By Philip Weiss
This is great: National Public Radio aired a long story yesterday featuring a demand by the brother of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh that the United States investigate her killing in Jenin on May 11 and keep Israel out of the case. Israel has refused to take any responsibility in the Al Jazeera broadcaster’s death– though eyewitnesses said that an Israeli soldier shot Abu Akleh from about 600 feet away, and investigations by AP, CNN, and the Washington Post have backed them up.
So some American media continue to seek to undermine Israel’s impunity, and push Joe Biden not to dodge the matter, as he surely wants to.
NPR reporter Daniel Estrin began his report with the honest statement that Israel doesn’t investigate the killings of civilians and doesn’t punish soldiers.
So the case is in limbo, and that is very similar to other times when Palestinian civilians have been killed. You look at the army’s statistics, and they show that Israel rarely releases definitive conclusions. Soldiers are mostly not punished. There is pressure from members of Congress to keep this on the radar. And so Anton Abu Akleh, her brother – he’s 58 years old. He wants the U.S. to get more involved. That was his main message when I visited him in East Jerusalem.
Estrin refers to the 57 Congresspeople who have called for an independent investigation by the United States. And meantime, the State Department expresses faith in the Israeli investigation of the matter. (P.S. I can’t think of one time that Israel has punished a soldier for killing Palestinians. Hatred of Palestinians is the glue of that society.)
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