Finding a pattern of government ”prejudice and neglect” toward Israel’s Arab minority, a landmark Israeli commission of inquiry today accused the police of using excessive force three years ago to combat riots that it said had resulted from simmering, overlooked anger.

The commission said insensitivity by the Israeli ”establishment” permitted widespread discrimination against Israeli Arabs and the buildup of a ”combustible atmosphere,” as, it said, a politicized Islam began to radicalize the population.

The three-member commission was charged with investigating the deaths of 13 people from police fire in October 2000, when thousands of Israeli Arabs choked streets and threw stones in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who just had just begun their uprising against Israel. A Jewish motorist was also killed, by a stone-thrower.

Criticizing police tactics that included the use of sniper fire to disperse crowds, the report concluded that Israel ”must educate its police that the Arab public is not the enemy, and should not be treated as such.” More than a million of Israel’s 6.6 million citizens are Arabs.

Israel identifies itself as a Jewish state, and since its founding in 1948 its Arab minority has held a vexed position in society. While many Israeli Arabs say they enjoy political freedoms and economic opportunities they might not find in Arab countries, they generally also say they feel like second-class citizens. For their part, Israel’s Jews increasingly regard Arab compatriots as a potential fifth column, after the convictions of a small number for aiding Palestinian terrorism.

The report, which recommended that at least one police commander be dismissed but did not call for severe sanctions against top political officials, seemed unlikely in itself to bridge the deepening divisions between Israel’s Arabs and Jews. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would convene his cabinet to consider the findings.

Relatives of those who were killed gathered here today to criticize the commission as not going far enough.

”It didn’t identify or make any attempt to identify the killers,” said Jamila Asleh, whose son, Asel, age 17, was killed during one stone-throwing protest.

Asel Asleh, who had many Jewish friends, was a leading member of Seeds of Peace, an American-based group that promotes conflict resolution between Israelis and Arabs. Mrs. Asleh, who wore a picture of her son pinned to her lapel, said the report ”shows that the future won’t be so good between Arabs and Jews.”

Walid Ghanaym, 37, whose brother Emad, 25, was killed, said: ”If the police killed 13 Jews, what would they do? That’s why we’re third class.”

The panel, the fifth such commission of inquiry into any subject in Israel’s history, questioned 377 witnesses.

While identifying a number of ”deep-seated factors” in leading to the violence, including less government financial support and law enforcement ”in the Arab sector,” the panel also zeroed in on the roles of particular officials. The committee found that Ehud Barak, then the prime minister, ”was not sufficiently aware and attentive” to developments among Arabs that ”created the possibility of widespread riots.”

The commission did not recommend that Mr. Barak be barred from running again for prime minister, should he choose to do so. But it did recommend barring Shlomo Ben-Ami, then the minister of public security, from ever holding that portfolio again.

Both Mr. Barak and Mr. Ben-Ami testified to the commission. Mr. Barak, who had ordered the inquiry, testified that the violence had taken him by surprise, saying that ”there was no concrete warning of such an eruption from any intelligence agency.” Mr. Ben-Ami, who has since left politics, also said he had no warning. He said that the police had failed Israel’s Arab citizens.

The commission issued several specific recommendations to the Israeli police, including that it halt the use of rubber-coated steel bullets for crowd control. ”It was determined that the police must take this weapon out of its inventory,” the report stated. Such bullets are also frequently used by Israeli forces against Palestinians.

The report stated that ”it should be pointed out in a completely non-ambiguous way that the use of live fire, including live fire by snipers, is not a means of dispersing large crowds by police.”

Gil Kleiman, a police spokesman, said the police had made several changes over the last three years, including investing in more nonlethal crowd control equipment like water cannons.

He said that the police were still permitted the firing of rubber-coated steel bullets, but that 17,000 of Israel’s 26,000 officers had now received special training in their proper use.

Azmi Bishara, one of 10 Arab legislators in the Parliament, praised the report for criticizing the police as treating Arabs as though they were not citizens. But, he said: ”There is a real problem, and it has its roots in the attitude of the police toward the Arab citizens of the state of Israel. It’s getting worse, it’s not getting better.”

Mr. Bishara and another Israeli Arab legislator, Abdulmalik Dehamshe, were accused of making statements before the clashes that conveyed ”support for violence as a means to reach the goals of the Arab sector.” But the panel recommended no penalties against them.

Read James Bennet’s article at The New York Times »

JERUSALEM | A formal inquiry this month into the police killing of 13 people in violent protests by Israeli Arabs in October has raised questions about several of the shootings, particularly whether the police needed to fire live ammunition. It has also served as a platform to air what Israeli Arabs say is discrimination that has gone on for decades.

