Insanity Plea in Murder of Palestinian Teen May Spark More Violence in the Holy Land

BY SIOBHÁN O'GRADY-NOVEMBER 30, 2015

Early on the morning of July 2 last year, three Israelis abducted 16-year-old Palestinian Muhammad Abu Khdeir from near his home in East Jerusalem, then drove him to a forest, beat him unconscious, and burned him alive. 

His killers — two Jewish teenagers, also minors at the time of the attack — were found guilty of murder in an Israeli court Monday, and will likely besentenced in January after a social worker reviews the case. But a lawyer for Yosef Haim Ben-David, the teenagers’ older relative who allegedly aided and abetted them in the attack, submitted a last-minute psychiatric evaluation to delay his client’s verdict, which was postponed and will be discussed again on Dec. 20. (The two teenagers’ identities are being kept private because they were under 18 when the crime was carried out.)

According to papers used by the prosecutor in court, Ben-David encouraged the murder, and the teenagers did not necessarily plan to kill Abu Khdeir until Ben-David, who was driving, told them to “finish him off.”  

For the many Palestinians following the trial, Ben-David’s delay is now overshadowing the significance of Monday’s two guilty findings. Ghaith Al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, toldForeign Policy that the postponement is “being read by Palestinian media at least as a de facto innocent verdict.”

At a time of renewed if sporadic violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Al-Omari added that if Ben-David is ultimately found to have been mentally incompetent at the time of the attack, the “increased tension in the public mood is likely to incite further violence.”

Muhammad’s father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, had throughout the lengthy trial expressed concern that Ben-David would try to lighten his sentencing with an insanity plea. And the two guilty verdicts Monday certainly did not put the older Abu Khdeir at peace with his son’s gruesome death. Instead, he told reporters that by deferring to a psychiatric evaluation, Ben-David “made a joke of the court.”

“My blood is boiling,” he said.

Last July, Israeli authorities quickly labeled Abu Khdeir’s brutal death as a revenge attack. It came just one day after the burial of three Israeli teens kidnapped and shot dead by Palestinians, their bodies abandoned in a shallow grave near Hebron, in the West Bank. But the murder was more than just a single tragic death: It was one in a series of many violent acts between Palestinians and Israelis that summer that helped spark the Gaza War, which over the course of 50 days killedroughly 1,500 civilians and severely damaged relations between Israel and Palestine.

For many Palestinians, Al-Omari told FP, Ben-David’s last-minute claim of psychiatric instability is a bitter reminder of a much earlier case, when Australian Denis Rohan set fire to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 1969. After being ruled insane, he was eventually released home to Australia, where he was reportedly put into psychiatric care. Palestinians saw that as him “basically getting away with it,” Al-Omari said. “That was such a significant case and it’s very much seared in the collective memory of Palestinians.”

Abu Khdeir’s murder was never labeled as terrorism by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who surprised his right-wing colleagues when a year later he condemned a deadly arson attack that killed an 18-month-old Palestinian as “a reprehensible and horrific act of terrorism.” The prime minister had been hesitant to label acts of settler violence in such a way, but Al-Omari told FP that Netanyahu’s condemnation signaled a recognition that violence carried out by settlers toward Palestinians was “more than individualized attacks, but a pattern and a more systemic problem.”

Since then, he said, Israeli security forces have been given a “freer hand toward dealing with terrorism with settlers,” including the ability to detain suspects for longer periods of time without court rulings.

But if Ben-David’s upcoming psychiatric evaluation essentially gets him off the hook for his role in Abu Khdeir’s murder, any efforts made by the Israeli government to take a harder stance against settler violence may be overshadowed by Palestinian anger.

This fall, violence between Israelis and Palestinians has escalated, and talks of a peace process between Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have all but ground to a halt. (On Monday, the two shook hands for the first time in five years at a climate summit in Paris, an encounter that likely had little wider political significance.)

At least 20 people, including 18 Israelis, one American, and one Palestinian, have been killed in attacks by Palestinians in the past two months. And around another 100 Palestinians have also been killed, some as they attempted to carry out such attacks, and others in clashes with Israeli forces.

“Today what we’re seeing is the Palestinian narrative is being built as this being another case where the perpetrators will go scot-free,” Al-Omari said. “The situation is primed to escalate.”

Photo Credit: AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty Images