Friday Thoughts (1)
False Dichotomies is proud to present a new feature – Friday Thoughts. This is off-the-cuff reflections on the week gone by. As such, I won’t be doing so much fact-checking or linking, so please forgive the inevitable errors.
Julian Soufir, a French immigrant, did Shlav Bet the mahzor before me. Then he cut the throat of an Arab taxi driver in Tel Aviv. This week a Tel Aviv District Court ruled that he was unfit to stand trial, as he had been insane at the time of the murder. Instead, he will be locked away in a psychiatric institution.I’m no expert on legal definitions of insanity, but I do know one thing. If an Arab had done this to a Jewish taxi driver, he would have been jailed for life. The breakdown of basic legal fairness was one of the early predictions of those who saw what the occupation would reap. This is yet another example of how right they were.
Earlier this week, another Arab died in Israel, perhaps in even more tragic circumstances. He was hiking in the north and stumbled into a mine-field. He injured his leg but – along with his friends – managed to alert the rescue services. The rescue helicopter managed to get him into the winch, but then – like something out of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love - he tragically fell from 20 metres in the air. He was killed instantly.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that there was any foul-play in this tragedy. But somehow it seems to be symbolic of the primary result of the Arab encounter with Zionism. Because the primary result had always been dead Arabs, whether they’re bombed by the IAF in Gaza, stabbed by a French Oleh in Tel Aviv, or accidentally dropped from a helicopter near Beit Shean.
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Sorry will he be locked away in an institution for life – or is there a specific time period? Will the family of the taxi driver be eligible for some sort of compensation, would they be able to sue Mr. Soufir in civil court? I apologize in advance for my ignorance of Israeli law.
A really good post, with so much to ponder with so few words!
Regarding the first story, it may be important to stress, if I understood you correctly, that it is not about questioning Soufir’s verdict, but rather questioning the way the Israel justice system treats the Arabs.
I am reading a letter to the NY REview of Books by Chomsky from 1984 (!) and it is amazing because how relevant a lot of what was being said more than 24 years ago is now. This excerpt caught my eye as very apropos to this post:
there is a regular pattern of imposed segregation, denial of right of free expression, extraordinary punishments (e.g., an inhabitant of Kafr Kassem was sentenced to a year in prison “for pretending to be a Jew in order to marry a [Jewish] woman” after being refused permission to convert, the same sentence that was meted out to an IDF officer who murdered 43 Arabs in Kafr Kassem in one hour in another 1956 massacre), and much else—as we would expect in a State that is not the State of its citizens, by law. All of this too has been suppressed for many years in the US.
Read it all, by all means…
This all boils down to ‘institutional racism’ – which is alive and well to this day even here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It is a fundamental and very sad problem in Israel, but as grania points out, it’s hardly an Israel-only problem. If you are a black man in the US, you will go to jail for longer for the same crimes a white man commits (if he goes to jail at all). If you are a man, you will serve a longer sentence than a woman serves. The truth is that the law is not equal anywhere really. None of this for a second condones the two-tier law (at least) that exists in Israel. (I would also add the Haredi community is, in a sense almost free from the laws of Israel, they almost always deal with matters on their own). Along with 60+ years of war inevitably comes dehumanization (this started well 1967) and there is a sense from all parties of the “us” versus “them” mentality which is the cause of these inequalities. Until some sort of change in the political landscape, I don’t see much changing.
I should point out that it seems the guys in the mine-field were looking to steal a mine; generally stumbling into a mine-field in Israel isn’t something done accidentally.
how do you steal a mine?
interesting Alex, maybe we should start a business … must be worth millions if you’re good at it and live in the North.
Perhaps if some of the Israeli top brass stand trial for war crimes they can invoke insanity too? Now there’s a plea I might have to seriously consider, actually…
Thanks for posting this.