The three-member commission, headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, drew attention last week during its inquiry into the death of Asel Asleh, a 17-year-old Israeli Arab peace advocate killed by police gunfire during a stone-throwing protest, part of a wave of Israeli Arab protests last fall in support of the Palestinian uprising.

Asel Asleh played a leading role in Seeds of Peace, an American-based group that promotes conflict resolution between young Israelis and Arabs. He attended a summer camp run by the group in Maine, was prominent in many of its local activities and had many Israeli Jewish friends. He was killed wearing the group’s distinctive green T-shirt.

At a June 6 hearing, several police officers who were near the youth when he was killed at his village of Arabeh on Oct. 2 testified that they did not know who fired the fatal shots, drawing angry accusations from his parents that their testimony was a coverup.

Dressed in black, Jamila Asleh, the youth’s mother, sobbed as she listened to the officers’ accounts. Outside the hearing room at the Supreme Court, she shouted at other police officers, “Murderers, you are murdering and lying!”

Hassan Asleh, the youth’s father, testified a day earlier that he had witnessed the events leading to his son’s death. He said his son had been watching the protest when three police officers chased the youth into an olive grove, kicking and hitting him with a rifle butt before he fell. The father said he then heard three shots, and saw the officers leave.

Umran Asleh, a cousin, testified that he had seen the chase and a gun pointed at the teenager’s head before hearing three shots. A doctor who treated the youth testified that he had been shot in the neck at point-blank range, and that crucial time had been lost when the police delayed the arrival of an ambulance.

In their testimony, police officers described a scene in which hundreds of rioters attacked them with stones, bottles and slingshots. At one point, the policemen said, a group of officers ran into an olive grove to arrest rioters after an Arab was spotted hiding among the trees, and Asel Asleh was discovered bleeding on the ground. One officer said he had seen the teenager run, stumble and fall.

Questioned by the three members of the inquiry panel about how the teenager had been shot, the officers said that they did not know.

“I have no explanation sir,” said Avi Karasso, one of the officers who ran into the olive grove. Another officer in the group, Ovadia Hatan, said none of them had opened fire. “I really don’t know how he was shot and from what direction,” he said.

Mr. Asaleh, the teenager’s father, stood up and shouted at Mr. Hatan from behind a glass wall erected to protect the witnesses, “Why don’t you say you murdered in cold blood?”

Yitzhak Hai, the commanding officer at the scene, testified that his men, members of an antidrug unit drafted into riot duty, were ill-equipped and untrained for the job. They had no rubber bullets, and there was a shortage of tear gas, leading him to use live ammunition to repel rioters, he said.

Another officer, Michael Shapshak, told the commission, “Had we used rubber bullets, it would have prevented what happened.”

Read Joel Greenberg’s article in The New York Times »

BY JOEL GREENBERG | Looking squarely into the camera, Amer Kamal, a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem, delivers a message to his Israeli friend, Yaron Avni, who will soon be drafted into the Israeli Army.

“I hope that you will be a good soldier who helps his society, who helps his people and who works for the peace process,” Mr. Kamal says. “I don’t want to see you in the West Bank or in Jerusalem or in the Gaza Strip running after Palestinians and killing them. I hope you’re going to stay the Yaron I know, not to change your opinions but go for peace and help us to work for peace.”

The scene is from “Peace of Mind,” the first documentary film shot jointly by Israeli and Palestinian youths, chronicling a year in their lives after returning home from an Israeli-Arab summer camp in the Maine woods. The camp is run by Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings young Israelis together with Palestinians and other Arab teenagers to build friendships and discuss ways to resolve the conflict between their peoples.

“Peace of Mind,” which will be shown a few times around New York in the coming months, had its Israeli premiere in November after being shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. The producers say that showings are being considered by PBS and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this summer. Israel Educational Television and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation are also planning to show the movie, which the producers hope will become a teaching tool in schools.

The documentary was conceived by Susan Siegel, co-executive director of Global Action Project, an educational group that has produced youth documentaries on social issues in the United States as well as on conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. She said she wanted the cameras to follow the campers when they left their idyllic surroundings in Maine and returned to the Middle East. “What happens when they go back home: that’s the real story,” she said.

Producers chose four Israelis and three Palestinians, trained them to use video cameras and to work as a team, and then sent them back to document their lives after the 1997 camp session. The film, produced and directed by Mark Landsman, took two years to complete, and the process produced fast friendships and heated debates.

