Israeli Court's Rejection of Corrie Family Appeal Is Not Fit for Print in Our Leading Papers

posted on: Feb 17, 2015

Last week there was important news in the Rachel Corrie case: the Israeli Supreme Court ended the ten-year-effort by her family to hold the Israeli army to account for her death in March 2003, under the treads of an Israeli bulldozer as she was attempting to prevent a house demolition in Gaza.
The Israeli court affirmed a lower court ruling 2-1/2 years ago that the Israeli Defense Ministry could not “be held accountable for events that take place in a war zone,” as Al Jazeera reported in a long article. And we published the Corrie family’s statement that the ruling “amounts to judicial sanction of immunity for Israeli military forces when they commit injustices and human rights violations.”
But neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported on the Israeli Supreme Court decision. Jamil Dakwar, the director of the ACLU’s human rights program, tweeted the Al Jazeera story above and asked the NY Times:

American citizen was denied justice in Israeli courts. Is that not “news that’s fit to print”?

Michael Slackman, international managing editor of the Times, responded:

appreciate your noting this but it did run in the NYT on Feb. 12

Slackman is referencing this AP story posted at the Times site on Feb. 12: “Israel Court Rejects Appeal in Death of American Activist.” The same short piece appeared in the Washington Post online, too.

As Dakwar reminds the Times: “It wasn’t published in the print version, was it?”

No; and the matter is not a trivial oversight. As the Corries pointed out, the U.S. government continues to call for an open and transparent investigation by Israel, but there has never been one– and there have never been consequences to Israel for its inaction. The Israeli court decision did not come up at the State Department briefing last week– even at a time when the killing of Kayla Mueller, one country over, is seen as a cause for the U.S. to go to war. And both Kayla and Rachel had served in the International Solidarity Movement that works for Palestinian human rights.

Source: mondoweiss.net