Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2002, pages 12-13

Special Report

 

Second Or Commission Hearings Produce Same Old Excuses, Some New Revelations

 

By Jonathan Cook

Eighteen months of judicial hearings into the killing by Israeli police of 13 Arab citizens of Israel at the start of the current intifada came to a hurried end in August, as secret documents were revealed suggesting both that senior politicians, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, had lied to the inquiry and that the police had adopted a policy of treating the country’s Arab minority as a “hostile enemy” since 1994.

The Or Commission, which has been taking testimony since February 2001, is investigating the violent confrontation between Israeli police and Arab demonstrators in the northern Galilee region in early October 2000.

In the first round of hearings, it emerged that, from the outset, commanders ordered the use of rubber bullets and live ammunition against protesters, injuring hundreds in addition to the 13 who died. Alik Ron, the northern commander, also admitted sending a team of snipers to the Galilee, the first time such a unit had been deployed against Israeli citizens.

Justice Theodor Or, who heads the inquiry, issued letters early this year to 14 individuals, warning each they faced grave allegations of misconduct against which they should be prepared to defend themselves in a second round of hearings.

Among the recipients were a handful of the country’s top policemen and the two most senior Israeli politicians of the time—Barak and joint foreign minister and internal security minister Shlomo Ben Ami. Three Arab politicians also were warned, accused of inciting the demonstrators.

But the second hearings, which began in June, largely failed to explore the issues in more detail than the first. Each “warnee” could be questioned only by the panel and lawyers for the other 13 warnees. This meant that the families of the Arab dead had no standing before the commission and their legal representatives no opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses.

The commission’s procedure was severely criticized by a delegation of lawyers from the Irish law firm Madden Finucane, which is representing families of the Bloody Sunday victims—14 civil rights marchers shot dead by the British army in Derry in 1972—at the current Saville inquiry. After observing the hearings, the Irish lawyers concluded that the failure to give the families proper representation contravened the internationally accepted standards of a commission of inquiry.

The families’ exclusion was another blow to Israel’s Arab minority, which already had been forced to accept that individual blame will probably never be assigned for most of the 13 deaths. Of the 14 warnees, only two are believed to have been directly involved in the killings: police officers Guy Reif and Murshad Rashed are thought to be responsible for up to three deaths.

Or tried to rush through the evidence at breakneck speed, managing to question the warnees and their character witnesses in less than three months. Many witnesses simply restated their evidence from the previous hearings.

Barak, who was given a particularly easy ride in the first hearings, again avoided clarifying key issues, the most pressing of which was what exactly he said at a meeting of senior police and security officials in his home on the night of Oct. 1.

It is known that the debate centered on police tactics for keeping open the Wadi Ara road, which demonstrators from the neighboring town of Umm al-Fahm had closed for much of the day. Ron brought the snipers in to Umm al-Fahm the next day, Oct. 2, to help open the road, then transferred them to Nazareth. A spate of deaths followed.

In a radio interview by Barak on the morning of Oct. 2, the prime minister stated that he had given the police “the green light for any action necessary” to keep the road open. During his questioning in August, however, he claimed the statement had been made merely to restore calm among the Jewish population.

In fact, he testified, in private he had told the police to exercise their discretion and not to provoke the crowd of demonstrators. This account did not tally with Ron’s version, however, in which he said he was ordered by his boss, police chief Yehuda Wilk—who was at the meeting with Barak—to keep the road open at all costs.

What really took place at that meeting is unlikely ever to be known, as there apparently is no written record of it. Barak’s military secretary, Gadi Eizenkot, has said at different times both that no record was taken and that the tape recorder used in the meeting failed to work.

Another issue which Barak was able to skirt was why, against the advice of the Shin Bet and his advisers, he refused to meet the Arab leadership before the deaths in October. Barak’s explanation was that such a meeting was pointless because “long-term problems would have come up in any such discussion”—a presumed reference to the decades of discrimination against Israel’s Arab minority.

The statement implicitly contradicted Barak’s other claim: that the intensity of the demonstrations, the “earthquake,” as he repeatedly called it, caught everyone by surprise (though not, according to their testimony, the Shin Bet, who had been urging him to meet with the Arab leadership). If, as Barak admitted, there were serious long-term problems that needed addressing but about which he was not prepared to talk, why was he or anyone else caught off guard by the ensuing explosion of anger?

Finally, there was the issue of Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Haram al-Sharif on Sept. 28, 2000, which unleashed the intifada. Barak testified that he approved the visit in coordination with Palestinian officials. But both Israeli police reports and the Mitchell Report, produced by American envoy George Mitchell, rebut this.