A major challenge was how the history of the conflict should be presented. The two sides have opposing narratives of the same events, and the young filmmakers struggled to meld them. They argued over terminology and historical perceptions: Were the Palestinians expelled from their land? Or did they flee a war started by Arab states bent on destroying Israel?

“It wasn’t possible to come up with a unified history,” Mr. Landsman said. “It doesn’t exist. The Palestinian youths produced their version of history, and the Israelis produced theirs.”

So the film shows two separate archival sequences: the Palestinians show the displacement of their people in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the Israelis depict the return of Jews to an ancient homeland after the Holocaust.

An emotional argument about terrorism almost broke up the group. The Palestinians grew defensive when Yossi Zilberman, an Israeli participant, called bombers from the militant Islamic group Hamas animals. Mr. Kamal, the Palestinian, argued that although the militants were wrong, they had sacrificed their lives for their country.

“It boiled my blood that someone from Seeds of Peace was defending them,” said Mr. Zilberman, 18. A heated argument ended in tears, threatening the project’s future. Sivan Ranon, 17, an Israeli, said of the Palestinian arguments: “It was scary to hear your friend talking like that. Suddenly you felt that you don’t know this person.”

In the end a sense of common purpose kept the group together. The movie includes a scene in which Bushra Jawabri, 18, a Palestinian, calls her Israeli friends from her home in a West Bank refugee camp to express sympathy after a deadly suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

“It meant a lot to me that she called,” Mr. Zilberman says in the film. “I think that this is the first step.”

Hazem Zaanoun, 17, a Palestinian from Gaza, said, “We had strong unity between us that really served us.”

There were also concerns about the Israelis’ impending army service, which is compulsory in Israel after high school. “What if they ask me to go and be in a base in the West Bank or East Jerusalem?” Reut Elkobi, 17, an Israeli, asks in the film. “I have friends over there. God, Amer lives in East Jerusalem. Maybe one time I will have to stop him from throwing stones at me. Is this ever going to happen? I don’t know what I’m going to do if they put me over there.”

Ms. Jawabri, who formed a close friendship with Ms. Ranon, exchanging home visits they documented in the film, said she was concerned about what her Israeli friend might do when she puts on a uniform. “Although I trust her that she really wants coexistence, what if her government asks her to do something against the other side?” Ms. Jawabri asked. “I don’t want to see Sivan carrying a gun in front of me, and me carrying a stone against her.”

Ms. Ranon, for her part, said that no matter how close she was to Ms. Jawabri, her friend’s dream of returning to her refugee family’s native village inside Israel remained a barrier. “She represents a whole population that wants to come back and live in our place, and that’s scary,” Ms. Ranon said. “Her dream is my nightmare.”

That contradiction is powerfully portrayed in the film’s climactic scene, in which Ms. Jawabri visits Mr. Zilberman at his home in Kiryat Gat, a town of immigrants built next to the ruins of her family’s village, which was destroyed in the aftermath of the 1948 war.

The camera lingers on their faces as he leads her to an abandoned grave of a Muslim holy man, points out trees planted over the ruins of Arab homes, and offers her shards of pottery that were left behind. Ms. Jawabri kneels in silent prayer near the grave and later fills a glass jar with soil to take back to the refugee camp.

For Ms. Jawabri the visit was a jolt. The arid landscape and sandy soil were nothing like the fertile green village fields described to her by elders in her camp. The village homes had vanished, giving way to the apartment buildings and industries of Kiryat Gat.

“I was really sad, and I felt bad for those people who still have their memories and still have hope of going back,” she said. “I now have less hope of returning. I don’t want to say it’s impossible. That’s too hard to say.”

Mr. Zilberman said: “I tell friends that we’re strong enough to acknowledge that there was a community here, that there were people here, with the emphasis on was. There was a war. We didn’t start it, and this is the history of the place. I was quite proud to show Bushra my town. Now it’s my place.”

In retrospect, he said, thrashing out painful issues with his Palestinian friends had made him more hard-headed about the odds of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. It will take a long time for true reconciliation, he said.

On both sides there are reservations about the finished film. Mr. Zilberman and Mr. Avni, 18, wrote a letter to Mr. Landsman criticizing portrayals that they thought were unfair to the Israelis and too sympathetic to the Palestinians. Mr. Kamal, 17, said the Palestinian views on Jerusalem were lacking, and Mr. Zaanoun said a broader range of Palestinian voices should have been heard, including the militant opinions of some people he interviewed.

All in all, Mr. Zilberman said the project proved to be a reality check.

“We got to know each other, for better and for worse,” he said. “I’m still for peace, but I’m much more realistic. I know what I’m up against. I’m more sober. We’re all more sober.”