The implications of mass acceptance of vigilante murder – with the example of the Azaria Affair in Israel

Joshua Leifer writes in Haaretz about an incident of an Israeli soldier murdering a wounded man in 2016 wound up becoming a celebrated act and how the trend in that direction has intensified in the ensuing decades:

Earlier this week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz requested that President Isaac Herzog pardon Elor Azaria, a former Israeli soldier convicted of shooting to death a wounded Palestinian man, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, in Hebron in March 2016.

At the time of the shooting, Azaria was a 19-year-old army medic who arrived on the scene of a stabbing attack carried out by two Palestinian men against Israeli soldiers near the settlement of Tel Rumeida. In grisly footage captured by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem that subsequently circulated widely online, Azaria can be seen firing a single shot to the head of al-Sharif, one of the two assailants, who lies wounded and immobile on the ground.

In 2017, an Israeli military court sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison for the crime of manslaughter (although he would ultimately serve only nine months and was released on parole). The court charged that Azaria had violated military orders and the rules of engagement, killing al-Sharif when he posed no immediate threat to soldiers or civilians. (1)

Azaria became a hero for the Israeli right. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, initially backed Azaria's prosecution, but pivoted once he realized where the wind was blowing and called Azaria's parents to offer support.”

Leifer observes that for the settler movement, “it was precisely Azaria's merciless, gratuitous act of killing that made him a hero.” Though the Israeli armed forces (IDF) “wanted to demonstrate that Azaria's conduct and his trial was the exception that proved the rule.” But, in fact, “Azaria's trial was one of the last times a soldier was jailed for unlawfully killing a Palestinian. In the intervening years, acts like Azaria's have become normalized, and, in some precincts of the Israeli right, lionized.”

This kind of celebration of murderous, criminal violence is a standard part of fascist ideology and practice. We saw something very similar during the Nixon Administration when rightwingers celebrated the homicidal thug Lt. William Calley, who commanded the war crime that became known as the My Lai Massacre – also known as the Son My Massacre, after the Vietnamese name of the village. (2)

We see something very similar in today’s Trump Cult and their celebration of the often lawless and sadistic and sometimes explicitly murderous conduct of Trump’s ICE Gestapo and the deadly neglect practiced by the for-profit private prison companies that run ICE detention systems, which are being accurately described as concentration camps.

In Israel, the Azaria affair turned out to be a turning point in the acceptance by the Israeli government and large parts of Israeli society that became impossible for most people to overlook after Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023 by Hamas. Bar Peleg reported last week:

The Israeli military has opened dozens of criminal investigations into the deaths of detainees held in its custody during the Gaza war, but none has resulted in an indictment, according to IDF data.

The IDF attributed the lack of charges to what it described as evidentiary challenges inherent to warfare. However, most of the investigated deaths took place inside military detention facilities equipped with security cameras and where numerous potential witnesses were present, including soldiers and detainees.

Data obtained following freedom of information requests submitted by Hatzlacha, a nonprofit that works to expand public access to information, shows that there have been 57 investigations into deaths in IDF custody, including 56 Palestinians from Gaza and one Lebanese. (3)

Two analysts back in 2017 warned about the problematic developments that they were seeing in the Azaria Affair, which have since presented such a horrific set of examples that has drastically changed:

The main problem lies in societal perspectives surrounding Azaria’s actions. The tragic root of the affair is linked to the fact that large segments of the public, backed by a portion of the political establishment, openly reject basic principles of the rule of law and of a society that respects human rights. IDI’s Peace Index poll, conducted in October of 2015 – just six months before the Azaria affair took place – found that 53% of Israeli Jews supported the killing of a terrorist even after he had been subdued. More and more frequent are public figures, from Knesset members to government ministers to popular singers, calling for changing the rules of engagement to allow the killing of terrorists, regardless of whether they constitute a clear and present danger.

