Police detective Moshe Ben David apologized recently after he shot and captured a Palestinian who had just stabbed four Jewish women to death. He was sorry, he said, for not gunning the man down on the spot. “I was afraid of hitting a bystander,” he explained. That was not good enough for his superiors. “He should have killed the Arab,” grumbled Police Minister Ronni Milo. Last week Milo broadened the mandate. He said that even civilians should feel no qualms about deadly force against Palestinian assailants. “If any Israeli, whether policeman or not, sees someone with a knife trying to kill, he should shoot,” said Milo. “If in the past there were doubts and fears [about shooting to kill], they have no place today.”
The militance reflects Israeli anger over renewed attacks against soldiers and civilians. The assaults have left seven Israelis dead and several more wounded in the past month. Last week Israeli settler Yair Mendelssohn was killed by a sniper near the Palestinian town of Ramallah, on the West Bank. Two days later, 74-year-old Shmuel Rubha was hospitalized after being knifed in the back in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem. Israelis joined the spiral of violence, too: Army troops shot to death two Palestinians last week, bringing to at least 800 the number of Arabs killed by Israelis since the intifada began in late 1987.
For three years Israel has struggled to contain Arab attacks on Jews. The Army has tried to weed out potential assailants among the more than 100,000 Arabs who hold jobs in Israel. The daily flow into Israel from the occupied territories has been cut to 50,000 Arab workers. There have been calls to seal off the territories. But Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir rejects this approach; it would compromise his policy of gradually incorporating the West Bank and Gaza into Israel.
To many Israelis, self-defense seems the most effective alternative. The last six months have been a surge in gun-license applications. It is estimated that up to 500,000 civilians, in addition to Army personnel and reservists, are legally entitled to carry guns. Why not take advantage of that firepower, suggests Defense Minister Moshe Arens. “We have a public that is in part trained and armed,” he said last week. “I would say that the probability is high that in any [Arab] attack, an armed [Israeli] will be on the scene, someone who knows how to deal with a murderer.”
Few Israelis seem outraged by such a notion. Indeed, Israeli liberals say, the shoot-to-kill license only sanctions officially what is already the practice. Punishment for any Jew who shoots an Arab is either light or nonexistent. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a West Bank settler who was convicted of shooting dead an Arab shopkeeper in Hebron in 1988, served only 14 weeks in prison. But there is little confidence that vigilantism will curb the violence. “Once the man in the street starts firing, we’d all better take cover,” columnist Yoel Marcus wrote in the daily Haaretz last week. “He may have a permit, but it doesn’t mean he can shoot straight.”
