MISJUDGED? Although polls show that 67% of the Israeli public believes Azaria should be pardoned only President Reuven Rivlin has the power to pardon the soldier (Photo: Flash90)

A day after a military court sentenced Elor Azaria to 18 months in prison and demoted him to private for the shooting death of an Arab terrorist in Hebron last Purim IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot found himself on the defensive in the Knesset. Lawmakers charged that pre-trial comments by top military officials prejudiced the case against Azaria and his arrest and conviction have shaken the fighting spirit of the IDF.

Eisenkot told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the military system acted “fairly” with the soldier and his family and rejected outside pressure to pardon Azaria or commute his sentence.

“There is an organized process and it needs to happen within the army and not in public or here in the Knesset” said Eisenkot who denied any interference with the legal proceedings and instead accused certain Knesset members of playing politics with the case.

Aside from Azaria’s fate the Knesset committee confronted Eisenkot with an internal report by the IDF’s Department of Behavioral Sciences showing that just 41 percent of combat soldiers think they will receive IDF support and backing if they make a mistake on the battlefield.

Eisenkot rejected this out of hand: “Since the Azaria incident there have been 200 incidents in which soldiers fired weapons and in each case the soldiers were not affected and acted appropriately”