After Hebron shooting, a proxy battle takes shape

The Israeli pundit class had the whole weekend to chew over the events of last Thursday, in which a soldier apparently shot to death a wounded Palestinian assailant after he was already subdued, and the story still dominates the press landscape Sunday morning, though it metastasizes from a single shot fired on a Hebron street to a larger battle between the army brass, who had the soldier arrested, and his family and right-wing politicians, who have rushed to his defense.

All three major papers project their coverage through the lens of the proxy battle that has formed between the family/right-wing politicians and the army over the soldier being arrested, with positions staked along predictable ideological lines pitting the right wing against the army and its supposedly leftist morals.

Writing under a barely blurred picture of the “shooting soldier” in handcuffs, Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yossi Yehoshua takes a stab at getting up to speed on the facts of the case and comes to the conclusion that things do not look good for him, despite his defense that he thought the assailant had a bomb.

“In the film, it’s possible to see one of the officers standing about a meter from the attacker; as in he didn’t worry about a bomb. In a film released by Reuters, which is different from B’tselem’s, you can see well that for six minutes the soldier doesn’t take part in the incident. He gets there with the company head, doesn’t speak with his commander, aims his weapons and shoots,” he writes. “And even if the soldier thought there could have been a bomb, and it’s doubtful he did, the army has clear rules for situations like that. Call in a sapper, add a cordon, warn others. Why would he suddenly shoot and endanger his comrades? The bullet could have hit the bomb and set it off, injuring the officers and soldiers standing around.”

Yet despite Yehoshua’s and the army’s conclusion that the soldier was in the wrong, many still came to his defense over the weekend, lashing out at the IDF for arresting him and at the chief of staff for disavowing his actions.

“The soldier is certainly no hero, but he’s also not a killer,” Israel Hayom runs in massive letters on its front page. Lest one think the quote is the paper’s own opinion, the words are attributed to “the political system,” though the quote actually comes from one of the paper’s own columnists. So yeah, it’s Israel Hayom’s opinion and the paper is showing a Trumpian penchant for bald-faced lying.

The paper’s coverage is mostly focused on the stirring backing of the soldier by his family, who terms the fact that he’s been arrested a “lynching,” and other soldiers, and also tries to drum up some sympathy by reporting that members of the soldier’s family were threatened online.

“I beg you, stop for a second. I beg the chief of staff and the army spokesperson: he’s your soldier; he’s like your son. Why are you killing him without any due process, and passing judgment using summary justice,” the paper quotes the soldier’s sister asking, apparently unaware of the irony of what she’s asking, given the soldier’s defense that he shot the attacker because it was a battlefield situation, not to mention the hilarity of saying his arrest ahead of a possible trial is the same as killing him without allowing for a trial.

That lack of self-awareness extends to columnist Dror Edry, who dismisses the shooting of unarmed person in the head to “mistakes that happen,” in a piece riddled with more hairpin turns of twisted logic than a mountain road.

“We’re talking about terrorists who deserve death, but we don’t shoot a wounded person unless we need to, even if it’s a terrorist. The army protects its morals and its command structure. However, one can’t forget that we are in war, and from a subjective basis, removing a soldier from immediate danger bears the utmost importance. Soldiers make mistakes sometimes, especially in dangerous situations,” he writes “If it turns out he did what he did on his own, he should be punished severely. But as former chief of staff Uzi Dayan said, the clarification should be made with an army investigation without the testimony of witnesses that can be used in a trial. We certainly should not involve the military investigator, since we aren’t talking about theft, looting or sexual harassment, but with actions made on the battlefield. This is the only way we’ll be able to make conclusions to help us next time around.”

Israel Hayom doesn’t actually have any of the right-wing politicians coming to the soldier’s defense, but that’s filled in by Haaretz, which leads its story by reporting that gaggles of lawmakers spent the weekend backing the shooter.

“The soldier is not a killer. Have we gone mad? We are in a war, a war against heinous terror,” the paper quotes Education Minister Naftali Bennett saying.

The paper’s Amos Harel takes a step back and sees the case as a watershed for the army, not over the shooting, but over whether it will let the hubbub over the incident, the right and left squabbling on Facebook, play into its decision and determine future rules of engagement. Not surprisingly, he hopes the answer is no, at least in this case where giving in would be letting the right wing win.

“Rightist sites accused the army of weakness and defeatism, as if the supreme goal was more dead Palestinian youngsters, rather than thwarting terror and calming things down,” he writes. “The current campaign is linked to the latest attack on human rights organizations. Behind them is a common and clear goal – to set a new standard, under which anything a soldier does in the struggle against Palestinians is legitimate. Investigations and suspensions only get in the army’s way of conducting war. Hence, the rules of engagement must also be mitigated. This will rapidly lead to anarchy and the loss of the IDF’s moral spine, which has already been bent from years of fighting terror carried out from within an occupied civilian population.”