In Jerusalem, justice is rarely served equally

One year after his murder, Mohammed Abu Khdeir's family waits for justice that Israel will likely never provide them, writes Joseph Dana

Suha Abu Khdeir and Hussein Khdeir hold a photo of their son Mohammed Abu Khdeir who was killed last year by Israeli vigilantes. Kate Shuttleworth for The National

A year ago, Mohammed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped near his home in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Shuafat. The 16-year-old was then beaten by a group of Israelis in a nearby forest. He was forced to drink petrol before being set on fire and burnt alive. Israeli police found his charred body the following morning.

Weeks before Mohammed was killed, Israeli West Bank settlers Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frenkel and Gilad Shaer were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinians said to have links to Hamas. That event sparked outrage in Israeli society, which was played upon by a number of senior Israeli politicians including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who publicly demanded vengeance. Large rallies of Israeli protesters chanting “death to Arabs” swept through major Israeli cities.

A 30-year-old Israeli, Yousef Ben David, took the calls to heart. He convinced two Israeli teens to join him in abducting and killing a Palestinian, Mohammed, in retaliation for the murder of the Israeli boys. After 16 sessions in a Jerusalem district court over the past year, there hasn’t been a verdict for Ben David, but the Abu Khdeir family is not holding its breath for justice.

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Suha Abu Khdeir, Mohammed’s mother, said last week that she didn’t believe her son’s murderers would receive the punishment they deserve because the system is stacked against Palestinians. Even if they are convicted, she said, they are unlikely to be given the minimum sentence of life imprisonment. “I don’t trust the Israeli court,” she said. “I don’t believe that they are going to give us our right.”

If you survey the legal system in place in Jerusalem, Suha Abu Khdeir’s lack of hope for justice is well founded. To start with, the Abu Khdeir family doesn’t enjoy the same privileges that Israeli citizens do, even though they are Jerusalem residents. As Palestinians, they are not allowed to vote in municipal or national elections. While they do receive national health insurance and have the right to freely travel around Israel, unlike West Bank Palestinians, they live with the constant fear that their Jerusalem residency will be revoked by authorities and they interact with the state from a position of perpetual insecurity.

One way of highlighting the inequality that Suha Abu Khdeir describes is to think about the situation in reverse. If the roles had been reversed and Mohammad Abu Khdeir had killed an Israeli Jew on that fateful night, the aftermath would have been dramatically different. For one, the Abu Khdeir family home would have likely been demolished as part of a long-standing Israeli deterrence policy of destroying the homes of Palestinians who carry out nationalist attacks on Israeli civilians.

A number of Abu Khdeir’s family members would have been taken into Israeli custody without charges, merely based on association to the attacker. There would be no easy defence, as in the case of Ben David, who claimed that he was insane at the time of the murder. To be sure, Mohammed would bear the full weight of the Israeli judicial system and his family would face a lifetime of harassment. None of this has befallen the Ben David family and it likely never will.

Israel wants to pretend that it has a functioning but flawed democracy with an impartial legal system but it is kidding only itself. This is why it is easy to understand why Suha Abu Khdeir is not holding her breath for justice from an Israeli court. If we cast our gaze from Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank, it is abundantly clear that Palestinians should have no faith in the Israeli judicial system to deliver them any semblance of justice. While the legal systems are different – Israelis in the West Bank are tried in civilian courts and Palestinians in military tribunals – the denial of justice for Palestinians is as old as the state of Israel itself.

Just last week, one Palestinian, 17-year-old Muhammad Al Kasbah, allegedly throwing stones near the Qalandiya checkpoint that separates Jerusalem from Ramallah, was shot at near point-blank range by a senior Israeli military commander. After his vehicle was hit with a stone, the commander got out and shot the boy in the head and chest as if the entire scene had been played out in the Wild West. This episode reflects a common facet of life in the West Bank and even in Jerusalem. When it comes to their interaction with Palestinians, the Israeli army and even Israeli civilians can act with impunity. Palestinians, on the other hand, are subjected to a Kafkaesque legal system that, at least in the West Bank, boasts a 99.7 per cent conviction rate when it comes to “security-related” offences.

In one remarkably defiant act, the family has kept a banner of their son hanging from their house for the last year. Jerusalem police have tried to remove it. At one point, city authorities threatened to fine the family $500 (Dh1,830) for every day that it remained on display. The family refused to take it down and it remains there today.

Given the international attention this case has garnered, Abu Khdeir’s killers will probably be found guilty. They might have to pay a sum of money to the Abu Khdeir family. But justice won’t be fully served because the justice system itself is predicated on unequal terms in Jerusalem. All that is left for Palestinians are acts of civil disobedience and the hopes that foreign courts like the International Criminal Court will take up the mantel of challenging the Israelis to change their system.

On Twitter: @ibnezra