There has just been a mockery and a miscarriage of justice in Israel. The Israeli soldier who killed a Palestinian assailant was supposed to have been charged with first-degree murder because the attacker was injured and incapacitated. Instead, the charge became manslaughter. He was then supposed to get 20 years behind bars because this was an extrajudicial assassination. But the Israeli court thought that sentence was too tough. The prosecution believed he should get at least three to five years for shooting to death a man who posed no discernable danger to the soldier. But the court decided the soldier should only really get 18 months. And for good measure, the soldier will be allowed to appeal so that even this ridiculous one-and-a-half year sentence could be reduced even further.
The March 2016 shooting in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron was caught on video by a rights group and spread widely online. If anyone still needed evidence of Israel’s army using blind force against Palestinians, this video was it.
Eleven months ago, Sergeant Elor Azaria was serving as an army medic in Hebron when two Palestinians stabbed and wounded another soldier. One of the assailants was shot dead by troops. The other was shot and wounded. Eleven minutes later, as the wounded man, Abdel Fattah Al-Sharif, 21, lay on the ground unable to move, Azaria, then 19, took aim with his rifle and put a bullet through his head.
It was a cold-blooded murder, a state-sanctioned execution. Azaria should have received at least life in prison. Even the three-member court said Azaria had “taken upon himself to be both judge and executioner” and had not expressed regret for his crime. “He deserves to die,” Azaria was quoted in the verdict as telling another soldier after pulling the trigger.
But Azaria has become a big hero in the eyes of an Israeli public that has shifted to the right in how it views the Palestinians. A poll by one Israeli newspaper found that around 70 percent of Israelis favored a pardon for Azaria. In another poll, nearly half of Israelis said any Palestinian attacker should be killed on the spot. Azaria, the killer with the newfound fame, entered the court the way he left it: all smiles and waving to his beloved supporters.
This was shoot-to-kill when there was no imminent threat of death. This week’s sentence is less than what many Palestinians receive for belonging to an organization banned by Israel. If a Palestinian throws a rock, he gets a two-year sentence.
Despite the court ruling that he did not open fire out of danger — but rather to harm the assailant — and despite what the court called a “needless” shooting, it is possible that Azaria could walk free after serving 12 months of his sentence, and there have been several high-profile calls for the recruit to be pardoned altogether.
The verdict shows how much discrimination Israeli courts practice against Palestinians. Palestinians harbored few expectations that Azaria would be held seriously accountable. No member of the IDF has been prosecuted for actions carried out in uniform in over 12 years. The Azaria ruling will give Israeli soldiers a green light to kill without fear of punishment.
This was a show trial that exposed one standard of justice for Israelis and another for Palestinians. The story of Azaria and Al-Sharif is a microcosm of the entire Palestinian-Israeli problem, for this is a problem of the occupation, not of one specific soldier or civilian.
Azaria unlawfully took the life of another person but his sentence was the next best thing to walking scot-free. In light of the severity of the crime, the verdict is a joke, and Israel gets the last laugh.
