Israeli Arabs Giving up on Israeli Justice For Killings, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson

Opinion, August 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Israeli Arabs Giving up on Israeli Justice For Killings

Palestine Media Center

31/08/2003

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson

For three years, Haydah Akawai, a mother of five, and Mahmoud Yazbak, a Palestinian professor, have yearned to learn the identities of the Israeli police snipers who killed Akawai's 42-year-old son and Yazbak's 25-year-old nephew.

The two were Arab bystanders in a riot that Jewish protesters started in Nazareth in October 2000. Their relatives still struggle to comprehend why Arabs who share the same Israeli citizenship as Jews were shot.

Akawai and Yazbak, like the relatives of 11 other Arabs whom police killed in Israel's northern towns during clashes in the early days of the ongoing Palestinian uprising, hoped the answers would come from an Israeli government commission that's investigating the shootings, which will release its findings Monday.

But now it seems more likely that the much-anticipated 800-page report will only widen the gulf between Israel's 1.3 million Arabs and 5.3 million Jews.

After a lengthy inquiry, during which Israeli officials from the prime minister on down pleaded ignorance and maintained their innocence, Akawai and Yazbak, who teaches Palestinian history at Israel's Haifa University, said they'd given up on seeing justice done. With the dovish Labor government that appointed the commission no longer in power, it appears unlikely that any police officials cited in the report will be punished.

"It'll be another report they will put on the shelf, nothing more," predicted Yazbak, 46, who was interviewed Thursday at his home in Nazareth, a city important to Christians as the place where Jesus grew up. "They'll talk about discrimination against Arabs, but no one will be held accountable."

Many Israeli Jews are equally critical of the investigation, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Cabinet minister who oversees police affairs, Uzi Landau.

"What you really need is not a report. What you really need is day-to-day, ongoing relations, a dialogue" between Arab-Israeli community leaders and police, he said. "This way people see if you mean business."

Others, such as Raphael Israeli, a Hebrew University professor who testified before the commission and argued that Arab-Israelis were to blame, said the report would start new riots because it would stir up anger.

What's in the report won't be known until Monday, although the three-member commission provided a glimpse of its findings 18 months ago. At that time, commissioners sent letters to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, his internal security minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, and a dozen other officials, warning them they would be judged harshly. Among those receiving letters were three Arab-Israeli leaders, who were led to believe the commissioners would blame them for inciting the riots.

Like their Palestinian brethren on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, Arabs living in northern Israel were swept up in the riots that began after Sharon visited the hill in Jerusalem that Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews call the Temple Mount. Protests and counterprotests shattered the appearance of harmony between the Jewish majority and Arab minority populations. Arab Israelis already had felt discriminated against and neglected over the past 50 years.

Wisam Hamdan Yazbak and Omar Mohammed Akawai watched the chaos on television, but weren't involved, their families said. Curiosity landed the men in the midst of the Nazareth melee on Oct. 8, 2000.

It was the eve of the holiest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, and hundreds of Jewish residents of upper Nazareth crossed the street that divides it from the biblical city to hurl stones at Arab homes. The rioters were angry over Palestinians destroying Joseph's Tomb, a Jewish pilgrimage site in the West Bank city of Nablus, the night before.

Nazareth's Arab residents rushed out to confront their attackers, and Israeli police soon arrived to separate them. Mahmoud Yazbak said he and his nephew went to the street to find out what was going on. Haydah Akawai said her son must have done the same, even after he warned several neighborhood children to stay away because it was dangerous.

Yazbak said his nephew, responding to Nazareth leaders' requests that the Arabs disperse, linked hands with other men to push residents back. In the tense moments that followed, police snipers fired shots. Wisam Yazbak fell to the ground, mortally wounded with a bullet to the back of his head.

Down the street, Omar Akawai also collapsed, a fatal bullet in his chest.

"The political irony is, Wisam was one of the contractors building the security fence between Lebanon and Israel. He was, in a sense, one of those who was defending Israelis," his uncle said. Well versed in Israeli law, Mahmoud Yazbak said he urged his relatives and other grieving families to pursue a legal remedy. They pushed for the most powerful tool available and never before granted to Arab-Israelis: a commission of inquiry. A similar commission appointed 19 years earlier to investigate Israeli leaders' actions before the Yom Kippur War led to the resignation of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Barak, who was prime minister in October 2000, agreed. His former Cabinet secretary, Isaac Herzog, called the decision courageous, although many others said Barak was influenced by a desire to garner Arab-Israeli votes.

Akawai rode a bus from Nazareth to Jerusalem each day to attend the hearings that began in February 2001 and lasted a year, a two-and-a-half-hour trip each way. "I thought maybe this time it would be different, that we'd hear the truth," she said. "I hoped it would give me a little peace." Yazbak was also a faithful attendee, though he said he quit going after three months. Fewer than two of the 200 days of hearings were spent talking about what happened in Nazareth on Oct. 8, 2000, he said.

"I gave up at the point when they started calling on the political leadership to say what they thought about political, economic and social discrimination against Arabs," he said. "I understood then the game was over, that the (inquiry) had turned into an academic debate."

*Knight Ridder Newspapers, Sunday, Aug 31, 2003

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).