Don’t shoot, he’s Jewish

What does it say when a lawyer argues that police shouldn’t have shot his client because it was clear he wasn’t an Arab?

When people talk about the serious deterioration in Israel’s democratic and civic awarness, they don’t necessarily mean the scandalous story of Ofer Tzabari, manager of the Hapoel Petah Tikva soccer team, who is suspected of, among other things, running over a policewoman. But the brief written by his lawyer, Moshe Yochai, tells a story whose implications go beyond both the rights of suspects, on one hand, and the duty to keep the peace, on the other.

“The commander of the [police’s] Ayalon Region must first of all look into what this policeman and policewoman were doing in a dark, isolated parking lot in the middle of their shift,” wrote Yochai, “and why they shot a Jewish citizen who didn’t fully identify himself to them. … They knew he was Jewish, and his only crime was that he tried to flee. Should one open fire for this?”

Jewish? And if he were Arab, it would have been permissible to shoot him? Let’s ask that loyal servant of the law, attorney Yochai, whose words reflect an incomparably problematic worldview: If Ofer Tzabari were an Arab, or if he had spoken to the traffic policewoman in Arabic when she opened the door of his car, would there then have been grounds for concluding that he was dangerous? Would it then have been permissible to shoot him?

This is a complicated and wretched story whose details are murky, and a great deal of caution is needed when discussing it. But what can we learn from it at this stage? Not from the personal tragedy of a man whose secret may have been revealed, or from the questions regarding the police’s brutal behavior – in contradiction to its obligation to prevent a crime or exploitation – but from the public aspects of the story?

We can learn about the basic assumption that is self-evident from the standpoint of everyone involved in the case, including those who speak in the policewoman’s name and paint her as a heroine, as well as the media that reported on the case: the suspect’s Jewishness. He was identified as a Jew, so why shoot him?

After all, Jews, too, can be dangerous. And Arabs, too, shouldn’t be shot when they aren’t endangering a policeman’s life.

The assumption reflected in attorney Yochai’s brief – and it’s impossible to deny that he has a talent for hinting at other couplings and other desires – reflects a certain worldview. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nation-state bill is both the fruit of this worldview and an inexhaustible source of new energy for it. This, after all, is ostensibly the normative view – that a Jew isn’t dangerous, that if he’s diagnosed, identified, marked as a Jew, then he’s okay “as far as we’re concerned.” This thought was expressed as part of a rational argument and viewed as a truth known to all.

Moreover, this rapid diagnosis – on the basis of criteria such as accent, appearance and perhaps also documents – that catalogs a person as Jewish, or as non-Arab, is seen in attorney Yochai’s brief as an acceptable criterion for everything related to civil rights.

The assumption implicit in his brief – that anyone who listens to him will immediately and automatically understand his argument, as if the injustice toward his client lay in the fact that he wasn’t treated the way a Jew ought to be treated – reflects a situation no less wretched than the case itself. For if it’s forbidden for the police to shoot a fleeing suspect, then it’s forbidden to shoot him regardless of whether he’s Jewish or Arab. If this is the defense on which the Hapoel Petah Tikva manager must rely, he’s in deep trouble.

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