Date: February 26th 2008

OPINION/EDITORIAL
Still no justice for October 2000 killings

By Jonathan Cook

The Electronic Intifada
26 February 2008

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9329.shtml

On 2 October 2000, as the Israeli army was beginning its
ruthless crackdown on the second intifada in the occupied
territories, 17-year-old Aseel Asleh joined tens of
thousands of other Palestinian citizens across Israel in
taking to the streets in protest and in a show of
solidarity with their kin across the Green Line.

A firm believer in nonviolence, Asleh wore a T-shirt
emblazoned with the logo of a prominent Jewish and Arab
coexistence group, Seeds of Peace, as he marched alongside
family, friends and neighbors through his town of Arrabeh
in northern Israel.

Within hours Asleh was dead, face down in an olive grove.
A bullet, fired from a police gun at point-blank range,
had severed an artery near the back of his neck in what
looked suspiciously like an execution. Earlier he had been
seen fleeing through the grove, chased by a police squad
breaking up the demonstration.

Late last month, after a seven-year battle for justice,
Asleh's parents and those of another 12 Palestinian
demonstrators killed inside Israel at the start of the
intifada heard that the policemen responsible for the
deaths would almost certainly never stand trial.

Israel's attorney-general, Menachem Mazuz, told the
families that the investigations were being wound up. In
most cases there was a lack of evidence, he claimed, and
in the cases where there was evidence the policeman had
acted in the belief that their lives were in danger.

The decision was a heavy blow not only to the families but
also to the fifth of Israel's population who are
Palestinian. In a display of anger and frustration over
the continuing inaction by the state, a one-day general
strike was called, bringing Palestinian citizens out onto
the streets once again.

"Arab blood is worthless"

Asleh's mother, Jamila, held aloft a picture of her son as
crowds surged through the narrow alleys of the neighboring
town of Sakhnin, where two more youths were killed. She
told the marchers that the families would continue their
struggle: "We shall not keep quiet and we shall show the
world what a racist establishment this is, so that
everyone knows what is taking place in the State of
Israel."

Her characterization of the Israeli establishment as
"racist" was far from inflammatory rhetoric. In October
2000, when she and her husband, Hassan, went to collect
the body of their son, they were handed a hospital report
card. Stamped on the front cover were the words "Enemy
operation." A later official inquiry found that even the
country's most senior police commanders believed
Palestinian citizens to be "the enemy" and acted
accordingly.

Shawki Khatib, chairman of the Palestinian minority's main
political body, the High Follow-Up Committee, told the
marchers that Mazuz's decision proved that, as far as the
Israeli authorities were concerned, "Arab blood is
worthless."

He found an unlikely ally in this assessment. The Israeli
daily Haaretz reported that, shortly after Mazuz's
announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met the
minority's leaders and conceded that, had the 13
demonstrators been Jews, the attorney-general's findings
would have been different.

Both the Follow-Up Committee and the Adalah legal center,
which represents the bereaved families, say that they have
exhausted legal channels inside Israel and will now turn
to the international community. A quarter of a million
signatures are being collected protesting Mazuz's decision
and calling on the United Nations to protect Israel's
Palestinian minority.

Certainly the struggle for justice has reminded the
minority that in times of trouble Israeli citizenship is
meaningless if you are a Palestinian.

Mazuz's closure of the files on the 13 deaths comes at the
end of seven years of blatant obstruction and evasion by
the Israeli police, politicians, investigatory authorities
and the legal system. Mazuz said he had been forced into
his decision by a dearth of evidence and because the
bereaved families had not cooperated with investigators.
Whatever basis in reality either claim has is entirely the
fault of Mazuz and his officials.

What is certain is that at every step of the way official
bodies have tried to conceal evidence that suggests the
police implemented a shoot-to-kill policy against unarmed
Palestinian demonstrators at the start of the intifada. A
trail of evidence apparently leading back to senior
government ministers, who may have originated the order or
at least approved it, has been concealed.

As the chair of the left-wing Meretz party, Zahava Gal-On,
put it, Mazuz's decision was the "chronicle of an obvious
cover-up."

The Or Commission

The evidence that has surfaced, mainly inadvertently,
emerged from three years of hearings by a commission of
inquiry grudgingly set up in late 2000 by the prime
minister of the time, Ehud Barak. He appointed a senior
judge, Theodore Or, to head a panel examining the 13
killings in the desperate and, as it turned out, forlorn
hope that he could win back the Palestinian minority's
vote and defeat his rival Ariel Sharon in imminent
elections.

While the Or Commission prepared to open its first
sessions, a police investigations unit, known as Mahash,
should have been collecting and sifting evidence and
questioning police officers and witnesses. Instead, it
used the establishment of the inquiry as an excuse to
defer its investigations until the commission's final
report had been issued.

Mahash's reluctance to investigate the police can be
easily explained: most of Mahash's team were either
serving or former policemen. Strangely, Justice Or
appointed two Mahash investigators to his own staff, where
they proved equally ineffective.

Damaging revelations emerged from the inquiry hearings
mostly in spite of the commission's work rather than
because of it. Justice Or decided it was not the inquiry's
job to carry out a forensic examination and investigation
of the 13 deaths and he ignored bulging files of evidence
provided by the bereaved families and their lawyers.

Nonetheless, several policeman, demonstrating an arrogance
that appeared to surprise Justice Or, gave testimony
incriminating themselves or others. Many of the officers
also signaled the contempt in which the Palestinian
minority is held by the force.

In particular, their testimonies included two shocking
admissions. The first was that the police had been using
live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets against
unarmed demonstrators -- a fact that was well known to the
Palestinian minority at the time but which had been
strenuously denied by the police and the government.

