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June 8, 2001/Sivan 17, 5761, Vol. 53, No.36
Arabs let down by riot panel
ORI NIR
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Behind a thick glass wall that protects witnesses from audience attacks, the state commission investigating the deaths of Israeli Arabs in clashes with police last October resumed its discussions this week.
The testimonies were suspended for three months after a bereaved Arab father beat up a police officer who testified that he shot demonstrators at the entrance to the Arab town of Sakhnin early last October.
The glass wall is intended to let Israel's Arab minority see how justice is carried out, while preventing the audience at the commission hall in Jerusalem from further attacking witnesses. Relatives of Arab youngsters killed in the riots twice attacked policemen whose testimony enraged them during hearings of the state commission that they themselves had demanded.
More than anything, the wall is a reflection of the deepening division between Israeli Jews and Arabs following last October's riots.
A public opinion poll published last week - the first scientific poll of Israeli Arabs since the riots - shows that 33 percent of the 1,202 Arab citizens surveyed believe the term "Israeli" best defines their identity, compared to 63 percent in 1995. Only 35 percent said they feel a stronger affinity to Israeli Jews than they do to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, compared to 50 percent six years ago.
Almost half - 46 percent - said they reject Israel's existence as a Zionist state, compared with 35 percent in 1995. A majority of 58 percent said that the intifada had distanced them from the state.
Opinion polls among Israeli Jews show a parallel resentment toward the country's Arab citizens.
The state commission headed by Supreme Court Judge Theodor Orr was supposed to help bridge the rift between Israeli Arabs and Jews. Eight months after riots and four months after public hearings began, however, the commission has emphasized the rift and, possibly, even deepened it.
Much of the Arab public's frustration stems from enormous expectations. Israeli Arabs expected the commission to focus not only on the circumstances and results of the October riots but on what they claim were the causes of the violent protest - years of alleged police brutality and government discrimination.
However, the commission is not attempting to dig into such deep wounds, and therefore now is being perceived as alienated from the Arab public, says Arab Knesset member Azmi Beshara.
Israeli Arabs hoped the commission would renew their sense of affinity with the Israeli left, and they hoped to use the hearings as a podium to recount their claims of injustice to the international community. They also viewed it as the closest thing possible to a tribunal that would hear their indictment against the Jewish establishment.
Late last January, the Arabs' umbrella leadership body, the Higher Monitoring Committee for the Affairs of Israel's Arab Public, presented the Orr panel with a collection of testimonies regarding the October events. As he handed them the files, Monitoring Committee Chairman Muhammad Zeidan told commission representatives that he was submitting an indictment against the state of Israel, in the name of a million Arab citizens.
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