After four months of work, thirty-one sessions and 106 witnesses,
the mountain called the Shamgar Commission of Enquiry produced a
mouse. Against expectations, the Shamgar report turns out to be a
miserable failure.
The Commission accepted at its face value Chief of Staff Ehud
Barak's statement on the unpredictability of Dr. Baruch Goldstein's
massacre of twenty-nine Muslims and the wounding of 125 in the Cave
of the Patriarchs in Hebron on February 25, 1994 as "a bolt from
the blue". It thus failed to attribute direct responsibility for
the event to anyone. In this, it deviated from the precedents of
former and more effective enquiry commissions, like that on Sabra
and Shatila, which demanded that those responsible pay for their
failure. No wonder that in Kiryat Arba', the Jewish settlement near
Hebron where Goldstein lived, the head of the Local Council, Zvi
Katsover, said on receiving the report that "a weight has been
taken off our shoulders."
Yet, twelve years ago, the report of Deputy-Attorney General
Yehudith Karp on violence in the Occupied Territories had already
reported on the need for "a radical reform of the basic concept of
the rule of law in its broadest and most profound sense". The Karp
report stated that "the reaction of Kiryat Arba' residents is
tantamount to civil rebellion", an "ugly atmosphere" prevails
between the settlers and the Palestinian population and
"self-defense must not serve as grounds for immunity before the
law".
In spite of this and of all the evidence and documentation (by
Human Rights Organization B'Tselem and others) on the failure to
enforce the law against Jewish transgressors in the Occupied
Territories in general, and Hebron in particular, the report does
not connect the massacre with the general background of
twenty-seven years of occupation.
In face of the stated and restated record of blatant inequality
before the law of Jews and Arabs, the Shamgar report, while noting
that "the massacre was one of the harshest expressions of the
Jewish-Arab conflict", fosters a "business-as-usual" atmosphere,
proposing only cosmetic technical, logistical and organizational
adjustments. Page after page is devoted to the killer's entrance
into the Tomb, his weapon, the worshippers, the security forces and
the police, metal detectors and closed TV circuit, and the orders
for opening fire. Yet apart from Goldstein himself, nobody bears
responsibility for the massacre and there is no call for any
radical re-evaluation of the situation which enabled the massacre
to take place. As for the occupation itself, the report seems
almost to take it for granted, perhaps like the weather, where
there can always appear a bolt from the blue ...
Was Goldstein's action so unpredictable? Not only the Karp report,
but also the facts on the ground indicate otherwise. Students were
killed by settlers in the past in cold blood at Hebron College,
shopkeepers were shot, market stalls overturned, West Bank mayors
maimed, and there was even a conspiracy to blow up the Dome of the
Rock.
Five years ago Goldstein wrote that "the lands belong to us and the
Arabs don't belong to us, so the land we should keep and the Arabs
we should let go. The Arab mind is not the Western mind. They are a
cruel people who want to spill blood. I don't feel toward a people
like that we have obligations". In the light of all this, what is
the basis for the report's saying that "we do not believe that
anyone can be blamed for not having foreseen the fact that a Jew
would plan and carry out a massacre of Muslims in the Tombs of the
Patriarchs"?
Compared to the waves of shock felt when the massacre became known,
the Shamgar report is flat and un-stimulating. There is a total
lack of proportion between the magnitude of the event and the minor
key of the report. Most of its prosaic and mundane contents could
have been dealt with equally well by the army or by private
security experts. Perhaps this was because the Commission produced
a legalistic document while the problems it confronted were
basically political.
The judges may have persuaded us that Goldstein acted alone, but
reading the report leaves us with a surplus of details but a total
lack of overall explanation of the background: the consistent
policy since 1967 not to punish the Jewish settlers for breaking
the law, while rigorously enforcing the law against the Palestinian
population, with the help of the same settlers.
Almost the last words of the report read: "we made a series of
investigations meant to assist in returning things to normal in the
Tomb of the Patriarchs in particular, and generally in Hebron".
Unfortunately, even though the peace process is moving forward, the
Shamgar Commission leaves unanswered the question of whether the
judges see not only the situation in Hebron, but the occupation
itself as "normal". If so, it would have been better to have had no
commission rather than one which thus evades its real
responsibility.