with. I read stories to the kids about young people during the Holocaust who were hidden away and survived, and about the ones who didn't. So that's where we were coming from, and the Palestinians were really removed from our experience. So she was educating me, even across the country, before she traveled. She was sending me links to websites and that kind of thing. But, and she, I remember her writing at one point, if you look at this, you know, you might become a little fearful. And I know she didn't want us to be afraid. But she said nobody in the International Solidarity Movement had been killed. There had been an injury or so. But nobody had died in that. And so, you know, she was, she was trying to help us along. I remember her first phone call to us in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I think that was a point when Craig and I really couldn't even talk about it with each other after that call because I could hear the trembling in her voice when she was in Rafa and she said, can you hear that? Can you hear that? And it was tanks that were going up and down this Philadelphia corridor. she was actually in the house that she stood in front of when she was killed, making that phone call, and it was nighttime. And I remember feeling worried then. But also, as she was there longer, what we saw happening through her writing and through her communications is she was okay. And people were, she was telling wonderful stories about the people that she was staying with. And we saw her confidence grow in her ability to be there and to do the work that needed to be done. And she was working with the Children's Parliament. She went, connected with women's organizations, was living with these families, and working with other internationals who had come for the same reasons that she had come. I remember when we finally made it to Gaza in September of 2003, and we went to the General Union of Palestinian Women. And Fatima, the woman who was there, so proudly pulled out for me a note that Rachel had left on International Women's Day. We went and visited families. And we have actually in a book of Rachel's writing, Naila's letter, a young Palestinian woman that Rachel had written a letter into her journal. And it was all about how the world should be ashamed of this and how Nyla should hold on to her dreams and how she had all this ability to be any of these things that she wanted to be. and how much Rachel was learning from Nyla and people like her about the human spirit and about dignity, just how much Rachel had learned there. So I think in terms of our anxiety about it all, of course we were concerned. I was particularly concerned when the war with Iraq was starting, and there was a lot of uncertainty about what that would bring. we saw how meaningful this was, and we were learning from her. I told you that we had heard about this issue forever, but all of a sudden, here's our daughter, we know what a careful observer she is, we know how careful she is about her words, and this is what she's sharing, this is the picture that she's sharing with Craig and me, and also with our extended family and her friends, that just completely changed our view of the whole situation.

Paul Jay: Rachel was someone that seems pretty early on didn't accept the official narrative of things. Did she get that from you? And you fought in Vietnam, Craig. How much did that change the way you accepted or didn't the official narrative of things?

Craig Corrie: Well, I think, yeah, it does go back, I think, in our life if we look back at it. But our family, Cindy and I with our kids, I think talked about issues of the day. Our daughter, Rachel, she went to a particular grade school that we had helped found as an alternative school in the public schools. And they tried to look at They said that children weren't preparing for life, they were already in their life. And they were part of the community, and the community was part of the school. And then they defined the community as the whole world. So Rachel, at a very young age, was involved in all that. And of course, I had some experience in Vietnam and lived through the 60s. But for instance, in 1970, I was with the 1st Air Cavalry in Cambodia. So while students are being shot at Kent State, I think protecting my life You know, I understand they're protesting where I was, but I thought they were supporting me, my views, certainly. There I was in Vietnam. And that was just a sad situation to be in. You learn a few things. You will protect yourself and your buddy, even though you don't really have anything against the person the shooting at you, I'm in their place. They weren't coming to Iowa to get me, you know.

Paul Jay: What were you doing?

Craig Corrie: I was a, strangely, I was a combat engineer, so it meant, among other things, that I was at times responsible for bulldozer operations. So, you know, I can tell you for one thing, you are responsible to know what's in front of that blade. Now, we were pushing down trees and stuff in the jungle, not somebody's homes. We were making fire bases in Cambodia or right right inside the Vietnam era. And another sort of interesting thing about that, when I flew over, my parents had in their home, they were sponsoring the son of a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army who had sort of formed the local militias. That was his idea. And I was reading on the plane, literally, this man's treatise for their war college. And he was saying that to win, South Vietnam had to have U.S. materiel, but could not use U.S. soldiers, because we would be viewed just like the French were, which was all true. But I'm flying over there learning that. And of course, it translates fairly closely to the way people in Gaza, I don't know what I'm trying to say here, but in a sense of... the with trying to impose U.S. power abroad. You know, we really can't do, even if you come with the best of intentions, you can't do that well. I'm reminded, and I'll quickly here, but I talked to an Israeli soldier once who said he was in Gaza, and for a particular period of time, a day or two, they were not supposed to engage with anybody. So they were trying to hide sort of walking down streets from the population. And he said a little child, like a three four year old child came out of the alleyway and saw them and just started screaming and then he realized he was being violent simply by being there he didn't have to do anything he didn't have to wish ill on anybody just by his presence in Gaza he was being violent And so I don't know how much of that Rachel would have picked up for me.

