29 July 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
A
decision by Israel’s
Supreme Court to double a 15-month jail
term for a policeman who shot dead an unarmed
Palestinian driver suspected of stealing a car has
provoked denunciations from police commanders and
government officials.
Yitzhak
Aharonovitch, the internal security minister,
condemned the judges for “sending a terrible message
to police officers”.
On the
advice of police lawyers, the accused policeman,
Shahar Mizrahi, had appealed his conviction last year
in the expectation that the ruling would be overturned
by the Supreme Court.
Mr
Aharonovitch and Dudi Cohen, the police commissioner,
said they would immediately seek a presidential pardon
for Mizrahi. “I won’t merely support a pardon bid,
I’ll lead it,” Mr Aharonovitch said.
But
groups representing Israel’s large
Palestinian Arab minority said the
outrage at the doubling of the 15-month sentence for
Mizrahi reflected the reality that the police force
expected impunity when it used violence against
Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of
the population.
At
Mizrahi’s original trial last year, the
district court judge,
Menachem
Finkelstein,
ruled that the policeman had acted “recklessly” during
an operation to stop car thefts in the Jewish town of
Pardes Hanna in 2006.
Despite his life never being in danger, Mizrahi had
used the butt of his gun to smash the window of a car
in which Mahmoud Ghanaim, 24, was seated and shot him
in the head from close range. The court also noted
that Mizrahi had changed his testimony several times
during the investigations.
According to Mossawa, an advocacy group, 40
Palestinian citizens have been killed in
suspicious circumstances
by the security forces over the past decade. Mizrahi
is the first policeman to be convicted in such a
case.
As of
yesterday, an online petition calling on the Israeli
president,
Shimon Peres,
to pardon Mizrahi had attracted more than 5,000
signatures in a few days, and a
Facebook page supporting the policeman
had 1,300 fans.
Gideon Levy,
a columnist with the liberal
Haaretz newspaper, warned yesterday that
those “siding with Mizrahi are eager to have a police
force that kills -- but just Arabs, of course”.
Jafar
Farah, the director of Mossawa, said: “The atmosphere
of racism in Israel is being used to destroy the legal
system from the inside, using the justification that
Arabs are being killed.
“The
reality today is that the police can kill an Arab
citizen in any circumstances and know that there is
almost no chance they will pay a price. The safeguards
are being stripped away.”
Relations between Israel’s Palestinian minority and
the police have been marked by profound distrust since
late 2000, when police shot dead 13 protesters and
wounded hundreds more during largely non-violent
demonstrations in the Galilee at the start of the
second intifada.
A
subsequent state commission of inquiry found that the
police had a long-standing policy of treating the
country’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens “as an
enemy” and recommended that several officers be
prosecuted for their role in the 13 deaths.
After
a long delay, state prosecutors announced in 2008 that
no one would be charged.
In
several speeches since he took over as security
minister last year, Mr Aharonovitch has promised
measures to restore the minority’s faith in the
police, including recruiting more police officers from
the Palestinian population and fighting high rates of
crime in Arab communities.
According to a police report submitted to the
parliament earlier this year, only 382 of more than
21,000 police officers are Muslim -- or less than two
per cent.
At the
appeal hearing last week, the Supreme Court increased
Mizrahi’s jail sentence after ruling that Judge
Finkelstein had not given enough weight to the
victim’s life and the value of deterring similar
police behaviour in the future. Under police
regulations, Mizrahi was entitled only to shoot out
the car’s tyres or fire at Ghanaim’s legs.
Immediately after the ruling, Mr Aharonovitch reported
that he had called Mizrahi to tell him: “Your fight
has become all of our fight.”
He was
backed by several retired police commanders and a
Likud MP,
Danny Danon,
who said he would submit a bill barring the indictment
of police officers who open fire when they believe
they are in danger.
In a
sign of the mounting pressure from police groups on
the Supreme Court, it issued a rare “clarification”
statement of its judgment, pointing out that Ghanaim’s
car was travelling too slowly to have ever put Mizrahi
in any danger.
Mr
Farah added that Mossawa’s investigations had revealed
that, despite police claims, Ghanaim was the
documented owner of the car he was driving.
The
police, Mr Farah added, had supported Mizrahi
throughout the case and had continued paying his
police salary after his conviction.
The
court’s decision to increase Mizrahi’s sentence came
in the wake of strong suspicions that police officers
executed a Palestinian driver in
East Jerusalem last
month, shooting him twice in the head from close range
as he lay on the ground.
Moments earlier, Ziad Jilani, who was married with
three children, had fled on foot after driving into a
detail of police, injuring several officers, in the
Wadi Joz neighbourhood. Witnesses said a stone had
smashed his windscreen seconds before he swerved.
In one
of the few other recent prosecutions of a policeman
for killing a Palestinian citizen, Rubi Gai was
acquitted last year of the manslaughter of Nadim
Milham, who was shot in the back during a police
search of his home for weapons. Witnesses testified
that police had beaten Milham and that he was shot as
he fled.
A
survey published last month by Haifa University found
that only one in five Palestinian citizens expressed
faith in the police.
Mr
Aharonovitch upset the Palestinian minority last year
during an inspection of undercover narcotics agents in
Tel Aviv. He was caught on camera telling one
detective dressed as a drug addict he looked like “a
real Araboosh”, a derogatory Hebrew term for Arabs.
The
minister, who is a member of
Avigdor Lieberman’s
far-right party
Yisrael Beiteinu,
apologised but added that the comment was a “moment of
banter”.
Mahash,
the justice ministry’s police investigations unit, has
been harshly criticised for the small proportion of
complaints against the police it agrees
to investigate. It rarely prosecutes officers.
The
police have also refused to cooperate in imposing
official sanctions on wayward officers, with critics
saying that officers found to have acted negilgently
or violently towards Palestinian citizens are often
rewarded with promotion.
The
state commission of inquiry into the killing by police
of 13 Palestinian protesters in
October 2000
recommended that several officers be dismissed from
service or denied promotion. The recommendations were
disregarded.
In one
notorious case, the commission found that Benzi Sau, a
northern Border Police commander, had acted with
gross negligence in allowing snipers to
shoot at stone-throwing demonstrators. Despite
suggesting a ban on his promotion for four years, he
rapidly rose through the ranks, becoming head of the
Border Police in
Jerusalem in
2001 and national head of the Border Police in 2004.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are
“Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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