Elor Azaria Verdict: ‘No Justice for
Palestinians’
Soldier who executed a wounded
Palestinian has been sentenced to 18 months in
jail and a demotion
By Jonathan Cook
February
21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Human rights groups and Palestinian leaders have
condemned what they called the “extremely
lenient” punishment of Elor Azaria, the Israeli
army medic who was filmed executing a severely
wounded Palestinian in Hebron last year.
On
Tuesday, a military tribunal sentenced the
soldier to 18 months in jail and a demotion,
nearly a year after he shot a bullet from close
range into the head of 21-year-old Abdel
al-Fattah al-Sharif.
There
has rarely been a trial in Israel where the
judges have been under such relentless – and
mostly hostile – scrutiny. That appeared to be
reflected in their sentencing, more than a month
after they found Azaria guilty of manslaughter.
The
sentence was much lower than the three to five
years demanded by the prosecution, and far below
the maximum tariff of 20 years. One of the three
judges dissented, recommending two and a half to
five years.
“Azaria
should have received a life sentence. This will
not act as a deterrence to other trigger-happy
soldiers,” Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian member
of the Israeli parliament, told Al Jazeera.
“There are thousands of other soldiers who have
killed Palestinians, but are not on trial.
Israeli pilots dropped bombs on schools and
hospitals in Gaza [in the 2014 war]. Why are
they not on trial, too?”
He
called Israel a “democracy of guns”, adding:
“The real author of the crimes against
Palestinians is the Israeli state. By putting
one individual on trial, Israel hopes to confer
legitimacy on the whole apparatus of
state-sanctioned killing.”
Cold-blooded execution
Even
before the sentencing, Azaria’s lawyers had said
they would appeal the verdict. If that fails,
they have vowed to seek a pardon. Education
Minister Naftali Bennett immediately backed a
pardon for Azaria.
For
Palestinians, the trial was viewed as little
more than a farce. The family of Sharif said
that Azaria had carried out a “cold-blooded
execution”, not manslaughter. They added: “The
sentence he received is less than a Palestinian
child gets for throwing stones.”
Azaria
shot Sharif more than 10 minutes after the
Palestinian had been severely wounded by other
soldiers at a checkpoint and was lying helpless
on the ground.
Samir
Zaqout, a spokesman for the al-Mezan Centre for
Human Rights, based in Gaza, said the lenient
sentence came as “no surprise”.
“Palestinians don’t expect any kind of justice
from the Israeli legal system,” he told Al
Jazeera. “The lives of Palestinians are judged
as worthless.”
Addameer, a group defending Palestinian
prisoners’ rights, also condemned the sentence,
noting that it was less than many Palestinians
received for belonging to an organisation
proscribed by Israel.
“The
message this sends to other soldiers and police
officers who extrajudicially execute
Palestinians is that their actions will not be
seriously accounted for and that impunity will
persist,” it said in a statement sent to Al
Jazeera.
Extreme anti-Arab views
Despite
the clear-cut evidence, military prosecutors
last year rejected a murder charge and settled
on the lesser manslaughter indictment, amid a
wave of support for Azaria from Israeli
politicians and the public alike.
Polls
showed most Israeli Jews agreed with Azaria’s
refusal to show remorse: they believed he acted
appropriately and had been unfairly singled out
for prosecution.
During
the trial, it emerged that Azaria, 20, held
extreme anti-Arab views, which he expressed
regularly on social media. In one Facebook post
during the 2014 war on Gaza, he called for the
massacre of every Palestinian in the small
coastal enclave.
He also
admitted to spending a great deal of time in
Hebron with the followers of the late Meir
Kahane, a rabbi whose virulently anti-Arab Kach
party was outlawed in 1994 after a supporter,
Baruch Goldstein, shot 29 Palestinians in
Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque.
None of
that damaged Azaria’s popularity with a large
swath of the Israeli Jewish public. The Israeli
media designated him as “everyone’s son”.
Worries about morale
Despite
prosecuting Azaria, the army was reported to be
worried about the damage the case was doing to
morale.
Local
media revealed that, after Azaria’s conviction
last month, a senior commander approached his
father to persuade the family not to appeal,
reportedly offering them an 18-month jail term
in return. In the end, that was what the judges
imposed, even without a deal.
The
army is reportedly concerned about research
showing a recent sharp drop in the proportion of
combat soldiers who believe their service is
more important than non-combat roles. There is a
similar fall among those who believe their
commander will back them if they get into
trouble.