Paul Jay: But that's kind of my background. How much did you talk to her about your Vietnam experience?

Craig Corrie: Very little. Very little. I remember after she was killed, we were just in days, we were in D.C. because we were trying to come up here. Our son lived here. in D.C., and we were trying to work to get Rachel's body back, and we thought we'd fly from D.C. to bring her back. But anyway, we were giving a press conference next to the Cannon office building with our congressman, Congressman Brian Baird at that time, and people had told me, you have to talk about being in Vietnam and getting medals, you know, kind of gives you creds on the Hill. And so I pulled that out and my son's watching behind me. And right after I got off of the air, I went back and I said, I'm sorry, I never told you about that. But when I was a kid, right after World War II, boys would bring their father's medals in to show and tell, and that's what a hero was. And I said, I don't, I never wanted you to think that's what a hero is made out of. And he kind of laughed. He said, you don't have any problem with that now, Dad. So no, you know, I didn't in that sense, like most people.

Paul Jay: Because Rachel is.

Cindy Corrie: I'm sorry?

Paul Jay: I said Rachel is, was, is, hero.

Cindy Corrie: Well, we think of her, of course, still as our daughter, and we miss her. She's very much present in the work that we do and inspires, I think, the work that we do. And we do it for ourselves now as well. You have to believe in what you're doing to sustain this as long as we have. But I find myself stopping at certain points and thinking, well, how would she think about this or how would she feel about some aspect of what we're doing? I think that she has come to represent the injustice of what's happening there for a lot of people in the world, particularly because for Palestinians, we work hard to get Palestinian voices now. out into our community and elsewhere. But it's been so almost impossible for Palestinians to pursue justice, for instance, in the Israeli courts as we did. And I think because we have been able to go down that path, and because Rachel was a writer and had something to say to the world in her own voice even after she was killed, I think that she has come to represent that injustice to a lot of people. And I think that from what I hear and I hope, you know, people do find hope in the work that we're doing and in the fact that she was there that day and stood against what was happening to all of those families in the Gaza Strip.

Paul Jay: I can't help but affect you, and I'm sure you're aware, that it took the death of a young white American girl to pierce the media on this. And we're aware of this in Baltimore, where we are. Two to three hundred black people are killed every year in Baltimore. And it's just, in terms of the media, it's just another number, another name. It's a completely different story if some young white person gets killed. It's the same parallel. It is. That you can have Netanyahu come and address Congress after killing thousands of people in Gaza. And it's all kind of, people are so dehumanized in the American media. that it's considered, oh, people can buy collateral damage or whatever you want to call it.

Cindy Corrie: Yes.

Craig Corrie: Yeah, I think these issues are connected. I'm reminded of, we went a few years ago to the West Bank and Gaza with a group, and a parallel group was a group of African heritage. So I'm So we were around each other at dinner and things, and before we left, this guy is telling me, you know, I work on the south side of Chicago. Why should I go halfway around the world to find somebody, you know, that needs to have attention paid to getting their rights when I've got all the work I can do in Chicago? And I said, you know, I kind of agree with you. But we have to understand they're connected. What we're talking about in one place is the same thing somebody else is talking about in the other. And we need to support each other. I hate to use a military analogy, but it's kind of like we're all just working on different fronts of the same war. And we are working together. And I believe if it takes a blond-haired girl to bring attention to the dark-haired Palestinian girls that are killed all the time, then that's the process we need to go through. And then we need to get on to, as Cindy says, the Palestinians having the voice and being seen. And, you know, they're rich, wonderful people. So they'll enrich all of our lives if we get to know them, just as that's true for people in the inner city in Baltimore or the south side of Chicago, or we've worked with indigenous people from Canada, the First Nations people. You know, all these people, we need them all. And we're just impoverishing ourselves if we don't let them into our lives.

Paul Jay: What's been your experience in Israel? You've been over there, you've been fighting a court case, suing, as I mentioned earlier, the Israeli government, the Israeli military. But in terms of Israelis, what's been your experience?

