It's the Soldier I Feel Sorry For

A rare rotten apple in the pure barrel of the Israeli Defence Force, Taysir Hayb, has been sentenced to eleven and a half years in prison, with three and a half of those years suspended and another eighteen months knocked off for time already served, as punishment for obstruction of justice, incitement to false testimony, false testimony and improper conduct, and also for the manslaughter of a British citizen with a noisy family. Fortunately, the manslaughterer is only a Bedouin, so the state of Israel has not opened itself to charges of anti-semitism by putting him on trial.

The Briton was one Tom Hurndall, who seems to have stuck his head in the path of a legitimate IDF rifle bullet while, according to witnesses, trying "to usher Palestinian children out of the range of Israeli gunfire during demonstrations in the Gaza town of Rafah". Such an act can only have been motivated by pure malice, since Israel has complained that protesters "endanger themselves and the soldiers with their activities". Who, after all, expects soldiers to face danger?

Hurndall belonged to a "pro-Palestinian" (not pro-legality, anti-racist or anything of that sort, you may be sure) organisation called the International Solidarity Movement. This organisation, it appears, "often places its activists between Israeli forces and Palestinians to try to stop the Israeli military from carrying out operations." There's only one way to deal with such people, and that is to destroy the brain, as instantly and utterly as possible. Typically for a wishy-washy pro-Palestinian activist, Hurndall failed to judge the angle of cranial penetration correctly and spent nine months in a coma before dying, much to the distress of his family and, no doubt, the Israeli Defence Force.

The Israeli government's initial response to the placing of Hurndall's head in an innocent line of fire was to deny that a soldier had fired the shot. At the risk of being accused of insufficient pro-semiticality, I should say that this may have been a small public-relations error. The denial hardly seems necessary. Earlier this year, the Israeli army dropped charges against an officer who shot dead a British journalist, James Miller; a judge ruled that "the soldier accused of discharging his weapon at the time of the incident could not be proved beyond doubt to have killed Mr Miller." Just because a soldier fired a shot at the time someone else was killed by a shot doesn't necessarily mean the incidents are linked, and you'd be an Islamofascist and an anti-semite even to think of thinking otherwise.

Then again, Miller's non-killer is a lieutenant, and quite possibly not a Bedouin; while the Bedouin whom Hurndall so thoughtlessly endangered has not received a commission. No country so beleaguered as Israel - the fragility of whose nuclear deterrent is such that it must needs imprison a man for eighteen years for the crime of betraying its existence - can afford the needless sacrifice of its lieutenants. Let us hope more pro-Palestinians can be persuaded to remember that fact.