The Israeli military court ruling which found Sgt. Elor Azaria guilty of manslaughter in the killing of Abed al-Fattah al-Sharif has revealed long-simmering fissures in Israeli society that, according to experts, point to a growing anti-democratic trend in the country and reinforce the lack of accountability for Palestinians within the Israeli justice system.
Sgt Azaria is convicted of manslaughter in Hebron killing of March 24, 2016. Human rights organization B’Tselem says Palestinians are killed all the time by Israeli security forces and there is no accountability. New York Times and Washington Post leave this angle out.
Netanyahu’s most impressive achievement is that he has associated his politics and even himself personally with sacred Jewish history and its hallowed lessons. That is why Jimmy Carter and now John Kerry must be vilified for pointing out the apartheid treatment of Palestinians. Netanyahu’s sacred construction is about to crash to the ground. Jeffrey Goldberg has already jumped ship.
The real struggle in Israeli leadership is not Netanyahu cowering before settlers, but who can control a sacred ethnocentric discourse of Jewish persecution and innocence in the face of alleged Palestinian Jew-hatred. Jeffrey Goldberg has propagated that discourse in the U.S. The inevitable conviction of army medic Elor Azaria on manslaughter charges next month represents a crisis for that discourse at last.
Why do media bystanders shut their mouths when they see critics of Israel smeared as “diseased” anti-Semites. Because of hasbara culture, a Jewish-Zionist ethnocentric way of looking at the world that is both aggressive and highly politicized.
Warnings of a civil war among Jews in Israel reflect the divide over the manslaughter trial of Elor Azaria, with Israeli generals determined to prosecute the medic. The generals want Benjamin Netanyahu gone; and a comment by Jeffrey Goldberg indicates that the Prime Minister may have lost an important American ally.
A video of the March 24 killings of two Palestinians in Hebron after an alleged attack on an Israeli soldier shows a soldier kicking a knife in the street closer to the incapacitated form of one of the alleged assailants, Abd asl Fatah al-Sharif. The group Human Rights Defenders released the video.
During his trial for murdering a Palestinian in Hebron, Elor Azaria’s defense team has cast doubts on the video shot by Imad Abu Shamsiyah showing the execution. The opinion of an expert from the DIFS (Division of Identification and Forensic Science) says that B’Tselem’s videos are authentic.
The notorious execution of Abd al-Fatah a-Sharif in a Hebron street on March 24 by Israeli medic Elor Azaria was preceded by the execution of a second Palestinian man, Ramzi al-Qasrawi, also accused of attacking an Israeli soldier, according to an explosive new report from B’Tselem.
The lawyers representing the IDF medic who is charged in the killing of a wounded Palestinian in Hebron in March called yesterday for the return to Israel of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif’s body, which was released on Friday and buried by his family in Hebron on Saturday