Cindy Corrie: Well, we've had extended time there because of the court case. Craig and I, I think, spent about a total of ten months, it wasn't consecutive, but living inside Israel while the court case was going on so that we could hear all the proceedings. We were in Haifa most of that time, but also spent time throughout the country. And you know, Israelis certainly in the peace movement have been so supportive of us. We in court all had to have everything translated for us. Everything was in Hebrew. So members of Combatants for Peace and other activists sat next to us and for hours at a time were translating from Hebrew to English, whispering it in our ears, sometimes having the judge yell at them for being too loud and that kind of thing. The district courtroom wasn't a particularly large space, but on some days, for example, when the driver came, there were Israeli supporters who stood out in the courtroom for hours so that when we came out, they would see that we were there, that they were there in support of us. They couldn't make it into the courtroom because there wasn't room. We just recently, actually, before the... Supreme Court oral hearing when we were in Israel and in 2014. We were there in May and June. The play, My Name is Rachel Corey, was performed in Hebrew in the, it's an Arab-Israeli theater in Jaffa. And the theater was full. The performance started at 8.30 at night, performed by a Jewish-Israeli actress and a director from Haifa, Jewish director from Haifa. The room was packed. There were no more seats. There was a panel afterward. A representative of B'Tselem, the human rights organization, was there. Mikael Svard, who has done some legal work for our family much earlier, but works with Palestinian cases all the time, was there as a part of it. And they were really there in solidarity with our family, that whole group of people. You know, that's a small segment of the country. Very small. But those people are there for us. And what they've told us is, you know, we can't do it by ourselves. We can't make these changes happen without all of you out there.

Paul Jay: Just like a couple of days before we are shooting this, Benjamin Netanyahu was just re-elected prime minister.

Cindy Corrie: Exactly.

Paul Jay: This is a very small segment you're talking about.

Cindy Corrie: Yes, it is.

Paul Jay: Yeah, it is.

Cindy Corrie: But they're so important to us. And when we're there, there are some really startling things that I think Americans who don't have the opportunity to go there sometimes think Israel looks like things do here. And in some ways there are a lot of similarities. But I know I was really struck in the beginning when we went there by how militarized it all is, how visibly militarized it all is. And just seeing how young all these soldiers are, men and women in uniform, in Haifa, you know, there are training areas nearby. And in the beginning, less so now, I think, but in the beginning, carrying weapons. I just couldn't adapt to the idea that these people were on the trains and on the buses and everywhere around the country. the whole region.

Paul Jay: I was there, I guess, about three years ago, four years ago, and I told you before off camera, I was so struck at the overt racism that I heard. I mean, I kind of asked about it, you know, what do you think of what's going on in the West Bank or something like that. But the response was just completely unfiltered, virulent racist, from storekeepers to people on the street to I mean, I kind of knew, but not like that. It kind of shocked me.

Craig Corrie: It is shocking. And that's probably the most overt, obvious part of it, that when you hang around long enough, even without knowing either language that's spoken there, it's very nuanced. There's rankings through the Jewish community, from Ashkenazi and then, you know, the Arab Jews and then Ethiopians maybe on the bottom of all that. And then you start through the Arab community as well. So maybe Christian Arabs might be sort of towards the top in a larger city. And then to the Muslims that are out in the country. And it's so unhealthy. You know, it's kind of hard to figure why anybody would want to get into that sort of thinking. But it's there. And in a lesser extent, it's other places. Like, it's still connected. But that's a very obvious spot.

Paul Jay: Now, how much has the American mainstream media given you a place to tell your story? Because still mainstream media covers so one-sidedly the impression that Israel is the Greek democracy and so on.

