Economist: Black October

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue Jul 17 06:01:14 PDT 2001


Israel's Palestinians

Post-mortem on Black October

Jul 12th 2001 | GALILEE
>From The Economist print edition

Uncomfortable findings from the inquiry into the internal intifada

A non-Jewish problem for the Jewish state

NINE months after Israel's 1m or so Palestinian citizens briefly joined the intifada, their towns and villages are quiet. Their mood is not. "All of Israel now recognises us as a problem for the Jewish state," says Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian leader.

Liberal Israelis believe that the remedy is investment, plus job and other preferment to redress the chronic discrimination that Israel's Palestinians suffer in every public sphere. Less liberal ones, including many people now in the government, see the source of the problem as a latent nationalism that the intifada rekindled-and are determined to snuff it out.

In recent months, Palestinian politicians have been detained without charge, writers have been questioned by intelligence officers about their "extremist nationalist" writings, and the police have recommended that Azmi Bishara, a radical member of the Knesset from the Arab-nationalist Balad movement, should be tried for sedition. In June he made a speech in Syria calling on Arabs to "resist" Ariel Sharon's government. He also applauded the "heroic example" of Hizbullah.

These may not have been the brightest comments to make. But Mr Bishara said nothing in Syria that he has not also said on the floor of the Knesset. There is also the matter of parliamentary immunity. And at a time when Jewish Knesset members are calling Yasser Arafat "a murderer" and questioning whether Israel's Arab citizens should have the vote, the police's recommendation suggests double standards.

Those double standards are being examined by an official commission of inquiry into the violent events last October, the "internal" Palestinian intifada. The commission was reluctantly set up by Ehud Barak's government, and is now into its seventh week of public hearings."Black October" was perhaps the bloodiest confrontation between the state and its Palestinian minority in Israel's 53-year history: in the demonstrations, 13 Palestinians were killed and 1,000 sent to hospital.

The commission's recommendations "may or may not be accepted," says Uzi Landau, Israel's public-security minister. The minister's discomfort arises from the evidence the commission is hearing about the behaviour of his police. The line of the last Israeli government, from Mr Barak down, was that the police had used only rubber bullets in the October clashes. The commission has swiftly put paid to that fiction. It has unearthed the government's own autopsies to prove that at least two of the 13 victims were killed by conventional ammunition (and that, suspiciously, only four autopsies were carried out).

It has also found that police snipers were authorised to fire conventional bullets from rooftops at protesting boys and young men armed with slingshots. For Israel's Palestinian public, this sounds perilously close to a shoot-to-kill policy. It quashes the previous government's defence that the police shot only in "life-endangering" situations.

Above all, the commission has exposed the disparity in government policy towards its Jewish and its Arab citizens. Against Palestinian protesters, the police were given "a green light to do whatever is needed" (as Mr Barak put it in an interview on Israeli radio on October 2nd). Yet when faced with a 3,000-strong Jewish mob torching mosques and attacking Arab shops in Tiberias, the police's orders were to "leave their guns in their cars".

In the long run, says Hassan Jabareen, whose legal centre unofficially represents the victims' families, the hearings will educate Israeli Jews as to what the Israeli Palestinians' struggle is now about. It is not, he insists, for separate sovereignty, as many Jews fear. But neither any longer is it just for the civil equality that was long promised by successive governments but never honoured. After Black October, he says, "the Palestinian struggle inside Israel is for a new definition of citizenship that recognises us as a national minority."

Copyright © 1995-2001 The Economist Newspaper Group Ltd. All rights reserved.



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