The shot that continues to be heard round the world

At a time when news of suspected corruption all over the political spectrum is being broken at a staggering rate, when a new senior official from the police or the army is accused of sexual misconduct once a month on average and stabbing attacks are carried out by Palestinian assailants on a near-daily basis, it is rare for any single story to remain on the mind of the Israeli public for more than a few days in a row.

And yet, the contentious case of a 19-year-old Israeli soldier caught on camera firing a bullet into the head of an incapacitated Palestinian assailant who had been shot and disarmed after stabbing another serviceman in Hebron continues to dominate the headlines in Israel’s main Hebrew-language newspapers, almost a week and a half after the incident. The prolonged preoccupation with the still-unnamed soldier hints at the set of completely different emotions the shooting evokes in the opposing sides of the Israeli political divide, with some viewing the soldier as a hero for his actions and others seeing the case as a horrifying reminder of the moral price exacted by the IDF’s extended presence in the West Bank and among the Palestinian population.

On Israel Hayom‘s front page, the daily reports dryly that the military prosecution and the soldier’s defense attorneys are becoming more “entrenched in their positions” following the publication of the Palestinian stabber’s autopsy results, which determined that he was severely injured but still alive before the bullet pierced his skull. The paper’s technical coverage of the shooting, however, ends when it comes to its analysts and contributors, who while attempting to maintain neutrality with regard to the case nevertheless end up taking sides in the debate and attacking their political rivals.

“At the end of the day, the fate of those standing trial will be decided in court, not on the streets,” Israel Hayom writer Haim Shine says at the start of his op-ed on the matter. But despite his apparent commitment to the Israeli justice system, the right-leaning Shine does not shy away from sympathizing with the soldier, determining that the suspect is “a son to all of us” and asserting that the public “must offer him support.” Furthermore, Shine levels a blanket accusation at the Israeli left for “taking a moralistic stance to the point of frenzy” about the shooting, and for supplying human rights organizations with an incentive to continue “tarnishing the state’s reputation abroad.”

The March 24 incident sparked a national controversy, with some politicians and others accusing the army of selling the soldier down the river by arresting him and putting him under investigation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and top army officials have all defended the investigation.

Yedioth Ahronoth connects between yesterday’s foiled stabbing attempt in the central Israeli city of Rosh Ha’ayin and the Hebron shooting, noting that right-wing Israelis pointed to a security guard’s unwillingness to open fire at the would-be stabber in the former case as evidence he feared facing criminal charges like the soldier in the latter case.

“Could it be that the security guard was afraid to open fire and be accused of murder?” firebrand Jewish Home lawmaker Betzalel Smotrich said following the thwarted attack, according to Yedioth, while Likud’s Navah Boker decisively said that a “terrorist should know that if he attempts to murder Jews, his end will be death.” The guard, it should be clarified at this point, reached the scene only after the woman, a 23-year-old from the Arab Israeli city of Kafr Qasim, had already been subdued by an Israeli truck driver. The guard was able to snatch the knife out of the Palestinian’s hand while she lay on the ground, the truck driver’s foot on her hands, and numerous other passersby holding her down.

After publishing a series of weekend articles on suspected cases of extrajudicial killings in the IDF since the founding of the Jewish state, Haaretz seems to have lost interest in the implications of the Hebron shooting, as it returns to focus on Israel’s policies in the West Bank. “The High Court is drawing red lines for the government on the issue of terrorist home demolitions,” the paper writes in reference to a decision not to seal up the homes of Palestinians who had hurled rocks at the direction of an Israeli vehicle, leading driver Alexander Levlovitz to lose control of his car, and lose his life in the ensuing crash. The court ruling, reporter Sharon Pulver writes, came after the judges decided that only one of the rock throwers had effectively caused the crash, while the part of the remaining offenders in the killing of Levlovitz “was smaller by far.”