Background to controversial police shootings of Arab rioters
Sheikh Raed Salah is right - by Israel Harel, Haaretz website
The Police Investigations Department (PID) has announced that it will not indict any police officers for the killing of 13 Arabs during the October 2000 rebellion. In response, the leader of the Islamic Movement’s northern branch and the most influential figure among Israel’s Muslim population, Sheikh Raed Salah, declared that if Israel does not change its attitude toward its Arab citizens, in 20 years it will cease to exist.
The sheikh, although somewhat impatient, is accurate in his forecast: If Israel continues to allow him and his friends to go on eroding it from within, it will cease to exist. Already now, in not insignificant expanses in the Triangle and the Galilee - but especially in the Negev - the Arabs have created islands of de facto autonomy. And the aggressive, creeping isolationism, together with natural population growth double that of the Jewish rate, are liable to bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish state, if not in another 20 years, then in another 40 to 50 years.
The media, which joined in the Arab criticism of the PID, barely mentions what really happened in October 2000: Thousands of furious Arabs who assaulted small groups of policemen in order to lynch them; who imposed a four-day siege - until reinforcements dispersed them by force - on Jewish settlements in the north and a military airfield (Nevatim) in the Negev; who threw stones and Molotov cocktails - like their brethren in Judea and Samaria - blocked off major traffic arteries and caused the detachment of the northern valleys from central Israel; who even fired their weapons, here and there.
However, the media assault does not even profess to present the events in the proper proportion and is focused on those who - at times, individuals facing thousands of rioters - defended their lives. And of course, the media do not mention that the revolt began one day after the Palestinian war of terror began. After all, the mention of these facts would present the Israeli Palestinians in the proper light, and their actions, then and now, in the correct meaning. There is no doubt: The Palestinians in Israel are discriminated against. And as long as they identify, and they cannot help but identify, with their warring brethren - and with horrific means of terror - against Israel, they will continue to be discriminated against.
When Israeli Arabs who provide assistance to terror activity are exposed, or when some of the Arab young people are engaged in arms-smuggling from the Egyptian border to terror groups in Judea and Samaria, the suspicion (the discrimination, as the Arabs and their supporters call it) will continue to exist. Professor Shimon Shamir declared that "logic cannot accept that 13 people were killed, and no one will stand trial."
However, nor can logic accept that Shamir, a member of the Or Commission, does not even ask why those who conceived the revolt, led it, inflamed the rioters, commanded the siege of Teradion, Hararit and a dozen other settlements, and burned down buildings that symbolize Israeli sovereignty were not brought to trial.
There is no doubt that there was a systematic failure in October 2000 of the agencies of government. Two days before Rosh Hashanah, on the day the Arab revolt began, the Shin Bet official responsible for situational assessment among Arab Israelis said that no significant events were expected because the Israeli Arabs had made a strategic decision not to collaborate with the Palestinians. And there was a failure by the police. It did not reinforce its units because it, too, predicted that while the brethren in Nablus and Ramallah were going out to war, the brethren in Umm al-Fahm - the biggest Arab city in Israel - would sit with their arms crossed. And quantity, as was proved only recently, prevents violence.
Of course, there was an option of sending the army into the fray. But an enlightened state, claimed lawmen and guardians of human rights, does not use an army against civilians in its sovereign territory, only police. That is an unconstitutional act. And the only way left to policemen to save themselves, and perhaps not only themselves, during the hours of terror until the reinforcements arrived, was to defend themselves with live fire.
