- Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s recent decision to pardon a former Israeli soldier who summarily executed an incapacitated Palestinian a decade ago is more than a gesture toward one individual, and it is not an innocent attempt to “heal the divisions” between Israelis surrounding a case that convulsed Israeli society a decade ago. It is a political act that continues a long tradition of legitimizing the killing of Palestinians. The pardon does more than clear the remaining stain from the soldier’s record. It once again blurs the line between an unlawful killing and conduct that the state is prepared first to tolerate, then to justify, and ultimately to absolve and thereby implicitly condone.
… Even when Jews were convicted of killing Arabs, the state knew how to respond with understanding. Israeli presidents Chaim Weizmann, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak Navon, and Chaim Herzog (the current president’s father) granted pardons or reduced the sentences of Israeli soldiers and police who had killed Arabs. Each case was explained by reference to its supposedly exceptional circumstances: prevailing security tensions, the defendant’s personal history, his service to the state, the passage of time, or the need for reconciliation. Yet the accumulation of such cases reveals a pattern. The judicial process ostensibly draws a moral boundary, while the power of pardon retroactively strips the crossing of that boundary of its full significance.
The pardons, reduced sentences, and failures to prosecute associated with the perpetrators of the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, members of the Jewish Underground in the 1980s, and the policemen who killed a dozen Palestinian citizens of Israel in October 2000 all belong to the same pattern—a pattern that prepared the ground for the genocide that has unfolded since October 2023.
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