In the case of most of the demonstrators who were killed,
the Justice Ministry had hurriedly buried the bodies
without conducting an autopsy, in contravention of its
public duty. In cases where bullets had been extracted,
they had not been examined. In the absence of solid
evidence, the police claimed that the bullets proved only
that the demonstrators themselves were armed. The
existence of live rounds even explained, said the police,
why several demonstrators had been shot in the back:
because gunmen were supposedly firing from behind them.

The second admission was that the most senior police
commanders, Yehuda Wilk and Alik Ron, and possibly the
prime minister himself, had approved the use of an
anti-terror sniper unit -- the first time in Israel's
history that it had been deployed inside Israel and used
against civilians.

In September 2003, Justice Or finally issued his lengthy
report, castigating the police in general for their
treatment of the Palestinian minority. However, having
failed to question the overwhelming majority of
Palestinian citizens who witnessed the police brutality at
first hand, including hundreds who had been seriously
wounded, he admitted to being in no position to pass
judgment on the individual policemen who killed the
demonstrators.

Investigation a low priority

Justice Or, however, did find that there was sufficient
evidence to implicate two policemen who were responsible
for three of the 13 deaths. He ordered Mahash to restart
its investigations immediately so that prosecutions of
individual policemen could begin.

Both the police and the government responded by suggesting
that it was too late to find the culprits. The Justice
Minister of the time, Yosef Lapid, argued: "The bodies
have long since been buried. There are no bullets, no
scraps of evidence, and no witnesses."

As we have seen, that was not true. But it would soon
provide Mahash with the alibi it needed to continue
avoiding a proper investigation.

On the first anniversary of publication of the
commission's report, an exasperated Justice Or rebuked
Mahash for making no progress in its inquiries. Only then
did Mahash begin to move. But conducting an investigation
seemed a low priority. Instead, Mahash requested that the
family of Aseel Asleh allow an autopsy on their
long-buried son.

The Aslehs had already made it known that they would
refuse such a request, both because they did not want to
desecrate their son's resting place when all the evidence
suggested Mahash was not serious about an investigation
and because ballistics experts were agreed that there was
almost no chance of identifying the police culprit from a
bullet extracted after all this time.

As one leading criminologist, Meir Gilboa, a former head
of Israel's Serious Crimes Investigations Unit, observed:
"All the [fatal] injuries were either from rubber-coated
bullets, which cannot be traced to a specific gun, or from
live rounds fired from M-16 rifles that shatter in the
body and so cannot be matched with a weapon."

Nonetheless, at a press conference in September 2005 the
head of Mahash, Herzl Shviro, justified his decision to
close the investigations largely on the grounds that the
families had failed to cooperate over autopsies. The
attorney-general, Mazuz, backed him.

Strangely Shviro, having found that Mahash could not
identify any of the policemen who killed demonstrators, or
hold accountable any of their commanders who ordered the
use of live fire, had allowed his team to ignore all other
potential charges that could be laid against individual
officers. Lesser charges -- or even disciplinary
proceedings -- were not leveled against officers known to
have committed perjury, fabricated evidence, violated
standing orders, or refused to cooperate with the Mahash
investigation.

For example, Yitzhak Shimoni, one of the chief suspects in
the shooting of Aseel Asleh, refused to take a polygraph
test to explain inconsistencies in his testimony. Rather
than being investigated by Mahash or disciplined by his
commanders, he had been promoted to chief inspector of his
area.

Shviro's press conference shocked many observers. The
noted historian Tom Segev commented that Mahash "comes
across as defense counsel for the policemen." One of the
Or commission members, Shimon Shamir, a distinguished
academic, called Mahash's decision "hard to accept,"
pointing out that Justice Or himself had believed there
was enough evidence to indict two policemen.

Mazuz tried to ride out the storm. But when the political
leadership of the Palestinian minority began a hunger
strike and threatened to take their case to the
International Court of Justice, the attorney-general
back-tracked. He announced that Mahash's findings would be
re-examined.

He put the examination in the hands of the Justice
Ministry's state prosecution service, headed by Eran
Shendar, an official who at the start of the intifada had
been in charge of Mahash, the very same Mahash that had
failed to carry out the original investigations now at the
centre of the controversy. The conflict of interest
appalled even the right-wing Jerusalem Post.

In an attempt to force the Justice Ministry to take the
investigation seriously, the Adalah legal center sent it a
comprehensive report entitled "The Accused," addressing
Mahash's failures to investigate the October 2000
killings. The report stated that Mahash "concealed
significant facts and issued a falsified report regarding
the events."

Two and a half years later, Mahash's sham investigation
has come full circle. Mazuz announced at a press
conference on 27 January that he was standing by the
findings of 2005.

This time much of the Israeli media has been supportive,
hoping finally to lay to rest the investigation. The
website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yediot
Ahronot, carried an article quoting a senior Justice
Ministry official who yet again blamed the families.

"The families refused an autopsy; the families and the
Arab public as a whole refused to cooperate with the
investigation that took place following the riots," the
official claimed. "Such a refusal bears consequences."

Mazuz held out a sliver of hope. He said there were two
incidents where it might be possible to identify the
policeman responsible but they would require "an autopsy
of several of the deceased bodies." He added, however:
"There is no guarantee that such a procedure will result
in an indictment of any kind."

This month Aseel Asleh's Jewish friends in Seeds of Peace
held a rally outside the Justice Ministry in an attempt to
change Mazuz's decision. They handed in a petition with
the following message: "If the murdered were Jews, you
wouldn't dare close the file ... If the protesters were
Jewish, even those who go wild, throwing rocks and even
carrying firearms, no police officer would shoot and no
demonstrator would be killed."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His extensive account of the October
2000 deaths and the Or Commission hearings can be found in
his book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is
www.jkcook.net.



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