The entire system has always defended Jewish Israelis suspected of murdering Palestinians or Arab Israelis
Israeli settler Yinon Levi seems to have killed Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen for no reason. In this incident in the West Bank in July, Hathaleen was at a clear distance from Yinon and didn’t present any threat. Footage shows that Levi cocked his pistol when he was in no danger, whether real or imagined.
Hathaleen’s only sin was that he was a Palestinian facing the barrel of Levi’s gun, and fortunately for the people of the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair, Levi wasn’t carrying a rifle instead.
Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Chavi Toker, who released Levi from custody, apparently knows which side her bread is buttered on. That is, why should Her Honor make herself an exception and deny conventionally accepted views?
If everyone behaves a certain way, that’s probably the right way, because the case of Levi and Hathaleen isn’t at all exceptional. The following are a few examples, a very small selection, of the way equality before the law is practiced in Israel.
In March 2019, a soldier fired at two Palestinians from a pillbox near Bethlehem. Ala Raida took a bullet to the stomach and was left seriously disabled. The second victim, Ahmad Manasra, was shot in the back and died at the scene, where he had arrived when he tried to rescue Raida under fire. At the time, no cars that could be hit by stones passed through the intersection that the pillbox overlooks.
In a video taken from the camera on the pillbox, you can see that no one was standing where, according to the soldier, stones were thrown. In an investigation, the Military Police paid no attention to these facts. Twelve very senior officers in the reserves, including Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, today a leading center-left politician, recommended leniency, and the soldier received a ludicrous punishment.
On May 12, 2021, on 55 Herzl St. in Acre in the north, a Jewish man with sidelocks pulled out a gun and fired at the predominantly Arab Wolfson neighborhood. He didn’t hit anything, but while he was shooting a large group of police officers were standing next to him, including one who later received a citation for his performance at the scene.
This police officer believed that the shooting was an illegal act, and even reported it, but no one, including the officer himself, tried to find out who the shooter was. And on the security footage you can see that the police helped the assailant leave the scene.
We can assume that if the shooter had “an Arab appearance,” no Israeli police officer would have helped him flee. He would have been “neutralized” immediately, and the Shin Bet security service would have conducted a thorough investigation.
In June 2022, a settler from the outpost of Nofei Nehemia near the settlement of Ariel stabbed Ali Harb from the village of Iskaka to death. Then too, the suspect said he felt that he was in danger, as were his children. He was transferred to a Shin Bet investigator, but there it turned out that this wasn’t a premeditated ultranationalist incident, so the issue went to the Israel Police in the West Bank.
The way the affair was “investigated” is a cause for mourning, to say the least. Two weeks later the suspect was released to house arrest, and after about a month and a half, the State Prosecutor’s Office closed the case, citing “insufficient evidence.” The decision is being appealed.
And I still haven’t mentioned how the entire system mobilized to rescue the police officer who shot Yakub Abu al-Kiyan to death in Umm al-Hiran in 2017. And the man who presumably (presumably because nobody investigated) fired a sponge- or rubber-tipped bullet at MK Ayman Odeh received a police certificate of excellence this year. How does that jibe with his appearance on video firing a rubber-tipped bullet at a girl in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in May 2021?
Only the gods of the police know the answer. And it’s hard to find the words to describe what is called a “hearing” on this sad affair at the High Court of Justice.
This is only the nutshell of cases I’m familiar with; they take place here all the time. In fact, it has always been like this, but there used to be an appearance of proper procedure, an investigation. It was eventually decided that there’s no point pestering the system and going all the way to the High Court. It’s better to save time and resources at a lower court.
Another recent example is the issue of the suckers who were detained in Nes Tziona southeast of Tel Aviv for alleged involvement in the lynching of Odeh and his staff. Yes, the Academy of the Hebrew Language has ruled that a lynching doesn’t have to end in an execution; it’s also “violent punishment of a person without trial by an angry mob.”
The judge decided that the three would be released to avoid “selective enforcement” – that is, they didn’t detain everybody who rioted there. Judge Toker had someone to learn from.
Ariel Livneh is a doctor of criminology.