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| The murder victims: real people, real lives, real loss |
This Ongoing War..
02 April '13..
In September 2011, we wrote here:
What seemed on Friday to be a routine car accident now turns out to have been an attack by terrorists in the vicinity of the Jewish community of Kiryat Arba. [Source]. The Jerusalem Post reports this evening that police now believe that rock throwing was the cause of the car accident that killed Asher Hillel Palmer, 25, and his one-year-old son Yonatan on Friday. At a court hearing today, counsel for the police said that it now appears the car veered off the road after a rock shattered its windshield. "The police said that the front window was shattered, and a large rock was found inside the car with Palmer's blood on it. People close to the victims claimed that the police quickly determined it as a car accident in order not to inflame the region." A young man and his baby son are dead and a family is forever shattered.
Some time afterwards, we got to know Michael Palmer. A man of great dignity, carefully spoken, determined, he is Asher's bereaved father and the murdered one year-old Yonatan's saba (grandfather). A cultured person who keeps his opinions mostly to himself, he faced (we are assuming) a question with which we ourselves have had to grapple and to answer: They killed my loved ones. What is there for me to do now?
Michael set out to do whatever is humanly possible to bring the killers to justice. This, for the benefit of readers living in comfortable places far from here, is not always so easy to do and never to be taken for granted.
We know only some of what he managed to do. We know he retained a lawyer who knows the military court system inside out - not an obvious thing to do, but one that helps to level the playing field. He pressured the authorities to treat the deaths of the young father and his baby son as murder by terrorism: the signs were there for anyone who wanted to see them, but at first the authorities did not see them.
He pressed for the law to to be applied in the manner appropriate to cold-blooded perpetrators who set out to develop killing skills, and who eventually succeed in killing.
He resisted with incredible firmness some of the more idiotic aspects of the military justice and prison system, some of which we were there to witness ourselves.
He patiently endured postponements and adjournments, one after another: the defence lawyer fails to arrive in time, the prisoner has to prepare for exams, another reason, another excuse, another nerve-wracking delay.
He encouraged well-intentioned strangers and friends to come and be there in the small court room at Machane Ofer on Jerusalem's northern edge - not only to be there but to be there with photographs in our hands. Photos of Asher and of Yonatan. By this, he succeeded in creating something unusual in a terrorism trial: an awareness of the victims. When our daughter Malki's murderers were tried in a different military court eleven years ago, we were told nothing before, during or after. The first intimations we had of their arrests and convictions came when we read about them in the news.
(Continue)
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