In an incident reported in the Jerusalem Post, two Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed a man who was "acting very suspiciously" before, they say, attempting to reach for their guns. After demanding he show them his ID, the confrontation escalated into a fight.
"The soldiers had high suspicions that he was a terrorist," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Thursday morning.
Only after the IDF troops shot the man down did they find out he was not an Arab Palestinian as they had assumed, but a Jew from Jerusalem. As soon as they realized their mistake, the soldiers stopped calling the man a "terrorist."
Emergency responders with the largely Orthodox volunteer organization ZAKA were on the scene. Chairman Yehuda Meshi Zahav said he also believed the man was an Arab terrorist.
"When I arrived with the ZAKA team at the site of the supposed terrorist attack, it seemed to be a ‘standard' current terrorist attack, a stabbing attempt, and the terrorist was apprehended," Zahav told the Post.
"I wanted to cover the body in a black bag [reserved for terrorists]. After I was asked to take care of the body I saw that he was a Jew, and that it was mistake to speak of a terrorist. I immediately notified the police and we switched to a white ZAKA body bag."
New York University research fellow Remi Brulin, whose work focuses on "discourse of terrorism," said the term has been used as means of propaganda from the very start, and is in fact a meaningless concept as a result.
JPost: perfect illustration of how "terrorist" is pure propaganda term, nothing to do w/ nature of act perpetrated pic.twitter.com/5URj36KlgO
— Remi Brulin (@RBrulin) October 22, 2015
Why change the label so suddenly if the conduct was the same? Looks like, in Israel, walking the terrorist walk (allegedly) doesn't make you a terrorist unless you're a Palestinian.