Riots
erupted outside the courtroom early last month
when Azaria was found guilty. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was among the senior
politicians who called for a pardon for Azaria
even before the conviction, implying that the
trial itself was a miscarriage of justice.
Sari
Bashi, the Israel-Palestine director of Human
Rights Watch, said that her organisation’s
research showed that too often, soldiers adopted
a shoot-to-kill policy towards Palestinians,
including when their lives were not in danger or
when less force could be used.
“It is
important that Israel’s political and security
leaders repudiate the shoot-to-kill rhetoric,”
she told Al Jazeera.
Secret offer to family
Delivering the verdict last month, the court
dismissed Azaria’s claim that he acted in
self-defence. They concluded that he sought
revenge on Sharif for a knife attack on a
checkpoint in the occupied Palestinian city a
short time before.
The
three judges, who received a flood of death
threats afterwards, had to be issued with
bodyguards. But while sentencing was expected a
few days later, the panel seemed in no hurry to
conclude the case.
It
emerged that the extra time had been exploited
by the army to try to reach a settlement with
Azaria behind the scenes.
Azaria’s battalion commander, Guy Hazot,
secretly approached his father, Charlie Azaria,
to offer lenient treatment if his son expressed
regret for his actions and promised not to
appeal the conviction. Charlie Azaria recorded
the conversation.
According to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, the
move by Hazot was designed “to end the public
relations headaches and social divisions the
case has created in the army and throughout the
country”.
Hazot’s
actions raised serious questions about the
military courts’ independence, said Nadeem
Shehadeh, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal rights
group in Israel. “I have never heard of a case
where army commanders went over the court’s head
to offer a sentencing deal,” he told Al Jazeera.
“It is highly irregular.”
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Appeal or pardon?
Azaria
now has various options to avert or minimise
prison time. He could request the head of the
army’s central command reduce his sentence. But
more likely, he will launch an appeal. His
lawyers have said they will argue that the
guilty verdict was influenced by statements last
year from former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon
and army commanders that there was clear
evidence Azaria shot Sharif.
If that
fails, Azaria can ask for a pardon from the army
chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot. And if he
refuses, Azaria’s final option is to submit a
request for a presidential pardon.
According to polls, some 70 percent of Israeli
Jews support a full and immediate pardon.
There
will be nothing exceptional if Azaria is
reprieved. He will simply be the latest in a
long line of security officials who demonstrably
killed Palestinians, but were exonerated by a
system that treats such murders with impunity,
noted Zahalka.
In
perhaps the most notorious such case, known as
the Bus 300 affair, several security officials
were pardoned after they were convicted of
killing two Palestinians in 1984. The officers
smashed the pair’s skulls with rocks after they
had been arrested for hijacking a bus.
Following their pardons, one, Ehud Yatom, went
on to serve in the Israeli parliament. In 2001,
the then-prime minister, Ariel Sharon, appointed
him as his anti-terror adviser, until the courts
overruled the decision.
Rare prosecution
More
often, however, soldiers face no trials at all,
even where there is overwhelming evidence that
they committed crimes, said Shehadeh. “We see
lots of cases like Azaria’s, where soldiers
injure or kill Palestinians at checkpoints, but
usually nothing happens. In Azaria’s case, it
was filmed and there was no choice but to
prosecute him.”
In
fact, Azaria is the first soldier to be tried
for manslaughter since 2004, when Taysir Hayb, a
Bedouin sniper, killed British solidarity
activist Tom Hurndall in Gaza. Hayb was
sentenced to eight years and served six and a
half.
Usually, when the army is forced to prosecute,
human rights groups have noted, the proceedings
are dragged out and plea deals arranged to spare
soldiers trials for more serious crimes.
Last
month, Ben Dery, a border police commander, had
his original charge of manslaughter reduced to
negligent use of a firearm in a deal with
prosecutors. Dery was filmed shooting dead
17-year-old Nadim Nuwara during a protest at a
West Bank checkpoint in May 2014, even though
the youth posed no danger. Three other
Palestinians were hit with live rounds, one of
whom also died from his wounds.
The
prosecution accepted Dery’s claim that he had
mistakenly loaded a live round into his rifle
when he intended to shoot a rubber bullet.
Nuwara’s family called the deal a “trick” and
“shame on the Israeli justice system”.
Zahalka
said: “There will never be real justice for
Palestinians from the Israeli courts. The proper
address is the International Criminal Court,
where Israelis must be put on trial for war
crimes.”
Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist
and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize
for Journalism.
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
