Month: November 2014

From Electronic Intifada

Note: This video shows disturbing footage of Israeli police shooting and killing a Palestinian youth.

At least thirty Palestinian citizens of Israel were arrested in the Galilee village of Kufr Kana on Sunday as protests spread over the cold-blooded police killing of a youth on Friday.

The video above shows Israeli police shooting 22-year-old Kheir Hamdan in Kufr Kana in circumstances that totally contradict their initial account.

“It is clear from the video footage that the shooting of Hamdan was a murder, as Hamdan did not pose an immediate threat to the lives of the police officers when they shot him,” the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel said in a statement.

“Hamdan approached the officers’ van and banged on the windows with an object. The officers then opened the door of the van, got out and shot him from close range as he tried to run away from the scene, without giving any prior warning such as firing a shot into the air,” Adalah added.

“After the murder occurred, the police rushed to publish a false statement about the details of the incident, but later it became clear that cameras had documented the incident, showing that the police narrative was false and fabricated,” Adalah said.

Israeli police had previously told media that Hamdan was shot “when he tried to stab an officer during an attempt to arrest him for allegedly throwing a stun grenade in the town.”

“The officers’ actions clearly violate the open fire regulations of the police,” Adalah added. “The video also raises suspicion that the police shot Hamdan again after he was injured and had fallen to the ground.”

The group notes that “the police dragged Hamdan’s body in a humiliating manner while he was bleeding and threw him into the police van, as if they were carrying a meaningless object, instead of calling on rescue teams to save him.”

Adalah called for the officers involved in the shooting to be suspended immediately and for a criminal investigation to be opened under the supervision of Israel’s attorney general.

Adalah expressed pessimism that the existing system could result in accountability. “The experience of Arab citizens proves that the Israeli Police Investigation Unit (Mahash) will not seriously investigate an incident of an Arab citizen’s murder at the hands of the police, and will not take those responsible for the murder to trial,” attorney Hussein Abu Hussein said in the statement.

Result of incitement

Adalah noted that the shooting came after direct incitement to violence against Arab citizens of Israel by a senior minister:

Adalah sees a direct connection between the murder of Kheir Hamdan and the statements made earlier this week by Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich. The Minister stated that anyone who attacks Israeli Jewish citizens should be killed immediately. In any democratic society that respects the life of its citizens, any government minister that makes statements such as those by Yitzhak Aharonovich should be immediately dismissed.

Impunity

There are more than 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who unlike Palestinians living under Israeli siege and occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are supposedly afforded civil rights and protections.

However, Palestinian citizens of Israel live under dozens of laws and de facto practices that leave them at best with second-class citizenship.

The Israeli state recognized this in the Or Commission report produced after the October 2000 police killings of thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel. But as Patrick O. Strickland reported last month, Israeli police brutality against Palestinian citizens remains unchecked fourteen years after that massacre.

Kheir Hamdan’s killing is only the latest by Israeli forces to be caught on video. In May, CNN and security camera video showed the cold-blooded killings by Israeli snipers of two teens, Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia.

In December 2012, a camera caught the killing of seventeen-year-old Muhammad al-Salaymeh in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In that case, as in the killing of Hamdan, the video directly contradicted Israeli claims that the youth posed an immediate threat to the person who shot him.

Protests and repression

This video shows hundreds of people marching in Hamdan’s funeral in Kufr Kana as many more line the streets…. Read more & see additional videos

In a JTA article this week, Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan talk about the significance of their Jewish upbringing, of having 3 Jewish Justices on the US Supreme Court, and of Judge Kagan’s debt to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin (who has since founded a particularly notorious West Bank settlement).

They fail to discuss the significance of having no Christian Protestant justices on the Supreme Court (the largest religious group in the US), no Muslim Supreme Court Justices (Muslim-Americans are about equal in number to Jewish-Americans), no Buddhist Supreme Court Justices, etc.

JTA reports, “Kagan also talked about her bat mitzvah, crediting Rabbi Shlomo Riskin – then of the Lincoln Square Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (and now rabbi in Efrat, West Bank) with enabling the ceremony…” He was, she says, “very gracious, and I think it was good for the synagogue.”

Neither JTA nor Kagan mention that Efrat is an illegal Israeli colony on Palestinian land that is known, according to blogger Richard Silverstein, for being “an especially cruel settlement to surrounding Palestinian villages.”

Jewish Studies professor Charles Manekin writes that Rabbi Riskin “emigrated to Israel and founded the town of Efrat, a sprawling settlement built entirely on Palestinian private and public land that never ceases to expand into, and pollute, the surrounding region. Through this his life-project, Riskin has caused more tragedy and pain to more Palestinians than any other rabbi of modern times….”

Apparently none of this bothers Supreme Court Justice Kagan.

Kagan and Bryer were speaking at the 2014 General Assembly conference of the Jewish Federations of North America, a group that regularly advocates for Israel. Among the other conference speakers will be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I had originally thought that Justice Breyer was less connected to Israel than Kagan, who has said that the judge who inspired her most was an Israeli judge. Therefore, I was surprised to learn that Breyer serves on the board of advisors for an Israeli institution.

It is rare for sitting Supreme Court justices to serve on boards. Most resign board memberships upon being named to the Supreme Court or shortly thereafter, probably to preserve an appearance, at least, of nonpartisanship. However, Breyer is activity serving on the International Advisory Board of the Israel Democracy Institute.

While some might suggest that such foreign membership does not matter since the Supreme Court hears only American cases, in reality, there are currently at least two cases on the Supreme Court docket that involve Israel directly. (There may be others that affect it indirectly).

Perhaps Judge Breyer feels, as is so often the case with Israel partisans, that rules of ethics don’t apply in regard to Israel.