Gideon Levy :I Thought Israeli Soldiers Weren’t Supposed to Shoot Palestinian Girls Anymore
But the executions – there’s no other way to describe them – of girls and boys, women and men, keep coming.
haaretz.com
To Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Chief of the General Staff,
This is to ask that you watch the video documenting how Israeli soldiers shot Jamila Jabbar on Tuesday at a bus stop near Ariel. Look how she’s approaching the two soldiers slowly, the knife held over her head. She’s a girl of 17, sir.
The
soldiers back away from her. They are armed with rifles and are well
protected; she’s a slender girl with a kitchen knife, taking hesitant
steps. And in the blink of an eye one of the soldiers shoots her in the
stomach. She collapses onto the sidewalk.
Is
this how soldiers are supposed to act, sir? Are you proud of their
behavior? Is the Israel Defense Forces proud of them? Are these soldiers
really “professional and ethical” as you described Israeli soldiers in
your speech to high schoolers in Bat Yam in February? At the time you
said, “I don’t want a soldier to empty a magazine on a girl,” even if
she was doing something very serious.
So
I’d like to know: Do you really think in this case the teenager
threatened the soldiers’ lives? Was shooting her in the stomach the only
way to eliminate the threat? Is it possible that two Israeli soldiers
can’t subdue such a girl without shooting her? Don’t they know any other
way to handle the threat of a girl younger than they, when they are two
and she only one?
What
do you think they’ll take away from their military service, from this
incident? Either that Palestinian lives are cheap, so there’s no problem
with shooting them, as you’ve trained them to think, or that they’ll
think it’s permitted to shoot any person with such ease.
Maybe
they’ll grow up one day, think about what they did, regret it, feel
guilty about what they did to a teenage girl when they were standing at
the Ariel junction to protect settlers, and be left emotionally scarred.
There have been such cases, albeit too few.
In
Bat Yam you also said, “If we were to perform immorally, it would pose a
threat to the IDF.” Let’s leave aside the question of whether moral
behavior is merely a cost-benefit issue for the army. Do you think this
was moral behavior? Is the IDF supposed to make the death wish of every
suicidal Palestinian girl come true?
Did
you think the soldiers who shot and killed Arif Jaradat, a young man
with Down syndrome, acted morally? What about those who shot H., a
schizophrenic young man who was riding his bike in Awarta? What about
the border policemen who last Friday shot Sara al-Hajuj at the Tomb of
the Patriarchs, a killing that B’Tselem described as an “execution”? And
15-year-old Mahmoud Rafat Badran, whom your soldiers killed “by
mistake” after they sprayed a car with bullets for no reason?
Are
you satisfied with an army that acts this way? If so, your remarks
about ethics and shooting girls carrying scissors were empty words, and
the applause for your courage was misplaced. We’ve only met once, sir, a
while ago, but I believe that you meant what you said. Still, the only
proof lies in your actions.
You
head a hierarchical organization where an order is an order. It would
be pretty easy to prevent all these incidents. It’s not enough to take the single case of Elor Azaria,
the soldier who shot a subdued Palestinian, hold a show trial, and wave
it around to demonstrate how moral the IDF is, while the brigade
commander who shot and killed a fleeing youngster keeps his job.
If
you really believe what you said, give the order and behold: These
executions – and there’s no other way to describe them – will stop. Not
only will the IDF’s image benefit, so will Israel’s security. It’s in
your hands, sir.
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