Mörderische israelische Staatsmacht

“Uncomfortable findings from the inquiry into the internal intifada
NINE months after Israel‘s  1 million 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.
[…] 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.

[…] 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 behavior of his police. The line of the last Israeli government, from Mr. Barak down, was that the police bad 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 dose 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“. […].“
Aus: Economist, 14.07.2001