FBI Hasn't Prosecuted Anyone for Deaths in West Bank
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Solemn
Moment:
Jewish settlers gather for funeral of Asher Palmer and his son, Yonathan,
whose car was hit by stone-throwing Palestinians on the occupied West Bank in
2011.
Published
April 04, 2013, issue of April 12,
2013.
Two FBI special
agents sat across from me in a conference room at the J. Edgar Hoover
Building, in Washington. It was late October last year, shortly after Sukkot.
We were discussing the deaths of my son Asher Palmer, and my grandson Yonatan
Palmer, who were murdered on a Friday afternoon, September 23,
2011.
That day, Asher had
strapped Yonatan into his car seat and headed to his in-laws in Jerusalem,
where he expected to spend the Sabbath with his wife. Soon after they left,
Asher drove onto a two-lane highway just outside the West Bank settlement of
Kiryat Arba; a taxicab sped toward him, its rear window rolled down. The cab
swerved close to Asher’s lane, and a football-size rock was thrown from the
back seat, crashing through his windshield. Asher’s car veered off the road
and rolled over. The cab sped off.
We can’t know
Asher’s reactions at that moment. The police found no skid marks on the road,
and theorized that the stone had knocked Asher unconscious, leaving him unable
to brake or to control his car. Asher was just shy of his 25th birthday.
Yonatan was nearly 1 year old. Both were declared dead by the first
responders.
Wa’al al-Arjeh
drove the cab. Ali Saadeh threw the rock. Al-Arjeh later said that he had
worked for the security and intelligence forces of the Palestinian Authority
for nearly 10 years. Saadeh was responsible for a number of other attacks
against Jews.
On October 4, 2011,
Israeli security forces arrested Saadeh, al-Arjeh and three of their
accomplices, who confessed to the attack. A fourth member of al-Arjeh’s gang
was arrested several days later. A series of trials followed, with al-Arjeh
convicted of murder in early April, and Saadeh now awaiting his own
verdict.
Asher was an
American citizen. The United States Department of Justice therefore was
supposed to have responded immediately to the murders with its own set of
prescribed actions: assigning an FBI rapid deployment team to the region,
opening an FBI investigation and establishing a joint task force with the
Department of State.
American law makes
overseas attacks on Americans the DOJ’s highest
priority.
Not one action, I
learned, had been taken for Asher. Not even a preliminary inquiry. So 13
months had passed since the murders (now 18 months), and I was sitting in an
FBI office, trying to understand why. The FBI agents explained: They preferred
to open “value added” investigations.
Mine, however, was
not an isolated complaint. To date, the United States has not prosecuted a
single Palestinian for attacking an American in Israel or in a P.A.-controlled
location, but in the past two decades alone, as many as 143 Americans have
been killed or badly injured. Were all of these cases also deemed
unworthy?
The DOJ’s hands-off
policy was acutely in evidence in the fall of 2011, when Israel made a deal
with Hamas and freed 1,027
convicted criminals in exchange for hostage Gilad Shalit. Fifteen of the
released terrorists had murdered or maimed Americans, but the DOJ essentially
did nothing more than gather information. No hot pursuits, no indictments, no
extraditions.
A group of 54 of
America’s congressmen, no longer willing to abide DOJ negligence, wrote a
bipartisan letter
in March 2012 to Attorney General Eric Holder, urging him to adhere to the
mandates of the law of the United States.
A DOJ public email,
disseminated shortly afterward, raised hopes of a more concerted
effort to follow, and the DOJ did seem to step up its support services for
victims’ families; however, it still is failing to vigorously pursue a
complete course of justice, and hardly “taking the matter of prosecuting
terrorists very seriously,” as the email claimed.
Congress must
increase its pressure on the DOJ so that it finally acts effectively.
Moreover, American lawmakers should anticipate another negotiated terrorist
release, and should task officials with formulating a plan to intervene long
before that occurs.
At a minimum, the
United States must demand that Palestinians who have harmed Americans be
excluded from release in Israeli-P.A./Hamas deal-making and that they do not
receive sanctuary in P.A. territory.
Justice and
deterrence are pillars that ensure a society’s integrity and safety.
Permitting terrorists with American blood on their hands to walk away
scot-free, under any circumstances, is not just an abuse of the rights of
victims and their families — it is bad policy.
Which brings us
back to the murderers of Asher and Yonatan. With premature prisoner release a
regrettable fact of life, the DOJ has to act now to ensure that the United
States will be well positioned to keep their killers behind
bars.
If, in the end,
Wa’al al-Arjeh, Ali Saadeh and their accomplices do not get the punishments
they deserve, the United States will have failed once again to honor its pact
with victims and with society. We, and Congress as our representative, must
not let that happen.
Michael
Palmer is the father/grandfather of Asher and Yonatan Palmer. Jeff Daube, the
Israel director of the Zionist Organization of America, contributed to this
opinion piece.
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