On 24 March 2016, Sergeant Elor Azaria, an 18-year-old member of the Israeli army’s medical corps, arrived at an incident in the city of Hebron, in the West Bank. Twenty-one-year-old Abdel Fattah al-Sharif was lying on the ground. He had been shot after allegedly trying to stab an Israeli soldier. Azaria did not administer first aid, but instead shot the young Palestinian in the head. The Israeli army’s decision to prosecute Azaria caused national outrage. Azaria was celebrated across the right as “our son, our hero”. Raja Shehadeh reports that “60% of young people [in Israel] expressed their belief that he did the right thing by killing the Palestinian” and that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called his family to express his support”.
Shehadeh’s short book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, is a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of 7 October. It is divided into two chapters. The first asks simply, “How did we get here?”, reflecting on key events since 1948, while the second analyses the last six months. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer and winner of the Orwell prize for political writing, traces the factors influencing an Israeli society that lauds Azaria’s actions and accepts the devastation of Gaza: the failure of the Oslo accords; the hardening of an occupation of the Palestinian territories that is by all the evidence “permanent”; increasing fractures in Israeli society, for which a common Palestinian enemy can be a balm; and the growing dominance of extreme rightwing elements in Israel. Above all, he notes an increasing failure to empathise – 90% of the Arabs in Israel speak Hebrew, but less than 10% of Jewish Israelis speak Arabic – which, in his analysis, also affects young Israelis like Azaria: “How to explain on the human level this total dehumanisation, that a wounded Palestinian who posed no danger could be shot by a medic?”
