Surrealism rules in the Israeli court's investigation of the death of , a young American peace activist killed by the Israeli Defence Forces in 2003, writes Hatim Kanaaneh The last session of the court case in Haifa had been repeatedly postponed on account of the weightiness of the witness. Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, better known by his nickname, Pinky, was the commanding officer of the Gaza Division�s Southern Brigade at the time the late peace activist was killed. I decided to display my solidarity with my fellow countryman, to wear my heart on my sleeve, so to speak. Lacking pink in my wardrobe, I donned the loudest Aloha shirt I had with a large off-pink flowery pattern. Pinky turned out to be weighty indeed: a rotund, dark-skinned, middle-aged man with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper scalp, thick black eyebrows and bulldoggish jowls. Despite the reassurance of our shared Semitic features, his presence evoked in me the same gut-level discomfort I had always sensed when seeing Ariel Sharon or our current foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Don�t jump to conclusions, please! Some of my best friends are rotund. I have a teenage neighbour who on occasion helps me to collect my free-range chicken eggs. He has an inborn glandular disorder that stores excessive fat on his short torso. I also have many American friends who tower a foot or more over me. Whether a war criminal, a bar bouncer, a simpleton, or an average well-fed person, the sheer bulk of a corpulent man is enough to intimidate and rile me on the inside. Today�s witness was no exception: I wished I had worn black. Even before he spoke, I decided that I wouldn�t want to wrestle with the man. His body language and his automatic assumption of priority in communicating with the judge, whose ruddy complexion suggested another longish repose on some tropical seaside, did little to reassure me. But Husain Abu Husain proceeded right away to tangle with the man and to try to cut him down to size. How could a man of his rank make so many spelling mistakes in his written affidavit, Abu Husain asked? Would he care to comment on the sexual harassment case a woman soldier had once brought against him? Would he commit to the principle of protecting human life? To this last question, Colonel Pinky acquiesced begrudgingly after stressing his first priority of protecting the life of his soldiers. And was he still convinced of his conclusion, after his rushed investigation into the case of the late only hours after his soldiers� D9R Caterpillars had crushed her to death, that their conduct had been flawless? To this, he responded in the positive, stating that Rachel had died through her own carelessness and willful interference on the side of the terrorists who had sent her to disrupt the soldiers� orderly carrying out of their duty in levelling an area. The presence of the home of a certain Dr Khalil and another �yellow house� repeatedly mentioned in the military investigations was considered immaterial not only by the witness but also by the judge who struck the line of questioning from the record. In Colonel Pinky�s logic there seemed to be no place for doubt: things were either black or white. What he repeatedly asserted was that the whole area was a war zone and that anyone present in it was as good as dead: � ben mavit ï mortal� by definition. Rachel was on the side of the enemy, and her death should have been a forgone conclusion. How could someone miss such simple logic? Pinky shook his head repeatedly in exasperation at the unbelievable stupidity of his doubters. His soldiers were performing their duties in a war zone: that included the killing of enemy combatants, or of their supporters and messengers, he seemed to imply. And yet his soldiers had acted in a humane manner. They had tried to give first aid to the accidentally injured woman. Pinky emphasised this �humane gesture� that his soldiers had extended to another victim whom they had shot dead as well. This last bit of logic made perfect sense to me: when you willfully shoot to kill someone, why would you want to extend first aid to him or her? Indeed, this was beyond the call of duty. When Abu Husain pointed out a contradiction between Pinky�s written affidavit and other documents on record regarding an injury he claimed he had suffered, the judge stepped in to rule that as irrelevant. This protective intervention was to be repeated by the judge several times, usually in response to the objection of the defence lawyer, raised with such animated movement of her brightly manicured pretty hands over her head and out of synch with whatever she was saying. I figured the woman would be something to behold with her favourite witness on a dance floor; she seemed so twirly and sympathetic to his preposterous who-the-hell-is-this-Arab-questioningmy-judgement stance. Twice, in his attempt to shield the witness from the aggression of his unjust doubters, the judge made pronouncements so damning of the IDF that I expected Pinky to get up and slug him in the mouth. When Abu Husain brought up the case of a soldier under Pinky�s command who had killed another international activist and lied about the circumstances of the murder and had his story taken as the honest truth by Pinky, the judge did not allow that into the record because he thought it was irrelevant to Rachel�s case. Besides, the judge rationalised, soldiers lie just as others do, including in his court. Then there was the issue of drug abuse in the unit whose members had been involved in Rachel�s demise. Again, the judge threw that out, explaining that drug abuse was widespread in all units of the IDF. I expected Pinky to maul him so hard that he would need to go into therapy at some far-off rehab facility. But the commander swallowed the insult quietly. After all, from the start he had given signs of common understanding between him, the defence, and the judge ï not as the result of some collusion ï God forbid! ï but of each doing his duty in repulsing the onslaught of so many goyim on �the most ethical army in the world�. Pinky had an expression of especial disgust at being badgered by a team of Palestinian lawyers. It didn�t make sense to me: true, Abu Husain was of darker skin and that may have justified Pinky�s look of condescension in his own eyes. But Dakwar, the second prosecution lawyer, was as fair-skinned as they come, fairer than the judge himself. I figured it must be size that this would decide status this time around. In Colonel Pinky�s clear-minded view, the last question that Abu Husain lobbed at him must have looked like the nastiest of curveballs: Abu Husain must have seemed to him to be intent on adding insult to injury. He, a former ranking colonel and currently the deputy head of the FIDF (Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces), had already been dragged through the mud enough. He had had to defend himself against the attacks of a scrawny (by comparison) darkskinned (also relatively) Palestinian (also relatively, since his Palestinian character had been compromised by Israeli citizenship in Pinky�s black-and-white world) reminiscent in his private thoughts, no doubt, of the standard IDF practice dummies. And now the dark-faced, kaffiyah -clad, hole-riddled scarecrow wanted him to apologise to the parents of that foreign proterrorist provocateur! These Ishmaelites, our leaders have told us, are supposed to serve us as �hewers of wood and drawers of water.� Look at them now, biting the hand that feeds them. How terribly insulting it must have felt to the colonel. Thank God the judge interfered and promptly halted the assault on the defenseless soldier even before the defence lawyers had objected. He angrily explained the inappropriateness of such a gesture before He had a chance to issue His ruling. In rural Galilee, older folks tell a story about a wild Bedouin�s first encounter with the law. He was dragged into town and kept overnight in a cell and repeatedly threatened by his jailers with having to face the judge. After the affair was over, the Bedouin was heard explaining gleefully: �I was scared stiff by the prospect of tangling with the judge. But the judge turned out to be a man.� After all, our judge turns out to be an Israeli man. I bet you my last Aloha shirt the Corries will not get a single dollar of what they are suing for. The writer�s A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel was published by Pluto Press in 2008.
