Source: 972 Magazine
One lynching tells the story of Israel’s racial pyramid
The acquittal of the two Israelis in the lynching of an Eritrean asylum seeker reveals just how deeply white supremacism is entrenched in Israel’s political establishment.
“For reasons that remain unclear, there were those who suspected the deceased was the terrorist, and due to this suspicion, he was shot by the Central Bus Station’s security officer.”
These were the words written by Judge Aharon Mishnayot of the Be’er Sheva District Court on Monday in the acquittal of two of the four Israelis indicted in the lynching of Habtom Zarhum, an Eritrean asylum seeker, in October 2015. Zarhum happened to be in the Be’er Sheva Central Bus Station when Muhannad al-Okabi, from the Bedouin township of Hura, opened fire and killed an Israeli soldier. Believing he was the attacker, a security guard shot Zarhum, after which a group of Israeli men began beating him as he lay bleeding on the ground.
There are many things to be said about the vile ruling handed down by Mishnayot, who previously served as the head of the military courts in the occupied West Bank. Let’s begin with the feigned innocence of “for reasons that remain unclear.” The reasons for the killing are, in fact, very clear to all: Habtom Zarhum was suspected of committing an attack because he was a Black man in a Jewish, white supremacist state.
The acquittal of the Israelis who participated in a lynch came just a day after Finance Minister Yisrael Katz announced he had held up an aid package to nonprofit groups so that government money would not go to organizations that support African asylum seekers. The proximity between Katz’s announcement and Mishnayot’s ruling may be coincidental, but both of them are part of the same ideological dehumanization of asylum seekers.
When the government does all it can to broadcast the message that asylum seekers in Israel are not considered human beings — that their lives are dispensable and thus can be subjected to every kind of injustice — there is no reason to assume that a judge who sharpened his professional skills in the occupied territories will be the one to imbue a lynched man’s life and death with any meaning.
Four men were put on trial for the lynch: two civilians and two in uniform. Both the civilians were convicted as part of a plea bargain. One was sentenced to 100 days in prison, which ended with community service and a payment of NIS 2,000 to the family of the victims. The other was imprisoned for four months and made to pay similar compensation. On Monday, Mishnayot acquitted IDF soldier Yaakov Shamba and prison warden Ronen Cohen. This, too, is far from coincidental. Both refused to sign a plea deal, claiming they preferred to go to trial, and in fact had a very good reason to do so: they know that in Israel, the authorities not only legitimize, but actually encourage the killer instinct among those in uniform.
The statistics behind this claim are disturbingly unequivocal. Four years ago, Israel human rights organization B’Tselem announced it had ceased cooperating with the IDF, including its military investigative system, after it came to the conclusion that doing so is no more than a fig leaf for crimes committed by soldiers. Between 2000 and until that decision was made, B’Tselem filed 739 requests to open investigations into cases in which Palestinians were killed, maimed, or assaulted by soldiers. Only 25 of those cases ended in indictments.
This is true not only for the army but for the police as well: over the last six years, police officers killed 16 Israeli citizens. Not a single cop was convicted. These statistics undoubtedly played a role in Shamba and Cohen’s decision to go to trial: there is virtually no one in the Israeli establishment who wants soldiers or officers to think twice before pulling their weapon and opening fire. On brown-skinned people, of course.