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.
