Israeli 'Heroes' Execute Arabs With Impunity - Opinion - Haaretz.com
The video clip is horrific. A group of young men are caring for a wounded man who is lying on the road, with cries of people living nearby heard in the background. A man wearing a white shirt is seen running toward the injured man. An ambulance sounds a siren. And then, suddenly, the horror. A gunshot is heard and a bullet hits the man in the white shirt, who is shot from behind. He falls on his face.
Amid Bani Shamsa,
a 33-year-old electrician with three children, is in hospital in
critical condition. On Tuesday he was transferred from the Rafidiya
Hospital in Nablus to the Istishari Hospital in Ramallah, but his
condition remains critical. A photo of him laughing with his infant son
is no less sad than that of Batsheva Nigri, also a mother of three, who
was killed at almost exactly the same time near the West Bank settlement of Beit Hagai. Israel of course mourned only Nigri. It barely heard about Bani Shamsa.
Bani Shamsa was the victim of an attempted execution There is no other way of describing the circumstances of this criminal and repugnant shooting. An unarmed man is going to assist a wounded man lying on the road, and a sharpshooter aims at his head and shoots him from a distance. This is the time to lament the fact that there is (still) no death penalty in Israel. If there were, perhaps Bani Shamsa would at least have been executed after some legal proceeding.
In the meantime, one can carry out executions without a trial, for no reason, just for the hell of it. Perhaps in order to satisfy the lust for shooting or the wish for revenge among soldiers and Border Policemen. Maybe they wanted to say how they killed a terrorist when they got home. Perhaps it was because they knew that no harm would befall them if they shot a Palestinian in the head.
Shooting someone trying to give first aid to a wounded person is a war crime of the highest degree. I hope that as a result of the judicial overhaul, Border Policemen like the one who shot the electrician from Beita in the head will from now on be vulnerable to prosecution by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Only there is there a chance that they will pay for their crimes. Here, they will be considered heroes.
Their victim threatened no one, he was unarmed, and one may assume that he did not take part in the legitimate resistance of Palestinian residents to the invasion of their village Beita by Border Police. Beita has been fighting for many months against the robbery of their land by the insolent and evil outpost of Evyatar.
Palestinians and an Israeli soldier at the Anin checkpoint, last week.Credit: Nidal Eshtaya
Bani Shamsa is not the first victim in this village nor is he the last one. He is also not the first or last victim of an execution in recent weeks.
This week I was in Jericho in order to record the circumstances of the death of a 16-year-old youth, who was on his scooter in the adjacent refugee camp of Aqbat Jaber. He too was shot to death by Border Policeman, from a distance, not in the head but in the chest, a small tactical change. This too was an execution.
Last week we related the insane shooting at a car that was driving innocently by, for no reason. One student was killed and his friend was wounded. A month earlier, another crazy shooting at a moving car. This time, the shooting left two young people disabled. What about the soldier in Nabi Saleh, who fired from a distance, hitting two-and-a-half-year-old Mohammed Tamimi in the head and killing him in June? Was this not an execution? When you fire a volley at a parked car, in which a baby has just been placed, you execute him.
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In the prevailing reality, such executions will only increase. The media almost never reports them. No one would be flustered even if they were duly reported. The protest movement is looking the other way – street executions are not related, in its view, to democracy.
When everything is enveloped in the framework of a war on terrorism, with only Palestinians deemed terrorists, with the army and police carrying out executions without being designated as the killing agencies of a terrorist state; when attacks are defined as terror attacks only when Palestinians kill Jews – it’s no wonder that the story of the attempted execution of an electrician from Beita was published almost exclusively in Haaretz. After all, who is interested in someone being shot in the head, just like that, as if it were nothing?