Craig Corrie: I think, you know, at times we have some coverage on mainstream media. When Rachel was killed, that was only three days before we did the actual invasion into Iraq. So it very quickly went off the news with that. But there was some coverage at that time. And I think that the mainstream coverage of Israel and Palestine has gotten better over the 12 years that we're looking at. In 2000, what was it, 2011 or 12 that we were there and got In November of 2012 we were in Gaza and there was an attack again, like there is every 16, 18 months it seems like. And so the bombs were falling the last night we were there. We were scheduled to go out the next day and we did. unlike in Cas Ladd before that in 2009, where there was actually no coverage coming from inside Gaza. When we got out and got back to the States, we could see there's Anderson Cooper sitting on top, standing on top of the same hotel that we've been inside Gaza. And I'm not sure that Anderson Cooper understands that situation all that well. Ben Wiedemann does, and he was there with Anderson Cooper. So Anderson Cooper brings the audience. Ben Wiedemann brought some understanding. And we would laugh because we'd hear the same sort of thing sort of aired. And then Ben Wiedemann would say, well, actually. And whatever he said after that, Cindy and I would agree with. So that's getting out, and that's better. I think also just trying to understand people as people and not seeing them as victims is important. And so some of that too is making it into the mainstream media. But there's a whole lot more that has to be done. And that's not getting Palestinian voices in. We need to get to the point where we hear from the Palestinians.

Paul Jay: You sued, launched a civil case against the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Force. Why?

Cindy Corrie: We learned very early in March of 2003 that President Bush had talked directly with Prime Minister Sharon about what had happened to Rachel the day after she was killed, and had been promised a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation into Rachel's case. There was, in Rachel's case, a military police investigation in Israel, which is very unusual. There's a lot of criticism of investigations in Israel by human rights organizations, Israeli human rights organizations and legal ones. And one of those criticisms is that there are so few actual investigations that proceed after Palestinians are harmed. But there was a military police investigation in Rachel's case, but the army found that no fault had been committed. The army had behaved perfectly that day. They brought no charges. They closed the case, and they declined to release their report to the United States government. They did allow a couple of members of the American Embassy to read the report. A couple of people in the State Department were able to read it later, and eventually some of our family members were able to read the report. We then turned to the US government.

Paul Jay: What was the gist of the report?

Cindy Corrie: They went through some of what happened that day. They had some testimony from different people. But basically it was that Rachel couldn't be seen. It was an accident.

Paul Jay: The guy driving the bulldozer didn't see her, and he goes over her because of that. Right.

Cindy Corrie: And there were two people in the bulldozer. They also did have some drawings of where people saw her body. An interesting thing about it is that with the two people in the bulldozer, the driver actually indicated that her body is where all the photos show her being and where the international activists said that she was. And the commander, who was the second person and was to be the set of eyes, an extra set of eyes, and to direct where the bulldozer went, he had her body behind a huge mound of earth. And others that testified initially in that also said that that's where her body was. And they were trying to say that she couldn't be seen. The driver had her right where she was in after she was run over by the bulldozer, between the bulldozer and between some dirt that had been pushed, but she was in the middle of that. So there was already in the military police report evidence that hadn't been reconciled, testimonies that weren't reconciled between these differences, and that became even more obvious in the court testimony. One thing that they said that was later we found not to be true, I mean there were falsehoods, complete falsehoods in the military police report. One was that there had been a representative of the American Embassy present when autopsy was performed on Rachel. Our family didn't find out until we actually read FOIA documents where we saw an American embassy official, high official, saying we didn't have anybody at that autopsy, did we? And then later we were able to confirm that there had been nobody there at all. So it was a pretty standard kind of report where they take some evidence and they arrive at a conclusion, and their conclusion was that it was an unfortunate accident.

Paul Jay: But your lawsuit was more than whether the guy in the bulldozer can see or not see. Your basic case, if I understand it correctly, was that the whole policy had to lead to something like that. The policy itself was unjust.

Craig Corrie: Well, I'm not sure it went that far. But we did sue the Israeli government and the military of Israel. So we weren't looking at the bulldozer driver himself. It was the whole situation, yes. And so we were looking for information because it was, as we said, That report came out, but it was actually Colin Powell's chief of staff, when Colin Powell's in the State Department, that said that's not... Larry Wilkerson. Larry Wilkerson said that's not a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation. And so we were trying to get some information and, of course, accountability. And that would go to the old military, as you say.

Paul Jay: So... Just back up one sec, because we've done several segments. In the first segment, we kind of painted the picture of that day. Just quickly paint it against for people that may not have seen the earlier segment.

Craig Corrie: Yeah, so Rachel was standing out on the border with the border between Gaza Strip and Egypt where Israel was bulldozing wholesale houses down. And they were trying to prevent that. And she was standing in front of the home of the Nasrallah family that was owned by two brothers. They each had a wife and there were a total of five children that were all home in the wall behind which she stood. Bulldozers would come up to the activists that day. But they would stop right as they got to their feet. And so that had been going on most of the day. About 5 o'clock the bulldozers actually retreated for a little while. How many activists were there? There were seven altogether, I believe.

