Panel Probes Police Killings of 13 Protesters

For eight months, even as Arab-Israeli violence has raged in the world outside its hearing room, a state-appointed commission of inquiry has doggedly pursued Israel’s first public probe into the way its police force treats Arab citizens.

In normal times, the revelations coming out of the Or Commission--a three-man panel investigating why violent demonstrations convulsed Israeli Arab towns and villages in October 2000 and why police shot dead 13 of the protesters--would be front-page news here.

In hundreds of hours of testimony--clouded by the commissioners’ voiced suspicions of coordination--police officers have laid out how poorly equipped, ill-trained and understaffed the force was when the riots erupted. They have detailed slipshod investigating procedures in instances of officer-involved shootings. Most damaging for the force, senior commanders have acknowledged ordering police snipers to shoot at stone throwers in violation of standing orders on opening fire.

But the commission’s work has gone largely unnoticed by Arab and Israeli publics too worried about what the future holds to care much about what went wrong a year ago and who should be held accountable.

And as officers have testified under oath in the Supreme Court building here that, in nearly every case, they don’t know who shot the victims, hope has faded among the families of those killed that anyone will be found responsible.

Even as Israeli Arabs, and some Israeli Jews, today planned commemorations of the demonstrators’ deaths, both sides agree that the last year has been one of the worst for relations between them. Few believe that the commission’s conclusions--expected sometime next summer--will turn things around. Many wonder whether they will make any difference at all.

“There is a war around us, there is a conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and the government doesn’t care now what happens to Arabs inside Israel,” said Hassan Asleh. His 19-year-old son, Assil, active in a U.S.-based Arab-Israeli coexistence group called Seeds of Peace, was shot to death in the October riots.

Asleh heads a committee, formed by relatives of the victims, that regularly attends Or Commission hearings and demonstrates outside the hall when key witnesses testify.

It pains him, Asleh said, that few Arabs outside of the victims’ families pay attention to the proceedings. The apathy, he said, is born of a conviction that the panel will not deliver the justice the Arabs crave and will not find individual officers and their commanders responsible at a time of a national security crisis.

If the commission ultimately does place blame, Asleh said, “Arabs would start again to believe that there is a chance to live in this country.”

In fact, Israel has never engaged in the sort of public examination of its security forces’ actions toward its own citizens that the Or Commission--named for the panel head, Supreme Court Justice Theodor Or--is conducting. Never before have officers, from the lowliest cop on the beat to senior commanders, had to publicly explain not only their deployment, training, equipment and tactics, but also their strategy and mind-set in controlling Israeli Arab demonstrations.

“The commission is bringing things into the light that have never been discussed before,” said Sarah Kreimer, director of a nonprofit organization that encourages economic development in Israeli Arab communities. “It is revealing that the police look at Israeli Arabs differently and treat them differently” from Jews.

Israeli Arabs, who make up nearly a fifth of the population, are Palestinians who became Israeli citizens because they did not flee their homes when the nation was born in 1948, along with their descendants. They are split between those who want to push for full rights in the Jewish state and those who want to disengage completely, Kreimer said, and the commission’s recommendations could be important in nudging Israeli Arabs toward one direction or the other.

The commission’s work has sometimes sparked extreme responses. After one victim’s enraged father slugged a testifying police officer in the face, a glass partition was erected and security guards became ubiquitous.

Public Security Minister Uzi Landau has indicated that he has little faith in a panel he regards as a political payoff that then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Israeli Arabs in the midst of an election campaign that Barak ultimately lost to Ariel Sharon.

Landau has said publicly that he may not accept all the commission’s recommendations--a rare, blunt attack on a commission of inquiry from an Israeli Cabinet minister. In another controversial gesture, Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit made what he called a solidarity visit to the commission when Alik Ron testified. Ron was commander of the Northern District police force during the riots. He came under intense questioning from the commission for ordering snipers to shoot demonstrators and for other decisions.

Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, an organization pressing for Israeli Arabs’ rights in Israel, said he finds value in the reams of testimony the commission is wading through.

“In the end, it is the process, not the result, that is important,” Jabareen said. “It is important that every day, police are brought to the bench to answer questions they have never been asked before. It is significant because the state has never respected seriously the status of Arabs as citizens, and with this going on, what happened in October is not forgotten.”

The sessions also have “empowered the families of the victims,” Jabareen said. “The killing of their sons became important. And it empowered the Arab community, because we brought people here to tell their stories without fear.”

The events that began Oct. 1, 2000, started as a display of Israeli Arab sympathy for and solidarity with Palestinians, who were battling Israeli forces in the wake of then-opposition leader Sharon’s Sept. 28 visit to a site in Jerusalem’s Old City that is holy to Muslims and Jews. As the toll of dead and injured Palestinians in the clashes mounted that weekend, thousands of Israeli Arabs took to the streets.

The demonstrators saw their protests as legitimate forms of civil dissent against the Israeli army’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The police saw the demonstrations as a civil revolt or insurrection. Time and again, officers have testified that they had never faced riots that were so large-scale and violent, and that they believed that their lives, along with the lives of Jewish civilians in communities near Arab towns and villages, were at risk.

Demonstrators blocked main roads, stoned cars driven by Jews, hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at police and torched government offices, banks and post offices in Arab communities. Police responded fiercely, deploying snipers to shoot even those armed with just slingshots.

Before the violence subsided, 13 demonstrators were dead, many more were injured, and Jews and Arabs were on the verge of panic. Under pressure, Barak appointed the Or Commission, made up of Or, academic Shimon Shamir, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Egypt and Jordan, and Sahel Jarrah, who was later replaced by Hashem Hatib, a fellow Arab judge.

In their questioning, the trio has explored everything from the fundamental nature of relations between Jews and Arabs here to the details of how many tear gas canisters were available to police deployed to put down riots in a particular village.

Even Jabareen, harshly critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of its Arab citizens, credits the commission with seriousness of purpose.

Ultimately, Jabareen said, the commission “could send a message that the blood of the citizens killed by those acting for the state is not that cheap.”