BY JOHN WALLACH | NEW YORK Seeds of Peace sorrowfully mourns the first anniversary of the death of our dear and beloved colleage Asel Asleh. While we commend the Or Commission for its continuing investigation, we regret that no fault has yet been found nor responsibility determined for this violent act despite hundreds of hours of testimony.
The family of Asel Asleh deserves more. They deserve a thorough investigation, regardless of where it leads. They deserve that those responsible will be identified and held accountable. They deserve the minimum that a democratic society assures all its citizens: a fair and unbiased trial in which all evidence is presented and a verdict is reached, so that justice may be done.
The testimony presented by the police to date has failed to show that Asel was personally involved in any violence on the day of this tragic event. To the contrary, all of the testimony has shown that when the officers first saw him, in his green Seeds of Peace t-shirt, he was lying in a pool of blood or was falling down in a grove of trees. None of them have testified that they saw him participating in violence, exhorting anyone else to violence, or in any way standing out among the crowd of protestors.
Asel’s hundreds of friends and fellow Seeds deserve to know the truth. We deserve to know what happened. There can never be closure for his family which has been robbed of an intelligent, sensitive, caring, committed son.
Asel’s commitment to the cause of peace between Arabs and Israelis is what we remember most. He gave throughout his life to advance these noble goals. In death, he—and we—deserve no less than a full accounting of the brutal act that robbed him, and us, of the promise of a life yet unfulfilled, a life that would have continued to spread goodness, fairness, justice and equality among all those he met. We implore the Or Commission to conclude its inquiry and to have the same bravery, courage and commitment that Asel had to lay blame wherever it might justifiably be—so that justice might ultimately be done.
John Wallach (1943-2002) was Founder and President of Seeds of Peace.