The shocking video of an Israeli soldier executing a wounded man lying prostrate on the ground in the West Bank city of Hebron last March threatened to do irreparable damage to the “enlightened conqueror” image that Israel tries so hard to present to the world. That damage pales in comparison, however, to the deep cracks left in the pillars of Israeli democracy by the affair of the “shooting soldier,” Elor Azaria. In a somewhat ironic coincidence, on the day after Azaria's court martial sentencing, the state’s Judicial Appointments Committee on Feb. 22 appointed four new justices to the Supreme Court. Since the founding of the state, never have the prospects for justices' appointments depended so heavily on the similarity between their political views and those of the sitting government. Indeed, three of the four justices selected by the committee are considered conservatives.

When I was young, we were taught that the court was a place where people went to get justice. We were told that the judicial and enforcement arms of government, which also includes prosecutors and police, were equipped with the best possible tools for protecting the values of morality, equality and compassion. The most cherished tool among them was said to be public trust in the integrity of judges and their ability to render justice impartially. Indeed, it is incumbent on an enlightened state to maintain a system of checks and balances through its various courts and judicial panels.

What is a school child to think, then, about the reaction of the education minister, Naftali Bennett, to the verdict rendered in the trial of the soldier convicted of manslaughter for killing an unarmed, injured assailant — to wit, “The investigation process was basically contaminated”? How will a teacher respond to a student who asks about Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev's charge that the Azaria verdict was a “direct outcome of the summary justice” meted out to the soldier from the start? Is it possible that the three judges who sat in judgment of the soldier did not base their rulings on the laws of evidence, natural law and the particular circumstances of the event? Given such views, there are two possibilities to explain the judges' action from the perspective of the right, which claims Azaria is innocent and is demanding that his 18-month jail sentence be commuted even though it is a more lenient punishment than the ones meted out to Palestinians who throw stones at Israelis.

One possibility is that the military police, the military prosecutors and the judges conspired to convict a “brave soldier.” Their contention, however, that Azaria shot Abdul Fatah al-Sharif because “he deserved to die,” to quote the soldier, is a despicable plot not supported by the facts. The second possibility is that the judges in their verdict veered from the customary norms of the Israeli military when they wrote, “The use of force for reasons other than a defined mission, involving the taking of a human life, even that of a terrorist, is unacceptable.” In keeping with that possibility, there was also no reason for the judges to write, “Respect for human rights and the safeguarding of human dignity, even that of an enemy, are embedded in the character of the state as a Jewish and democratic state.”