Last week, Israeli news outlets quickly reported of the wounding of an Israeli soldier stationed in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian town of Hebron at the hands of two Palestinians. The news outlets provided extensive details of the soldier’s (mild) condition including the name of the hospital where the soldier was being treated. At the end of the news report, it was noted that two Palestinians had been “neutralised”.
No details were provided as to how these two Palestinians were “neutralised” — which, incidentally, is one of the Israeli news media’s favourite words and happens to be code for “killed”. The Palestinians were simply “neutralised”. End of story, we were led to believe.
But it was not the end of the story. Later that day, the real news story came to light — not through the Israeli news media outlets but through NGOs working to document the persistent abuses of the Israeli army.
The truth was so harrowing that its description seems unreal: a Palestinian bystander filmed the process of one of the Palestinians becoming “neutralised”. In the video, we see approximately 20 Israeli soldiers, medics and colonists, milling around as an Israeli soldier is taken to an ambulance for his light wounds. Two Palestinian men lay motionless on the ground. As the ambulance is about to leave the scene, a full six minutes after it arrived and without treating the two Palestinians lying on the ground who appear to be more in need of assistance, an Israeli soldier cocks his gun and shoots one of the Palestinians in the head at close range, killing him.
The truth of Abdul Fattah Al Sharif’s death at the hands of an Israeli soldier is so harrowing that its description seems unreal, age 21, had his life taken away and were it not for the video, he would have been just another nameless, faceless Palestinian and the witnesses who saw his execution would simply have been labelled liars and not believed by any foreign news media.
But yet the presence of this video has done more than just reveal what we Palestinians have long known — that the Israeli army summarily executes Palestinians — but it has highlighted the complicity of the entire Israeli system; from the medics who failed to treat Al Sharif and Ramzi Aziz Al Qasrawi, also 21, to the ambulance driver who manoeuvred his way around the now lifeless body to the soldiers who acted completely unfazed at seeing a comrade execute a Palestinian. Indeed, not a single soldier tried to stop the Israeli murderer, and no one is seen reprimanding him, or are even shocked afterwards, for impunity reigns supreme in the Israeli army.
Given the news media’s sudden interest, the Israeli army quickly announced that it would be pressing murder charges against the Israeli soldier. But so deep is the level of impunity in Israel that this soon became cause for outcry: thousands of Israelis signed petitions calling for his release labelling him a “hero”, the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh advertised a rally in support of this murderer labelled a “hero” and public opinion polls showed that only 5 per cent of Israelis believed that he murdered Al Sharif while 57 per cent did not believe that the Israeli soldier should have been arrested in the first place.
For those thinking that this is a shift to the right in Israel’s politics, think again. It is not — it is the mainstay. When criminal offences by the Israeli army against Palestinians are exposed to the public, the army is quick to label such incidents “exceptional” with the army vowing to hold the perpetrators accountable. But quickly, when the public, and in particular, the international news media stop looking, charges are dropped.
Such is the case already, with the Israeli army announcing a few days ago that the charges against this soldier would be lessened from murder to manslaughter. And the numbers bear witness: according to Israeli human rights organisations, since 2003, Israeli military police opened criminal investigations into the killing of 179 Palestinians, though more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed during that time. Of those investigations, the army issued indictments on only 16 cases, none of them on murder charges.
Take, for example, the case of 13-year-old Iman Al Hams from Gaza, murdered in 2004 as she was on her way to school. An Israeli soldier, upon seeing young Iman, recognised that she was a child and yet insisted on firing an entire magazine of his automatic rifle into her, including two shots to the head and a series to the body after her death to “confirm” that she was dead. Reportedly, her murderer said he would have done it again, even if she had been three years old. His sentence? Acquittal.
And so too this Israeli soldier will face a kangaroo court in which there is a semblance of law, rules and witnesses but we all know what will happen: he too, like those who preceded him and those who follow him will never serve any time for their crimes, and impunity will continue to prevail for them just as it has for the State that continues to deploy them.
— Diana Buttu is a Ramallah-based analyst, former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian negotiators and policy adviser to Al Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.
