The Independent (London)
by Eric Silver In Jerusalem
HUMAN RIGHTS campaigners warned Israel of a Palestinian backlash yesterday after the Israeli Supreme Court released a Jewish settler who had served eight years of a life sentence for murdering a bound Palestinian prisoner.
Basem Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, said: "This decision sends a clear message that Arab blood is cheaper than Israeli blood.
"The Israeli judicial system would not let a Palestinian get off so lightly for killing an Israeli. The lack of symmetry will make Palestinians more and more angry. Israelis will go on suffering as a result of their own policy."
The Arab fury, stoked by Friday's Anglo-American air strikes on Baghdad, was making itself felt even before the court's verdict. Palestinian gunmen stepped up their attacks on settlers and soldiers over the weekend. Israeli troops returned fire, killing six Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Yoram Skolnick, 32, the murderer released yesterday, shot dead Musa Abu Sabha in 1993 after the 20-year-old Palestinian had tried to stab a West Bank settler. When Skolnick fired nine bullets from an Uzi sub-machine- gun into his back, Abu Sabha was already under arrest, tied and blindfolded.
Former president Ezer Weizman reduced his sentence to 11 years, and a parole board recommended he be freed for good behaviour after completing two-thirds of his sentence. Yesterday, by four votes to three, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Israel's Public Committee Against Torture to delay the release, which the human rights group said would send a dangerous message to "ideological Jewish criminals".
Skolnick's wife, Sigalit, said her husband regretted the murder. He had, she claimed, shot Abu Sabha in a "storm of emotion" and was no longer dangerous. However, the Attorney General, Elyakim Rubinstein, concluded earlier that Skolnick had not grasped the severity of his crime.
His release comes less than a week after another settler, Nahum Korman, began a stint in an old people's home, doing six months' community service for kicking to death a 10-year-old Palestinian boy who had been throwing stones at Israeli traffic.
B'tselem, an Israeli human rights watchdog, condemned the verdicts in these two cases as an example of Israel closing its eyes to the excesses of Jewish settlers, while imposing long sentences, with no prospect of parole, on Palestinians who kill Jews. "There is persistent discrimination against Palestinians," it said. "The message of today's decision is that it's not very bad to kill Palestinians."
On the political front, Israel's outgoing Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, is under increasing pressure, from the public, the media and his own Labour Party, to reject Ariel Sharon's invitation to serve as defence minister in a national -unity government.
Even the few remaining Barak loyalists are urging him to think again about joining the man he denounced on the hustings as a warmonger - and not to go back on his announced intention to take a break from politics after his landslide defeat.
Five senior figures in the Labour party, including the ministers Shlomo Ben -Ami, Yossi Beilin and Haim Ramon, have launched "an uncompromising campaign" to stop Mr Barak taking the defence portfolio. It would, they contended, destroy the party.
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