Haaretz reports on the value that the Israeli justice system places on the life of one of its Arab citizens:
A Tel Aviv Court on Sunday sentenced a border patrolman who shot and paralyzed a Kafr Qasem resident to six months of community service and a year of probation.
In 2003, Haim Castro shot Salah Amar from a distance of a half a meter, claiming that his life was in danger and he acted in self defense. The court dismissed this claim and ruled there was no threat to Castro’s life.
Since the shooting, Amar has been listed as 100% disabled.
Although 20 Israeli citizens have been killed by Israeli security forces since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, Castro is the first person to be convicted for shooting an Israeli citizen.
What type of community service do you think Castro will get? I think he should be forced to wash Salah Amar’s bed pans for a year.
What makes this crime and sentence even more heinous is that this is the same Kfar Qassem in which Israeli soldiers shot and killed scores of residents during the 1948 War when their commander ordered them to kill anyone violating curfew (which the residents had no idea existed). Just last week, Shimon Peres apologized for the massacre.
There are a few right-wing commenters here who enjoy defending the Border Police. This one’s gonna be tough for them but I’m sure they’ll give it a shot, so to speak.
I assume you mean me. Well, I’m not going to argue with the judge. He knows better than me, I’ll just point out a few details that you left out and that even Haarets left out which I found in the Hebrew language press and I’ll point out a factual error you made.
-Castro was the driver of a border patrol jeep. Today he is working for cable television. The time was the beginning of the second intifada and there was a disturbance of sorts between the policemen and a crowd of people. Salah Amar’s son was arrested and was on a jeep and Amar was trying to get him off the jeep to “rescue” him. By his own admission Castro was “scared to death” because he had bever been in such a situation. He claimed Amar held a 50 cm rock so he he fired at the ground. Amar was injured in the thigh. 100% disabled is a categorization used for the purpose of work compensation and does not mean the man is a quadripleg. We can’t know from the artice the extent of his injury but we do know that he cannot be expected to earn a livelihood due to his injury so it is probably severe.
The judge wrote that (my translation) “the accused is not a man of criminaL behavior problems, he does not have violent or aggressive urges, he did not act out of hatred. He is a 21 year old young man who was assigned to be a border patrol policeman, to make decisions requiring not a little life experience and judgement though he erred in assessing correctly the situation and showed poor judgement.”
It is unlikely that the Presiding Judge Khaled Kabub went easy on the border policeman because he does not value Arab life as is suggested from this post. Actually, from reading exerpts from his sentence you get the feeling he feels he is going hard
In fact Kabub justifies punishing Castro because he has determined (from the comfort of his judges chambers) that Castro was not in a life threatening situation and that he did not followe the rules of engagement.
It is my personal opinion that if a judge has determined that there was no criminal intent on the part of the policeman but rather that he erred due to a lack of judgement or a lack of experience, he should not convict the defendant. Rather the process of training and selection of policemen should be investigated to determine if it is adequate, especially since in many cases (I don’t know if this one of them) we’re talking about men and women that are drafted to the service.
Of course this is completely irrelevant. And the massacre at kfar Kassem was not in 1948 but was in 1956.
http://www.nfc.co.il/Archive/001-D-150127-00.html?tag=23-32-58
this is the address where I took the above quote from.
The judge gave the punishment that the prosecution asked for, though he said that in his opinion he deserves a harsher sentence. Is a judge not allowed to give a harsher sentence that the one the prosecution asks?
Amir,
IF that’s all you gleaned from the Hebrew press, then the coverage must have been very spotty. A few items stand out. First, you are incorrect in saying that the incident occurred at the beginning of the Intifada. It happened in mid- September 2003. Second, you quote the driver as saying that the victim held a rock, but don’t mention anyone else’s testimony about the alleged rock. Why is that? Is his testimony corroborated or disputed? I would suspect disputed, and probably disputed by his fellow border policemen, since the Justice Ministry chose to prosecute. If the victim was allegedly pulling his son from the jeep at the time he was shot, how could he be simultaneously threatening the driver with a rock?
Did the Hebrew language press you scanned mention that according to eyewitnesses the border police were beating Amer’s son in the jeep and when Amer tried to intervene to stop the beating, he was pushed to the ground and then shot on the ground? Did you know that the Hebrew language press stated at the time of the incident that, according to the police, Amer’s son and nephew were arrested on suspicion of allowing an illegal resident to stay in the family garage?
Here’s two earlier articles about the incident, originally taken from the Hebrew language press,which did mention these facts:
http://www.aad-online.org/2004/Englishsite/Englinks/aad4/Forth/7.htm
http://www.aad-online.org/2005/english/1-Jan/22-27/26-1/2.htm
And here’s a report on the incident from the Arab Association for Human Rights, with testimonies from eyewitness and pictures.
http://www.arabhra.org/Hra/SecondaryArticles/SecondaryArticlePage.aspx?SecondaryArticle=1363&Language=2
BTW, My apologies to Amir for confusing him with Bar-Kochba in an earlier post.
Apology accepted.
Thanks for those links. When I try to post links they get swallowed in the spam filter. I’m not sure websites for advocacy groups qualifies as “Hebrew language press” but they have some interesting testimonies there. There are some contradictions between those websites concernng the chain of events, from a cursory looking.
I’m not going to dispute the details of the incident since the judge already had his say. The judge determined that the soldiers were not in a life threatening situation and the use of lethal force was not justified.
For anyone who is familiar with reading judicial rulings or the ways of courtrooms I would certainly expect a judge who was about to give a slap on the wrist to a defendant who shot and seriously wounded a victim to “go hard” on the perpetrator in his ruling. At least the judge could say that his rhetoric was strong even if his decision was weak. This way the judge has the best of both worlds. He can say to Israeli Arabs he spoke tough words & he can say to Israeli Jews that he looked favorably on the perpetrator’s lack of prior record. Not to mention that Israeli justice rarely (perhaps never?) treats crimes against Arabs committed by Jews as severely as crimes against Jews committed by Arabs.
assume you saw you made this list of the self-hating
at yidwithlid.blogspot.com/
I’m not sure websites for advocacy groups qualifies as “Hebrew language press” but they have some interesting testimonies there.
Amir, my point was that both of the links I cited source the articles from the Hebrew press, here: http://www.aad-online.org/2004/ArabicSite/Arabiclinks/aad4/4/dap37.htm
and here: http://www.aad-online.org/2005/Hebrew/1-Jan/22-27/26-1/a2.htm
Jesse: Why would you or anyone assume I followed a hate site like Yid With Lid?? And why would you think I’d care what that hateful person approximating a Jew calls me? In fact, I’m rather honored to be on any list of people he thinks are his enemies. But it’s he who is inimical to the interests of Israel and the Jewish people. You can tell him I said so.
Maybe I should do a post about the 10 Jews I couldn’t give a crap about. But he might not even make that list my interest in him is so meager.