ONE of the most contentious cases in Israel’s military history reached its verdict on January 4th when three military judges found a serving soldier, Sergeant Elor Azaria, guilty of manslaughter for killing a Palestinian.
The public controversy was not over the facts. Both the prosecution and defence agreed that on March 24th 2016, in the West Bank city of Hebron, Mr Azaria had shot point-blank at Abdel-Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian man lying grievously wounded after he had been shot while trying to stab Israeli soldiers.
Nor was it over the court’s dismissal of Mr Azaria’s claim to have been acting in self-defence; the judges reached a unanimous decision that he had acted “calmly, without urgency and in a calculated manner” and that, as he said on the scene to a comrade, that he thought Mr al-Sharif “deserve[d] to die”.
Instead the controversy relates to the fact that a large section of the Israeli public seems to believe that Mr Azaria was right to have shot a wounded prisoner who no longer posed a danger. A poll last August by the Israeli Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University indicated that 65% of...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2iSAo6T
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