Dead Jews aren’t news

22 October 2005

British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross, but not the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror — even if they are British

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Corrie was affiliated, is routinely described as a ‘peace group’ in the media. Few make any mention of the ISM’s meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif who, a few days later, blew up Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens, including British citizens. Or of the ISM’s sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukiya, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement the ISM said ‘armed struggle’ is a Palestinian ‘right’.

According to the ‘media co-ordinator’ of the ISM, Flo Rosovski, ‘“Israel” is an illegal entity that should not exist’ — which at any rate clarifies the ISM’s idea of peace.

Indeed, partly because of the efforts of Corrie’s fellow activists in the ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the tunnels near where she was demonstrating. Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and elsewhere.

However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, co-creators of My Name is Rachel Corrie, leaving almost all the critics who reviewed the play completely ignorant about the background to the events with which it deals.

So in April, when reviewers first wrote about the play, they tended to take it completely at face value. ‘Corrie was murdered after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation,’ wrote Emma Gosnell in the Sunday Telegraph. The Evening Standard, for example, described it as a ‘true-life tragedy’ in which Corrie’s ‘unselfish goodness shines through’.

Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times) saw the play for the propaganda it is. At one point Corrie declares, ‘The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.’ As Davis notes, ‘Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed at that one.’

But ultimately the play, and many of the articles about Corrie that have appeared, are not really about the young American activist who died in such tragic circumstances. They are about promoting a hate-filled and glaringly one-sided view of Israel.

Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.