Brig. Gen. Yisrael Shomer at a situation assessment meeting, in April.Credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

The army boots peek out from under the black gown, each head sports a black mortarboard. These are the recipients of an honorary doctorate from Reichman University in 2024, awarded this year “in recognition of”Israeli heroism": a dime-store propagandist (Noa Tishby); the commander of a tank company (Capt. Karni Gez); a founder of Brothers and Sisters in Arms (Eyal Naveh); a leader of the Gaza-border communities (Haim Jelin) and Brig. Gen. Yisrael Shomer, commander of the 146^th Division.

Shomer was cited for having “devoted many years to the strength and security of the State of Israel.” According to the university’s website, “The honor is bestowed upon individuals whose actions exemplify the values of Zionism, entrepreneurship, social responsibility and academic integrity, and in recognition of their impactful contributions to the State of Israel, the Jewish people, and Reichman University.”

Flashback: Friday morning, July 3, 2015, Qalandiyah checkpoint in the West Bank. The traffic moves slowly. A Palestinian teenager approaches the car of Binyamin Brigade commander Col. Yisrael Shomer, hurls a large rock into the windshield and flees. No one was hurt. The future honorary doctor’s blood boils; he gets out of his car and gives chase.

The brigade commander fires three bullets from a range of six to seven meters into the back of the fleeing boy, who falls bleeding and dies soon afterward in the hospital. The death penalty for throwing a rock. Before speeding away, the brigade commander took the time to turn over his victim’s body with his foot to check his condition, the way one turns over a dead animal, without calling for medical help.

Mohammed Kosba was 17, the child of refugees. He was the third son whom his parents, Fatma and Sami, lost. His brothers Yasser, 10, and Samer, 15, were also shot dead by the army after throwing rocks. They were killed within 40 days of each other in the winter of 2002. (“The 40 days of Sami Kosba,” I called my article about them.) The first time I came to their home in the refugee camp, after his brothers were killed, Mohammed was 4.

He was buried next to his brothers 13 years later, and the blood on the traffic island had not yet dried when I got there. The IDF promised to investigate. The teenager posed no threat to him when the brigade commander decided to punish him for daring to throw a rock at the car of a Jewish officer. If this had happened on the Ayalon Highway, in central Israel, the shooter presumably would have been arrested and tried for reckless homicide. But Shomer was an IDF officer and his victim was a Palestinian teenager who had lost two of his brothers and didn’t want to see an occupation army near his refugee camp.

A year later, the army closed the investigation, as is customary. Two years later, the IDF’s last halfway-principled chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, delayed the promotion of the officer who killed the boy as he fled. But Shomer’s career got back on track after the minor derailment. He is set to become the head of the IDF Operations Division, with an honorary doctorate.

The honor goes to him, the disgrace to Reichman University. While people at Harvard, which Reichman would very much like to resemble, are fighting against the war in Gaza and for the rights of the Palestinian people, at Reichman an honorary doctorate is awarded to a killer of children. A university that bears the name of its founder during his lifetime, peculiar in itself, that excels in close ties to the defense establishment – as if it were the Israel National Defense College, rather than a private university – that has long since exceeded the proper boundaries of academia, gives out medals to officers from whose disgraceful conduct even the chief of staff took exception.

But there is a war on in Israel, and everyone is mobilized to the cause. Shomer lives in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, on the border with Gaza, and at Reichman, which has been in service to the military since the day it was founded, wants to pay tribute to him and obscure his misdeed. But in Qalandiyah there is no forgetting the cowardly officer who chased after an impoverished refugee boy who had lost two of his brothers and shot him in the back three times at close range. An IDF brigade commander with the behavior of a hotheaded criminal. The people of Qalandiyah will never forget, even if Brig. Gen. Shomer continues to receive honorary degrees from dishonorable universities.

Gideon Levy