‘Being Black in America Shouldn’t Be a Death Sentence.’ What About Being Palestinian?

Did you see the American police officers? Did you see how they choked George Floyd to death in Minneapolis? Did you see Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck, pinning him down, with Floyd begging for his life until he died five minutes later? What racist police forces they have in America, how brutal. Now Minneapolis is burning after a black citizen was executed because of his skin color. The mayor apologized, the four officers involved were fired, Chauvin was indicted. America is a cruel place for black people and its police are racist.

A few days after Minneapolis, on Saturday morning, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Eyad Hallaq, a 32-year-old autistic man, was on his way to the Elwyn Center for disabled people. Border Police officers claimed they believed he was holding a gun – there was none – and when they called out for him to stop, he started running. The penalty was death. The Border Police, the most brutal of all units, knows no other way to overpower a fleeing autistic Palestinian except to execute him. The cowardly Border Police officers fired some 10 bullets into Hallaq as he fled, until he died. That’s how they always act. That’s what they’ve been trained to do.

The Israel Defense Forces and the Border Police have a special weakness for the disabled. The slightest wrong movement or sound could sentence them to death. In another Old City, of Hebron in March 2018, soldiers killed 24-year-old Mohammad Jabari, who was mute and mentally ill, and whose neighbors called him “Aha-Aha” because those were the only syllables he could say. They ambushed and shot him near a girls’ school, claiming he was throwing stones. He left behind a 4-year-old son, an orphan.

The nickname for another young man, Mohammad Habali, was Za’atar (hyssop); nobody knows why. He was also mentally ill and used to walk around with a stick. Israeli soldiers executed him by shooting him in the head from about 80 meters away. That happened in December 2018 opposite the Sabah Restaurant in Tul Karm, just after 2 A.M., while he was moving away from the soldiers and the street was quiet.

A protester in front of a burning building during a demonstration against the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 29, 2020AFP

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– The B’Tselem footage of the incident.