Rorschach "Rachel" [View All]

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Simone Bitton's documentary "Rachel," which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is what's not in it. Bitton, a Moroccan-born Jewish filmmaker who spent many years in Israel and now lives in France, conducts a philosophical and cinematic inquiry into the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist who was killed under ambiguous circumstances in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in March 2003. But the political firestorm that followed Corrie's death, which saw her beatified as a martyr for peace by some on the left and demonized as a terrorist enabler by some on the right, is virtually absent from the film.

We do not see the infamous photograph of the keffiyeh-clad Corrie burning an "American flag" -- not a real flag, but a crude children's drawing of one -- at a demonstration about a month before her death. Nor do we see the torrent of exaggerated and often shocking verbal abuse to which Corrie was subjected, postmortem, on right-wing bulletin boards and Web sites. Corrie, who suffered massive internal injuries when she was either crushed by a bulldozer or buried under construction debris, was routinely dubbed "Saint Pancake" in such venues, or described as "terrorist-loving swine." (That's without getting into the grotesque sexual fantasies and elaborate conspiracy theories.)

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.

While it's unusual for a Westerner to die in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Corrie was neither the first nor the last, and no individual death can make much impression amid the constantly clicking body count on all sides. In the film, one of Corrie's friends recalls that the Gaza hospital mortuary had to move her body out to make room for someone else, a Palestinian man who had reportedly left his house to smoke a cigarette and was shot by an Israeli sniper.

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