Things are now clear. Medical examiners have concluded that the terrorist was still alive, and had been lying helplessly on the ground for 11 minutes, before he was shot to death by the soldier in Hebron.
The investigation was compromised legally and publicly by the torrent of statements from politicians who wanted to extract political mileage from their constituents.
Such behavior was ill-advised and damaging. Politicians should now keep their hands off this complicated issue and leave it exclusively to the hands of legal experts. In hospitals, only physicians and nurses are present in an operating room with the patient. No one else.
The real test does not revolve on the merits or otherwise of the shooting, or on the damaging stories of people who want to criticize such behavior based on their own stories, dozens of years after they took place. One of them is Tzvi Kaftori, a former Shin Bet security agency official, who wrote in Haaretz last week that many years ago enemy soldiers were shot in the back after being captured. Kaftori was in charge of following my every move as a journalist in the 1970s, on behalf of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir. In both cases, he wanted to own up to what he did (or failed to prevent).
What counts is what the country's leaders and our finest legal scholars think about such cases. What kind of message do they send the public? Do their words mean that extra-judicial killings are permissible or prohibited? During the First Intifada (the 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising), Military Advocate General Amnon Straschnov grappled with this issue as well. He made sure to uphold the supremacy of the law, and even elaborated on this in his memoirs.
Tempers have always flared on extra-judicial killings, but the rulings have always been the same: that they are outright prohibited. In the current case, the debate is still raging. The anxious masses are storming the barricades, but they are also being incited and led astray, and the result is that the suspect is being viewed as the victim. In certain respects, he really is a victim. But the masses are also oblivious to the damage they may inflict on a generation of young people, who may conclude that everything is fair game, even the shooting of a subdued terrorist.
Politicians who have shed any notion of self-restraint should not back away. They should not let the public outcry make it into the court room, as was the case in the late 19th century, when European Jews saw a troubling development unfold before their very eyes: the Dreyfus Affair.
The military would be well-advised to give this case extended leave. IDF troops should let the professionals deal with this case. They should leave no stone unturned in their search of the truth, but they must also uphold the rights of any suspect or defendant. Even what has been said now in the heat of the moment, even things that are not germane to the case right now, could eventually help the defendant get a more lenient sentence. Now that the pathologists' role is over, it is time to let go: "After the fire, a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:12).