The latter, for example, states: “Palestinian and U.S. officials urged then Prime Minister Ehud Barak to prohibit the visit. Mr. Barak told us that he believed the visit was intended to be an internal political act directed against him by a political opponent, and he declined to prohibit it.”

This and much other serious investigative legwork in both sets of hearings was done by the Adalah legal center for the Arab minority in Israel, representing the families of the 13 dead. It submitted many revealing documents.

One of the most embarrassing came during the testimony of Internal Security Minister Ben Ami. Prepared by Ministry officials shortly after the 13 deaths, the report was subtitled “Cover-up for the minister.” It suggested that Ben Ami claim that the Arab demonstrators fired guns at the police, an allegation that was promoted in the media for many months but subsequently was shown to be false.

Another official document showed that Ben Ami had told police commanders at a closed meeting in November 2000 that his ministry would voice support for all actions taken by the police during the October clashes. This was despite reports in the Israeli media at the time that snipers had been used in the Galilee.

Ben Ami later performed an about-face, however: during his testimony in November 2001 he shuffled off responsibility for the deaths by blaming the police for disobeying him. During the second hearings, his lawyers advised him that by blaming the police he was effectively blaming himself as internal security minister—so Ben Ami changed his account once again, this time referring to Wilk as “one of the best police chiefs.”

In the second hearings, Adalah lawyers had hoped they might be allowed to cross-examine the senior policemen and Barak and Ben Ami over their roles in October 2000 on behalf of the families. Instead they were allowed to attend only in their capacity as “defense lawyers” for the three Arab politicians: Tajamu Member of Knesset Azmi Bishara, and Islamic Movement leaders Abdulmalik Dehamshe and Sheikh Raed Salah. Inevitably this forced them to concentrate on countering the commission’s allegations that the Arab politicians provoked or encouraged the clashes in the Galilee.

 

For the first time a team of snipers had been deployed against Israeli citizens.

The legal team produced three expert witnesses, all academics from Tel Aviv University, who rejected the assumption behind Or’s warnings that the Arab leadership was to blame for the outbreak of violence.

Prof. Dan Rabinowitz caused the most upset by producing official reports suggesting that the police had taken a decision in 1994, after the start of the Oslo peace process, to treat Arab citizens as a hostile enemy. Consequently police strategies for dealing with protests among the Arab population were framed in military terms. Given the police view that a clash was inevitable, the senior command came to favor an approach that relied on force and guns as a primary means of control.

It may have been no coincidence that at the end of the sessions, after Adalah’s witnesses had produced the only shocks to disturb the smooth progress of the hearings, the legal center found itself the unexpected target of a state investigation.

Israel’s registrar of non-profit organizations, Amiram Bogot, leaked to the press details of “irregular financial management” at the center. He also accused it of having been hijacked by Bishara’s party. Bishara is currently on trial charged with supporting a terrorist group, Hezbollah, in an attack on free speech that has heaped international condemnation on Israel (see August 2002 Washington Report, p. 15).

Adalah has made itself more unpopular than usual with the Israeli establishment by being at the center of a wave of court petitions against Israeli military activities in the occupied territories. It has accused the state of breaches of international law over house demolitions, family deportations and the use of Palestinians as human shields.

The daily English-language newspaper The Jerusalem Post also joined the fray with articles implying that Adalah had an anti-Semitic agenda. The paper is widely read among American Jews.

Bogot immediately launched an investigation of Adalah, which the legal center claimed was an attempt to discredit it. It added that it had not been approached by the registrar about his suspicions, nor had any documents or information been requested.

The fear among Adalah lawyers is likely to be that with so much mud being thrown around some of it will stick. Like other Arab non-governmental organizations in Israel, the legal center relies almost exclusively on money from American and European funders, some of it linked to the Jewish left. These donors may withdraw if there is any hint that Adalah is not squeaky clean.

The Or Commission’s final report is not expected for several more months. Each of the warnees now has until mid-October to submit any additional evidence in their favor.

The report is almost certain to recommend policy changes in the police force, including better training in crowd control, the purchase of equipment such as water cannons, and possibly the outlawing of sniper teams inside Israeli areas. The northern police force announced in July that it was banning the use of rubber bullets for crowd control following repeated criticism of the practice by Or.

The temptation now will be for Or to spread the blame evenly among the police, politicians and the Arab leadership, thereby effectively suggesting that the deaths were the outcome of a series of misunderstandings that led to an unfortunate escalation of tension.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak takes the stand Aug. 20 at Israel’s Supreme Court in Jerusalem. Barak testified in front of the special Or Commission investigating the deaths of 13 Israeli Arabs in riots that erupted in October 2000, following Ariel Sharon’s provocative tour of Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif.

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