The Israeli media claimed that Fadi Alloun, who stabbed a 15-year-old in Jerusalem, was shot and killed while being chased as he was holding a knife. A new video reveals that he could have been subdued, and did not pose a threat.
By *John Brown
Last Saturday an Israeli policeman shot and killed Fadi Alloun, a 19-year-old resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, after he was suspected of stabbing a 15-year-old Israeli near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate.
A video that went viral following the incident shows young Jewish Israelis egging on the policemen to kill Alloun, despite the fact that it is unclear from the video whether he posed a threat when an officer shot him numerous times. The Israeli media reported that he was shot while “trying to escape from the security forces that began chasing him. After refusing to release his grip on the knife, the forces shot and killed him.”
It was clear that that first part was a lie from the get go: Alloun never tried to escape. However, a new video that captures the scene from a different angle shows that Alloun wasn’t holding a knife when he was shot, and therefore did not pose a threat. Moreover, this was the reason an officer who stood near the person filming the incident chose not to shoot Alloun. He chose no to shoot or even draw his weapon as threat as Alloun walked past him. He didn’t shoot when the teenagers nearby yelled “Shoot him, bitch!” or “Pepper spray? What kind of policemen are you?” while warning Alloun that he was “about to die.” When it was all over, the police officer who refused to shoot Alloun became the target of verbal abuse by those same teenagers.
And while this particular policeman acted appropriately, additional officers who arrived on the scene chose to act differently. Seconds after they exit their vehicles, one of the teenagers — who would later celebrate Alloun’s killing by shouting “death to Arabs” — tells the officers that Alloun had just stabbed someone and that they should shoot without any attempt to subdue him. The officers did not even yell at Alloun to throw down the knife — that’s because there was no knife and Alloun posed no threat. They did not even yell at him to give up or to let him know that he was under arrest.
The video shows that detaining Alloun was indeed possible. In fact, there is no other option but to determine that Israeli policemen shot and killed a man in cold blood, despite the fact that he did not pose a threat, and must be put on trial for doing so. Even a person who stabbed someone has the right not to be extrajudicially killed by the police, regardless of the pressure put on them by a racist mob.
Obviously this will not happen, since the killing was in line with the instructions that permit the shooting of Arabs suspected of terrorist attacks. “This is how these events must end,” say the police chiefs and government officials. This is exactly what the officer did. But they conveniently forget to mention that this order only applies to Arabs.
This is the reason the terrorist who stabbed four Palestinians in Dimona was not shot on the spot. In fact, if you look at the Israeli media, no one has even bothered to label him a terrorist. Eli Schlissel, who murdered 16-year-old Shira Banki at the Jerusalem pride march, was not shot, despite the fact that he clearly posed a threat to the marchers. This is the same reason that the IDF does not shoot settlers but does shoot Palestinian children who pose less of a risk.
This policy is based on spilling of Arab citizens’ blood, a policy that is slowly becoming normalized among the Israeli public, and which leads to dozens of terrorist attacks against Arabs, including: settlers who throw rocks at Palestinians under the protection of the IDF; a racist mob in Israel’s northern town of Afula that attacks a television journalist because he is Arab; or a racist mob that attacks Arabs in Netanya (where the police handcuffed the victim, rather than the attackers); and a racist mob in Jerusalem that walks the streets in search of Arabs.
*John Brown is the pseudonym of an Israeli academic and blogger. This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call, where he is a blogger. Read it here.
