To predictable outrage among anti-Israel activists worldwide, a Haifa court ruled Tuesday that former U.S. college student Rachel Corrie’s 2003 death was an accident. Corrie, a member of the fanatic International Solidarity Movement, was in Gaza at the time, trying to obstruct the work of the Israeli Defense Force; she was killed as she tried to act as a “human shield” by an IDF bulldozer whose driver couldn’t see her. The judge used common sense, noting that as the bulldozer moved toward her, “she did not move away as any reasonable person would have done. But she chose to endanger herself . . . and thus found her death.”
Corrie’s story subsequently became lionized by those eager to demonize Israel; see Jamie Kirchick’s scathing review of the one-person play based on Corrie’s writings as both a little girl and as a college student. As Kirchick noted, the play’s attempt to tug at the audience’s heartstrings unwittingly undermined its argument, since it showed that “Corrie never outgrew the naïve little schoolgirl. Corrie at 23 was just like Corrie at ten.”
This simple-mindedness was reflected in Corrie’s e-mails to her family. A note that she sent to her mother at the time confirmed her ignorance of international affairs; after accusing Israel of genocide, she wrote home to ask her mother to “look up the definition of genocide according to international law,” whose meaning she admitted that she could not recall. (“I really value words,” she added--though apparently not enough to worry about whether what she said about Israel was accurate.)
If nothing else, sending such a poorly-trained student into a war zone would constitute an indictment of the education that Corrie received, especially since she was in Gaza while on break from Evergreen College. Evergreen, however, seems to revel in the fact that its students will receive (at best) a one-sided education on matters relating to Middle East international relations. The college sponsors a “Rachel Corrie Memorial Scholarship” (to memorialize Corrie, the “community activist”), which awards $2000 to an Evergreen student “dedicated to gaining a better understanding of the Middle East and to working locally or internationally to further Middle East peace.” Applicants, according to the college, “must show how they will use their studies to promote human rights and social justice through community activism and/or political advocacy.”
What academic training does a Corrie Scholarship applicant need? Work in such “areas of interest related to the Middle East” as “Arab culture and Arabic language, US Policy in the Middle East, and peace, justice and conflict resolution studies.” At Evergreen, learning about Israel apparently isn’t essential to gain “a better understanding of the Middle East.”
Given what Evergreen does teach about the Middle East, perhaps it’s better for its students simply to remain ignorant about Israel. While she was at the college, Corrie could learn about Israel through such one-sided offerings as “Seeking Justice: Reclamation, Equality, and Restitution,” which contrasted Palestinian sources with what the syllabus termed “Zionist/Israeli” documents; Israel, in this sense, was recognized not as a sovereign state but merely a “Zionist” entity. And after her death, an Evergreen professor who had worked with Corrie named Steve Niva published an op-ed charging that his former student was “killed” as a foreseeable result of Israeli security policies (in this instance, building a security barrier to guard against Gaza smugglers). Niva, who shortly before Corrie’s death penned a Counterpunch article implying that former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon bore responsibility for the Palestinians’ embrace of suicide-murder tactics, has made something of a career in Corrie Studies; the Evergreen website notes that he served as a featured speaker at Oregon State during a “week-long run of the play ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie,’ where he gave a talk entitled ‘Unlikely Icons: Rachel Corrie, Palestine and the New Internationalism.’”
This past semester, Niva taught a course on U.S. foreign policy and the roots of terrorism, which purported to ensure that students would “obtain a thorough knowledge of current events” and “develop a thorough understanding of the history of United States foreign policy in the Middle East.”
Evergreen, alas, has stopped putting course syllabi on-line, so outsiders have to trust that Niva’s reading list and course topics are fair.
