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Scrutinizing the Foundations of Morality in Israel
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11382 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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11 / 1986 |
1,313 Words |
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Seymour Siegel
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On Thursday night, April 13, four Arab terrorists hijacked a civilian bus en route from Tel Aviv, Israel, to the Mediterranean city of Ashkelon. Troops stormed the bus and rescued the 35 passengers being held hostage.
According to the initial reports coming out of Israel, two of the four terrorists were killed in the cross fire and the other two were capture. Later reports said that all four terrorists had been killed. There were also a few casualties among the passengers. Following the dramatic event, there deemed to be an odd mood in Israel. Characteristic of this strange spirit were the words of one of the soldiers who had killed a hijacker. "I don't feel happy for what happened," he said on the state radio, “but I knew that's what I had to do…”
Later the story began to unravel. There were persistent reports that two of the four hijackers were seen being handed over alive to Shin Bet (secret service) interrogators. This gave rise to demands that the security police chief and his subordinates should be prosecuted for their treatment of the captured hijackers.
This whole incident took on added emotional dimensions because it involved the treatment of the hated terrorists and the behavior of the highly respected and awesome security forces. The dispute erupted during a cabinet meeting at the end of May. Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir, who has been pushing for prosecution of the case against the advice of almost everyone else in the cabinet, was replaced. The case assumed added significance when the head of the rescue operation of the hijacked bus, Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai, later admitted he had pistol-whipped the two Palestinians to get them to say whether they had left explosives behind on the bus. (They had not.)
An investigating commission concluded on August 1985 that, besides Mordechai, a total of 11 men, including five members of the Shin Bet, had beaten the two captives. The charges of misconduct led all the way to the head of the Shin Bet Avraham Shalom, who was accused of falsifying evidence and ordering his subordinates to lie to investigators.
Public opinion polls in Israel suggested that a majority of the public believed that Shalom should not be prosecuted and that the Shin Bet should be allowed to operate outside the strict limits of the law in combating Palestinian terrorists.
Bending the law
As is usual in the volatile Israeli political climate, the whole case caused an uproar that involved the top leadership of the Jewish state and raised the basic issue of whether it is permissible under some circumstances to bend, even to disregard, the law.
The whole case took on a stranger hue when in early August the Israeli High Court of Justice upheld presidential pardons granted to the chief of the Shin Bet and three of his subordinates for their role in killing the terrorists. This was on the heels of the amnesty granted by Israeli President Chaim Herzog to the presumed killers of the captured terrorists. This was stranger still since the four men granted amnesty had yet to be charged or convicted of a crime in connection with the incident. Herzog's pardoning of the Shin Bet official was supported by
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