This represents not only a moral failure, but also a perverted view of the meaning of justice. If a majority of the public believes that it is permissible and even right for a soldier to kill a terrorist without trial, even after the terrorist has been subdued and is no longer a threat, the underpinnings of the entire legal system begin to crumble. [my emphasis] (4)

The late writer Uri Avnery wrote about the moral and political implications of the murder committed by Azaria and what it reflected about the ethnic division within Israeli Jewish society between “Mizrahi” (Jews of non-European descent) and Ashkenazi, who Avnery describes as defining “all Israelis of European and American origin, who adhere or pretend to adhere to Western values.” And he reported:

Public opinion polls [in 2017] tell us that for the large majority of Mizrahim, killing a seriously wounded "terrorist" is the right thing to do. After the singing in court [in support of Azaria during his trial], his father kissed him and cried out: "You are a hero!" For many Ashkenazim, [the murder] was a despicably cowardly act.

One casualty of the affair is the Chief-of-Staff, Gadi Eizenkot. Until recently, he was the most popular person in the country. Now he is cursed by the Mizrahim as a contemptible lackey of the Ashkenazi "elites". Yet, in spite of his German-sounding name, Eizenkot is of Moroccan descent.

And he observed:

For more than 40 years now, the army has not fought a real war against a real military. It has deteriorated into a colonial police force, the instrument of a system of oppression of another people. In the performance of this role, many acts of brutality are committed every day.

Quite recently, an innocent Arab teacher, a Bedouin citizen of Israel, got involved by accident in an incident, when policemen clashed with the local population. They shot the teacher, in the erroneous belief that he was about to run them over.

The man was severely wounded and bleeding, with policemen all around him. They did not call the medics. He slowly bled to death. It took 20 minutes. (5)

If this recalls the action of Jonathan Ross, the ICE Gestapo goon who reportedly murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis this year, it should. It’s the same mentality. And the kind of personalities who sang in court in support of the killer Elor Azaria in 2017 are very similar to the Trump cultists who support such murderous action by ICE in the US today. And to the ghouls in the American South – and not exclusively in the South – who came to watch public lynching of blacks and sometimes other minorities.

Any state who intends to practice the rule of law cannot afford to be indifferent to such public enthusiasm for vigilante murder.

Notes:

(1) Leifer, Joshua (2026): How the 2016 Azaria Affair Foreshadowed the IDF's New Impunity. Haaretz 07/16/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-07-16/ty-article-magazine/.premium/how-the-azaria-affair-foreshadowed-the-idfs-new-impunity/0000019f-6a91-d782-ad9f-fffbf9880000> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).

(2) The My Lai Massacre. PBS American Experience n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/vietnam-my-lai-massacre/> (Accessed: 2026-23-07).

Herring, George (2012): The Vietnam War and the My Lai Massacre. History Now 31:Spring 2012. <https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/vietnam-war-and-my-lai-massacre> (Accessed: 2026-23-07). “The murder of more than 400 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai and My Khe by US soldiers on March 16, 1968, stands as one of the darkest days in the nation’s military history.”

Taylor, Telford (1971): Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, 123-153. New York: Bantam Books.

(3) Peleg, Bar (2026): IDF Opened Dozens of Probes Into Deaths of Detained Gazans. No One Was Charged. Haaretz 07/16/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-crime/2026-07-17/ty-article/.premium/idf-closed-dozens-of-probes-into-deaths-of-detained-gazans-no-one-was-charged/0000019f-6fa6-d853-a9bf-7fb7fdd50000> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).

(4) Cohen, Amichai and Shafran-Gittleman, Idit (2017): The Azaria Affair: How Israel’s Leadership Betrayed Democracy. Forward 08/07/2017. <https://forward.com/opinion/379250/the-azaria-affair-how-israels-leadership-betrayed-democracy/> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).

(5) Avnery, Uri (2017): Uri Avnery: the Sergeant Azaria affair mirrors a rift in Israeli society. PIME Asia News 03/03/2017. <https://www.asianews.it/en/middle-east/israel/uri-avnery-the-sergeant-azaria-affair-mirrors-a-rift-in-israeli-society> (Accessed: 2026-23-07).