Cindy Corrie: Eight with Rachel.

Craig Corrie: With the International Solidarity Movement. Exactly. And they were from the United States, of course, but mostly Great Britain.

Paul Jay: The basic idea here is the Israeli government, in theory at least, is not going to want to run over a young American, or they might, a young Palestinian.

Craig Corrie: A Palestinian walking out in that area would probably be shot. In fact, we learned through the lawsuit that entered into the log after Rachel was killed was that the standing order is anybody in this area is to be shot to kill, any adult in this area. That's, you know, blatantly illegal.

Paul Jay: In fact, many kids were killed in the area, too.

Craig Corrie: Yeah. A couple of years later, I think it was, little Iman Al-Sham, I believe it's Al-Sham, was shot. A captain in the Israeli military went out and emptied his gun into this girl, saying that he was confirming the kill of a 13-year-old child. And that was the only reason we know about that is because that was captured in radio communications, and somebody let that out to the world.

Paul Jay: So the Israeli Supreme Court recently, this is just February 2015,

Cindy Corrie: February 12th of this year.

Paul Jay: Right. Ruled that your case was turned down by the Supreme Court. It did not overturn a divisional court or district court?

Cindy Corrie: District court.

Paul Jay: District court's decision that essentially this was war, and these things happen in war, and you can't hold the Israeli government or military liable. But what was the argument of your case?

Craig Corrie: I guess we were arguing two things. We were saying that she was either intentionally killed or it was negligence. And what was finally determined by the courts is that they didn't really have to think about that because they said that under Israeli law, you cannot sue the government for what goes on in Israel. in a war zone. But of course, under international law, in the first place, the Gaza Strip is occupied territory, so they have an active duty to protect civilians there. And under international law, you would look to see whether the soldiers were acting legally. And so this flies right in the face of international law, and it's upheld by their high court. So their high court is saying, as I explained, they're outside the law. They're proud of being outlaws. And I think the world has to admit that. We have to deal with that. From my perspective in the United States, we give over $3 billion of funding to Israel every year. Why are we doing that to somebody who says they will not abide by international law?

Paul Jay: And we see they don't, and they say they don't have to. And the violation of international law is knocking down all these people's houses.

Cindy Corrie: Well, that is true, although just completely ignoring civilians being your area, not taking every possible process or procedure to try to prevent harm to civilians is really what we're talking about in Rachel's case. We found it very hard in the lawsuit to try to provide any context about these home demolitions. The judge basically didn't want to let any of that information into the court, why Rachel was there. Human Rights Watch has come out with a statement about how damaging this Supreme Court verdict is, not only to Palestinians but also to Israeli soldiers, because it basically gives them license to do anything again. and not have any consequence, except we know that the greatest loss of death in the Israeli military is suicide. So people do live with these things, or don't live with these things that they've done. Human Rights Watch in their decision, though, did point to the fact that they had documented all of this massive home demolition that had occurred there, and it was their belief that there was a very likely possibility that everything that the Israeli military was engaged in at that time was illegal under international law. I'd just like to say, too, that thinking about the children there, And we, because it was a civil case, were able to hear from very high-level officials in the military under oath. And one of them was a colonel, Pinhas Suarez, who was in charge of that whole area of southern Gaza. And he took over about six months before Rachel was killed in that part of Gaza. And I checked B'Tselem, Israeli human rights organization's records of all of the fatalities during that period. And from the time he took over until Rachel was killed, during that six months, there were over a hundred people in the southern part of Gaza that were not engaging in hostilities in any way. So they weren't engaged in any resistance. But over 100 people under his command were killed. These were civilians. And over 40 of those, I can't remember the exact number now, but I remember over 40 were children. So before, and Rachel wrote about seeing the posters on the wall of Ali, a young boy who had been killed right before she got there. So the amount of death and injury and destruction is pretty unfathomable for people here. And yes, I definitely feel like most of the activity that was occurring there was probably counter to international law.

Paul Jay: And you were promised by a president, President Bush, that you'd get something open and transparent and thoroughgoing. What was the actual words of the promise?

Craig Corrie: thorough, credible, and transparent investigation, and that was made by Prime Minister Sharon to President Bush. But of course, that's from one head of state to another, and then the family has to try and enforce that. We can't enforce that. We need our government as an institution. We've had a lot of help from caring individuals in our government in institutions that have done almost nothing. We need the institutions to work. We need our State Department to go to bat for us. And has there been any response to the Supreme Court decision?

