ISRAEL’S RIGHT WING SEEKS PARDON FOR SOLDIER
Officer found guilty of killing Palestinian man
• A young Israeli soldier was convicted Wednesday of manslaughter for killing a wounded Palestinian in a divisive military trial that immediately prompted calls from right-wing politicians for a pardon.
Sgt. Elor Azaria, 20, was found guilty in a courtroom inside the Israeli defence ministry in Tel Aviv as an angry crowd protested his innocence and scuffled with police outside.
Sgt. Azaria was arrested in March after video emerged of him shooting a wounded Palestinian man as he lay bleeding in the street in Hebron, a city in the West Bank.
The Palestinian, 21-yearold Abdul Fatah al-Sharif, had stabbed an Israeli soldier moments before and had been shot but not killed by other troops. The mobile phone footage showed Azaria cocking his rifle and firing once into the man’s head. The defence tried to claim that Azaria thought the wounded man might have a suicide vest on and acted to protect his comrades, but their argument was rejected by a panel of military judges.
Col. Maya Heller, the lead judge, said Azaria acted “calmly, without any urgency, in a calculated way” and was determined to kill the Palestinian in revenge for the stabbing attack. The trial was one of the most divisive cases in recent Israeli history and even before the judge finished giving her verdict, the country’s politicians started releasing statements.
Naftali Bennett, a cabinet minister and head of the farright Jewish Home party, led a number of ministers in calling for an immediate pardon for Azaria. “Today a soldier was convicted like a criminal for killing a terrorist who tried to slaughter soldiers,” he said.
Azaria has not yet been sentenced and faces a maximum of 20 years in prison. He can be pardoned by Israel’s president.
The soldier has become a wronged hero to the Israeli right, and hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the court with posters of him and placards bearing slogans such as: “Don’t leave any soldiers behind.”
Many of the protesters were from La Familia, a group of football fanatics with political ties, and at one point they burst through police lines to block traffic on one of Tel Aviv’s busiest streets.
Among the demonstrators was Baruch Marzel, a prominent settler from Hebron who lives just a few streets from where the shooting took place. “I’m here to say thank you to Elor Azaria because he killed a terrorist that endangered my family directly,” he said.
That view is widely shared in Israeli society and opinion polls taken after the shooting found that a majority believed he should not have been arrested, let alone convicted.