After 3 years, the French court ruled in the 'Les Zeitouni' case: Eric Rubik and Claude Hayat were convicted of the death of the young woman in Tel Aviv and their abandonment, and were sentenced to five years and fifteen months in prison, respectively.
The verdict resurfaced the painful incident from September 2011 when Lee Zaitouni, a 30-year-old woman crossing the road at the intersection of Weizmann and Naksa streets in Tel Aviv, was run over by a black sports car, and was left bleeding on the road by the rapists who rushed to flee the scene, and the country. Now, 3 years after the event, and justice has already been served, it is perhaps permissible to raise some reflections on the semantics that accompany us in times of disasters and tragedies, in which human factors are involved.
With the tragic death of the late Lee, and her abandonment injured on the road, a tremendous emotional wave arose that gradually gained momentum. Everyone sought revenge on the perpetrators. Among the multitude of organizations and initiatives to extradite the drivers of the vehicle to Israel from France, the phrases "murderer," "animal," "monster," and so on and so forth came up again and again. Many of the commenters on radio channels and news websites called for "eliminating" the murderer, running him over, and others, with a more developed imagination, suggested throwing him into the lion's cage at the zoo and watching him face off with the beasts of prey.
But in the heat of deep pain, we seem to have forgotten one simple and tragic truth in all its poignancy: the driver who hit and killed the late Lee did not intend to murder him. The accident occurred due to a lack of vigilance, disobeying traffic signs, or even criminal negligence, but not out of a desire or intent to murder the poor young woman. The driver's big mistake was not precisely the injury that - according to the descriptions - the late Lee could not have survived, but rather his unfortunate choice, which stemmed either from a personality disorder or from an unclear fear, to abandon the scene and flee abroad.
Let there be no misunderstanding. The man is a criminal and must serve his sentence. This act of abandoning a wounded man in the field is a crime for which the perpetrator must pay and be punished, but from here to 'cold-blooded murderer', and other descriptions that recalled the terminology that accompanied the trial of Roni Ron and Marie Pizem, there is still a long way to go. Even according to the Jewish-halachic definition, the vehicle owner is considered a 'murderer by mistake approaching premeditation' who is sentenced to life imprisonment in a 'city of refuge', that is, in a closed space used as a prison, and some would say that this case even allows the 'redeemer of blood' to kill him without law or trial, but even that still does not make him a mass murderer.
And this semantics is very important. As with personal and national tragedies, the voices of various entities rise in the public sphere. Family members and close friends who express their pain from a place that no one who is not in the same position is allowed to judge, even if these positions do not always match their own, and the crowd around them, which also includes various journalists, who give free rein to their sharp tongues and put forward suggestions, ideas, and hypotheses without any distinction. It should be remembered that even if these statements come from a place of honesty and truth [and not out of a desire to ride some wave, etc.], they do not necessarily reflect reality as it is.
Sentiments, emotions, and intuition can be crucial players in initial reactions to dramatic events, and they do not necessarily serve the purpose or correctly characterize the chain of events. In cases like these, semantics are very important, because despite the great severity of the act of ramming, it must be said that the driver, Arik Rubik, is still not a terrorist who enters a synagogue early in the morning and slaughters people with a butcher knife.
It would have been good if the driver had turned himself in to the police and served his sentence. It would have been even better if he had not abandoned the late Lee, bleeding on the road, and it would have been wonderful if he had driven carefully and not taken the life of a young woman who had not sinned, in the prime of her life. It is very reasonable to assume that the man's life will change from now on and he will receive his reward one way or another. But since all of this has already been done, we need to examine whether the driver should be treated, at least verbally, as a fugitive criminal required to serve his sentence according to law, or as a mass murderer wanted for a sentence of hanging in the city square.
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