An Israel Defense Force colonel who ordered his troops to break the arms and legs of Palestinians arrested for rioting was stripped of his rank by a special military court Tuesday and discharged from the army as a private.
In a verdict handed down April 8, the court had found Col. Yehuda Meir guilty of brutality. He is the highest-ranking IDF officer convicted on that charge.
But on Tuesday, the judges decided his actions did not warrant a jail term, though the law allows up to a 20-year sentence for the offense.
The case dates back to January 1988, when the intifada, the Palestinian uprising, was in its second month. Meir ordered troops under his command to beat and break the limbs of Palestinians who had been taken into custody during disturbances in the West Bank villages of Beita and Huwara, near Nablus.
Meir was not present at the beatings. But the court rejected the defense argument that his orders conformed with instructions issued by then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and passed on by Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, then commander of the central sector, which includes the West Bank.
While Rabin acknowledged giving such instructions in the early days of the intifada, they applied only to rioters caught in the act, not as post-facto punishment.
The court found, moreover, that even if Meir had such instructions from his superiors, he was “obliged to rise up and fight against them, because the orders were patently illegal.”
Shortly after the incident came to light, the IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, and Judge Advocate General Amnon Strashnov — both since retired — decided not to court-martial Col. Meir but to retire him from the military.
He was thereby eligible for full pension when he left the army a year later, well below retirement age.
Widespread protests followed in the media. Knesset member Yossi Sarid of the Citizens Rights appealed to the High Court of Justice, which recommended that the IDF put Meir on trial.
Sarid believes the colonel should have gone to jail, and he accused the military court Tuesday of being overly lenient.
But military legal circles indicated the prosecution would not appeal the sentence.
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