A tale of two incidents

Compare and contrast:

The Israeli army suspended an officer and five soldiers involved in wounding a Palestinian man in the southern West Bank and put all of their unit’s operational duties on hold, the military said Friday.

In the incident Thursday, Palestinians in the village of Dahariya said soldiers shot and seriously wounded a man. The army denied involvement at the time, saying only that troops evacuated an injured Palestinian from a military checkpoint to an Israeli hospital.

But in a statement Friday, the army said the six-man patrol entered the village Thursday, took over a Palestinian taxi and shot a Palestinian man they believed to be suspicious. The soldiers did not give first aid to the wounded man and didn’t report the incident, the army said.

The step of immediately suspending soldiers and freezing their unit’s operations is unusual and indicates that army commanders believe the incident involved a serious violation of orders.

There will be an investigation, and if laws and procedures were broken, there will be a trial and punishment.

Now let’s look at a story that also took place in the West Bank:

A university student shot during a brawl between supporters of Fatah and Hamas at a West Bank university died of his wounds Friday, hospital officials said.

The student, 20-year-old Mohammed Radad, was shot by Fatah-allied gunmen on Tuesday, when students aligned with the rival groups clashes on the campus of An Najah University in Nablus. Palestinian security forces intervened, accompanied by Fatah men in civilian clothes, wounding three students with gunfire.

Witnesses said Radad, a Hamas supporter, was shot in the head by one of the armed men.

I’m going to take a wild guess that there will be no investigation, no trial, and no punishment. Possibly the student’s relatives will seek out and kill the man who shot him, since tribal justice is all the rage in the Middle East. This is the state that Olmert is about ready to create next door—one that resembles the Wild West more than any kind of civil society. Or perhaps a thugocracy.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s closest confidants said Friday that Israel should withdraw from “most” of the West Bank in a negotiated deal with the Palestinians and that a previous plan for a major unilateral pullback was no longer viable.

Vice-premier Haim Ramon, one of the politicians closest to Olmert, told Israel Radio that he favored reducing the Israeli presence in the West Bank to the “large settlement blocs” and that NATO forces could replace Israeli troops in the areas evacuated.

No way anything good can come of this. When Olmert’s “closest confidant” is openly talking about withdrawing from the West Bank, you can pretty much bet that Olmert has already drawn up the plans. This disengagement policy has been a disaster, and yet, he’s willing to go one step further and put uncontrolled enemies on Israel’s every border.