Documentary About Rachel Corrie

Salon has an interview with Simone Bitton, a Moroccan-born Jewish filmmaker who made a documentary "Rachel," about American activist Rachel Corrie. Corrie was killed by a bulldozer in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in 2003.

Bitton approaches Corrie's death from an Israeli point of view, which means she sees it quite differently from the way Americans do. For her, it's partly a forensic puzzle -- an episode of "CSI: Gaza" without a clear resolution -- and as a philosophical challenge to the military and political status quo. It's important to understand that within Israel, Corrie's encounter with a military bulldozer (an enormous armored machine called the Caterpillar D9, built in the United States to Israeli specifications) and the subsequent investigation were a relatively minor news blip, not the full-on media frenzy we enjoyed.

Until she visited the U.S. late in production to meet Corrie's family, friends and classmates in Olympia, Wash., Bitton was unaware that Corrie embodied an ideological divide in American discourse about the Middle East. When I asked her about the flag-burning photo, she didn't seem to understand that many Americans view that act as tantamount to treason. (Other nations do not tend to view their flags with the same quasi-religious fervor.)

Some quotes from the interview:

I think they [Corrie and her group, the International Solidarity Movement] had a pro-Palestinian agenda, and I don't think that having a pro-Palestinian agenda means having an anti-Israeli agenda. Actually, as an Israeli, I have a pro-Palestinian agenda, and I think that when life will be normal and reasonable for Palestinians, it will be much better for Israelis too.

I don't think it's an insult to say that somebody has a pro-Palestinian agenda. If it means that somebody is committed to more justice for the Palestinians, who have been oppressed, bombed, caged, occupied, it's very good to have a pro-Palestinian agenda. It's not only good, it's absolutely needed if you don't want the Middle East to explode in the face of the world, more than it has exploded already.

I was a peace activist when I was their age, you know. I was demonstrating against occupation when I was 25 years old, and our generation failed completely, because the situation is much more horrible now than it was. More settlements, more killings. So we failed. And now it's on their shoulders, all this mess that we couldn't solve.

I have the feeling that they are more lucid than we were, because we believed that we would solve it, you know. We were naive enough to think that it would be enough for a few thousand Israelis to stand up and say, "Hey, we don't want this occupation, we want peace, we want the Palestinians to have their own state." They are not so naive. They know that even if half the Israeli population is against the occupation, the occupation goes on and gets tougher and tougher. And the Israeli governments are more and more extremist and more and more right-wing. It's really a catastrophe. So this young generation knows all this. They are more lucid, and still they are struggling without much hope, which I find really remarkable.