The Orr Commission published its
findings on September 1, 2003, after three years of an enormous work
of compilation of evidence, interviewing hundreds of witnesses,
consulting experts, issuing legal warnings to those likely to be
incriminated, and writing up the two-volume report on the tragic
events of September 2000, which pitted the Israeli Arabs against
institutions of law enforcement in the country. However, the report
was disappointing in the sense that instead of recommending practical
and operational steps to be taken to punish the perpetrators of the
horror, they wasted pages upon pages on examining the trajectory of
rubber coated bullets and on formulating the legal warnings, none of
which was substantiated. They pretended that “discrimination” against
the Arabs was at the root of violence, instead of calling the Arabs to
task for their violence that had no justification. Not only
discrimination had to be examined in neutral and objective terms, and
a yardstick set for its measurement, which was not done, but a false
balance was established between the violent breakers of the law and
the police who tried to contain them. Therefore, all those years of
hard work, and the hopes that were attached to the work of the
commission, were dashed, and no real turning point was chartered for
returning the Arabs in Israel to the track of law-abiding if they want
to live as a minority in a Jewish state.