Paul Jay: Because this ends it as far as the Israeli process is concerned.

Craig Corrie: There's not been a public response by our government to that. We have talked with high-level people in the State Department and asked them, said it seems to us that you should be concerned about this if you let that promise you know, go unfulfilled, and if you look at this court proceeding and make no statement about it, that's okay? Another sort of outrageous thing is that the court said that Rachel would be responsible for her own death because the U.S. Embassy had issued a travel warning. Now, the travel warning wasn't actually in evidence. They had come, the lawyers had come with a travel warning that was actually after Rachel was killed, because she was killed by the Israelis. But, so it wasn't in evidence, but the judge took it anyway, and it was referred to by the high court, so that somehow what our government does to try to protect traveling U.S. citizens becomes a license to kill by the Israeli government? And you're not going to comment on that? Our government, we did have somebody from the embassy in every time we were in court. And so there was, and often it was the council general. And so they've been able to see this as we have over these years. And from the original district court, it has been several years for them to analyze what they saw and come out with. And it's now been a month since the high court. So I do think that they can. They should be looking at this, should be analyzing, and they should be coming back with something just as a piece of diplomacy.

Cindy Corrie: And our expectation is that they will do that. We've asked for that. And so we'll wait and see what happens.

Paul Jay: My understanding is the Israeli Supreme Court decision, if I understand it correctly, is Israeli law trumps international law, and we're at war and bad things happen, too bad. And the American government, under American law, if I understand it correctly, at least, in practice it may be another story, at least does recognize some international law when it comes to war. So shouldn't they be objecting to this?

Cindy Corrie: We believe so. And as I said, we're in the Washington area. We've been in Washington, D.C. this past week meeting with the State Department and with members of Congress.

Paul Jay: The problem here obviously is the American army has committed so many similar atrocities in Iraq and so many places around the world that if you take a stand on Israel's culpability in such things, then people are going to say, well, the American government should be culpable too.

Craig Corrie: But we talked to people in Congress, lawyers in Congress, to say that they are. Now, I don't follow it that much. But they say, you know, if it's an illegal activity, now, you know, you can divine that. I understand, you know. But certainly when I was in Vietnam, you know, the oath, I was surprised. I thought when I had to take the oath to get into the military, I'd probably just have my fingers crossed. But it was actually pretty reasonable. It was for you to obey all legal all legal orders. And they were quite serious about that. I mean, I got training on how to identify what's a legal order and what's not. And you'd be held personally responsible if you carried out an illegal order. And that's coming out of Nuremberg. We cannot allow ourselves to go back to the way the world was before World War II. I mean, it's bad enough the way it is now. So we have to hold the line somewhere. And that's not a very, I mean, it's a very important line, but it seems to me it's a pretty low hurdle for everything that we've learned since then during my lifetime.

Paul Jay: For some of our younger viewers, Nuremberg were the trials of Nazi officers and leaders after World War II, which found the line, I was only following orders, did not make you less culpable if you knew what you were doing was illegal and was a war crime. There seems to be a lot of interest in forgetting about Nuremberg these days. What's next?

Cindy Corrie: Well, this is one piece, the legal piece is one piece of what we do. So the situation, of course, in Gaza and in the Middle East continues to be really concerning. So there's plenty of work for us to do. We have the Rachel Corey Foundation for Peace and Justice. We do a lot of education. We have connections with people in Gaza and try to provide some support there. We are have scholarship programs that we're involved with, and so forth. So we'll do all of that work. With the outcome of the Supreme Court case, I think we have a story to tell now about this. It's really important to get the word out, and we thank you for letting us talk about it here. I think people need to understand how really damaging this verdict is, and to challenge it in all the ways that we can. And I think here in the U.S. we have a lot of work to do with our Congress and so forth. We're not sure about the next steps that we might take beyond this, because I think our paths are somewhat limited where we could go. Some people have talked about the International Criminal Court, but we know that with the Palestinians joining There's a time limitation. I think they'll only go back into 2014 to be able to look at what happened in Gaza. And there's also a level, obviously Rachel's one person, and what happened in Gaza is thousands of people. So there's a different level there. So I'm not sure that they can look at it. But we'll look at what our options are. We're in communication with our attorneys, and we'll continue to see what we can do.

Paul Jay: One way or the other, Rachel's mission continues, will continue to be yours.