A police counsel told the court on Wednesday, "The grounds for the very high level of risk that he posed in view of the offense and the daring to rush a crowd of teenagers. ... We dropped the charge of murder after examining the material in the case. This does not mean that the suspicion did not strengthen."
Culture Minister Miki Zohar, a distinguished jurist and moral theorist, was even faster and more decisive: Shortly after the incident, he called the act "murder," rendering the murderer's trial unnecessary. It only remains to wait for the Knesset to approve the death penalty for terrorists, and the terrorist from Bus 64 to Ramot will be executed – in Shabbat Square, the Knesset Rose Garden or the Yad Vashem yard. We're closer to that than may seem.
The Arab driver was a suspect from the start, unless proven otherwise. He was already a suspect when he went to work in the morning to support his family, just like all Arabs, unless proven otherwise. He was sentenced the moment it was learned that he was an Arab. Were he not an Arab, the police would never have imagined of initially charging him with aggravated murder, especially in such record haste.
When a settler maliciously kills a Palestinian farmer, in front of the cameras, months pass before law enforcement decide whether to prosecute him at all, usually not, and he and his murderous rifle are meanwhile free. It is no longer possible to hide and look for excuses.
This is exactly how the apartheid police act. There is no more conclusive proof for the existence of Israeli apartheid than the existence of two legal systems: one for Jews (the civil legal system) and one for Palestinians (the military legal system); one law for Jews and another law for Arabs.
Let someone stand up who believes that charging the driver with murder and then executing him wasn't because he was an Arab. Let someone stand up who believes that were he a Jew, he would be indicted at the same speed and severity.
The aggravated circumstances are as follows: The driver woke up in the morning to go to his dangerous and humiliating daily job, because he must earn a living for his family. He has never been arrested or been in trouble with the law. He knew that he was headed for another day of humiliation, being spit at, barrages of stones and maybe also blows on his bus route, which mostly serves the ultra-Orthodox community, the new flagbearers of racism.
But what choice did he have?
No one knows what he was thinking at the moment of terror on the bus, but it's clear that he was scared to death. It's a fact that he called the police emergency number for help, which obviously never arrived. The police were busy trapping anti-government protesters carrying suspicious signs and shackling unlicensed scooter riders.
It's also doubtful whether the driver saw that he had hit someone. He continued driving as if nothing had happened with the teenager hanging from the front of the bus. Videos from the scene show the young men throwing stones at the bus before the accident, shouting Arab, Arab. If the driver were a settler whose car was being stoned in the West Bank, he would have pulled out his rifle and shot to death the Palestinian boy who was throwing a stone, and returned home a hero. He would never be indicted, of course. But the driver was an Arab.
The bus sped toward the crowd, apparently in fear of it. What happened next is proof of what has long been known: Israel is rushing to apartheid.