Israeli Panel Faults Police In Killings
Arab Citizens Were Treated as 'Enemies'

A government-commissioned report concluded today that police used excessive force against Israel's Arab citizens during protests in the earliest days of the Palestinian uprising three years ago, resulting in 13 deaths in a fusillade of bullets and sniper fire.
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Analysis / The two Octobers

The portrait painted by the Or Commission Report regarding the missteps of top police officers and politicians during the violent clashes of October 2000 resembles the depiction of blunders made by the Israel Defense Forces General Staff on the eve of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In October 2000, as in October 1973, the writing was on the wall, but the brain refused to process what was written.

Precise evaluations of what might come of volatile tensions within Israel's Arab sector reached the desks of the police commissioner and public security minister before October 2000. The extent to which they refused to acknowledge what such estimates meant is simply staggering. The October 1973 syndrome returned, and delivered a devastating blow to the country's security forces (including the Shin Bet) 27 years later. This is a syndrome born of arrogance and condescension, which comes to a country that is too confident about its own power.
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"First of All - the Wall must Fall!"
by Uri Avnery

There is, of course, an important distinction between the German and the Israeli wall. East Germany had a border fixed by international agreement (between the Soviet Union and the Western allies at the end of World War II). The wall was built entirely on this line. Its path was self-evident. But here there is no agreement, no border, no self-evident path. Everything is determined by anonymous planners.

It is easy to imagine them sitting in their air-conditioned offices, a map spread out before them. A very special map, because it shows only Jewish settlements and bypass roads. The Palestinian towns and villages do not appear on it at all. As if the ethnic cleansing, that so many in Israel (and in the Sharon government) are longing for, had already happened.

That is what's so special about this Wall: it is inhuman. The planners have completely ignored the existence of (non-Jewish) human beings. They took into account hills and valleys, settlements and bypass roads. But they totally ignored the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages, their inhabitants and their fields. As if they did not exist.

And so the Wall stands between children and their school, between students and their university, between patients and their doctor, between parents and their children, between villages and their wells, between peasants and their fields. Like a big armored bulldozer that crashes into a village and crushes and destroys everything in its path without faltering, the Wall cuts thousands of the thin threads that constitute the fabric of people's daily lives, as if they weren't there.
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What the fatality statistics tell us
by Amira Hass

But it turned out that according to calculations of the Shin Bet and by its own definitions, of the 2,341 Palestinians who were killed up to the beginning of August this year, 551 were terrorists, "that is, bearing arms and explosives" (Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, August 8, 2003). To those who wonder who the other victims were, whether they were suspects, or civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time - here is a partial answer: Until the end of August this year, IDF soldiers killed 391 minors, according to B'Tselem. According to the Red Crescent, the IDF killed 141 women. B'Tselem determined that 291 Palestinian security personnel were killed, some of whom were participating in the fighting, whether during an IDF incursion or during attacks they initiated in the settlements or against soldiers.

However many did not take part in the fighting, and were killed while they were standing at their posts as defined in the Oslo Accords. Many others were killed in bombardments, in invasions of cities, or in attempts to detour roadblocks. In addition to some 120 Palestinians who were targets of assassination, 82 Palestinian civilians were killed "by mistake." They, it is to be assumed, are not included in the 551 terrorists as defined above.

Here are the disastrous proportions, in the hope that someone in Israel will take notice: 80 percent of the Palestinians killed were not connected to armed actions.
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Sharon is saved from the threat of peace

It used to be said about Yitzhak Shamir that he wanted to wake up in the morning and see newspaper headlines saying, "The threat of peace has been lifted." All the signs now point to Ariel Sharon approaching the accomplishment that the former Likud premier dreamt of. The "window of opportunity" for renewing the peace process, opened after the war in Iraq, has been slammed shut. The efforts for a political deal have once again given way to the routine of managing the conflict, with Israel controlling the territories, and all the settlements in place.
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