Keeping the Peace at Bay?

JERUSALEM — It is known simply as “the videotape.” And in this small, self-critical and image-conscious nation, it has become an infamous and instantly familiar symbol of injustice and oppression.

The 45-minute tape, filmed by a Palestinian in a nearby apartment, shows two Israeli border guards beating and humiliating six Palestinian laborers caught trying to enter Israel without work permits. When Israeli television aired the tape in November, Israelis and Palestinians alike reacted with shock and anger as they watched guards force the men to do push-ups, kick one in the head and sit, bouncing, on the head of another.

The beating, in a remarkable parallel to the Rodney King case, was aired here repeatedly and broadcast worldwide, creating an immediate uproar. Yet it is only the latest in a series of incidents that have raised concerns about the training, education and racial attitudes of those assigned to protect Israel from intrusion at a time of rising tensions with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world.

That border police violence against Palestinians is growing is without question. The reasons, though, are in dispute.

The guard is a 9,000-strong paramilitary force that controls the checkpoints separating Israel from areas under Palestinian self-rule and backs up the Israeli army and regular police in disputed areas.

According to figures released by the guard’s commanding officers, incidents involving undue force against Palestinians jumped 21% last year. Recent cases have also tended to be more severe and to have been referred for criminal prosecution more often than in the past, said a Justice Ministry official charged with investigating the incidents.

For years, Palestinians--and some Israelis--have asserted that members of the border guard routinely assault and degrade Arabs. Privately and in testimony to human rights groups, Palestinians have recounted numerous instances of verbal and physical abuse.

Palestinian officials see the current escalation as an indirect result of the election last May that brought to power Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a rightist-religious coalition government that has slowed the peace process with the Palestinians.

“We are not saying that ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu told them to be tough with Arabs and beat them,” said Ahmad Tibi, a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. “But we believe that the policeman on the ground is seeing a green light from this government for a harder line against Arabs, and interpreting that in this way.”

Israeli government officials and border guard commanders dismiss such statements as baseless and say the reasons for the recent increases are more complex than that and rooted, in part, in the guards’ evolving mission.

Although most of the thousands of daily contacts between guards and Palestinian civilians end peacefully, “the exceptions occur too often, and in numbers that should bother us in a democratic society,” said Eran Schendar, who heads the Justice Ministry’s department of investigations of police officers.

After a review prompted by the televised beating, Israeli Atty. Gen. Michael Ben-Yair told defense and internal security ministers that he is convinced that guard violence against Arabs is a “widespread phenomenon.” Further, the data involving such incidents paint a “grim picture of a deep-rooted tradition of violence by the border police against Arabs, simply because they are Arabs,” Ben-Yair said in a letter. “There are those who hold that the same phenomenon exists, albeit in lesser dimensions, within the framework of other [Israeli] security forces.”

The attorney general also said that those convicted of abuse should be punished more harshly than in the past.

Of 304 cases opened last year for unlawful use of force, 73 were closed because the petitioners did not cooperate with the investigation, 47 were closed for lack of evidence, and 26 were dismissed as unjustified. In 33 cases, guards were prosecuted; in 14 others, they were referred for disciplinary action; and the rest remain under investigation.

Schendar and others said the numbers would undoubtedly be higher if many Palestinians were not too fearful to complain to Israeli authorities.

“The system doesn’t work well,” Schendar said. “If they had a bad experience, it could be they wish not to speak to us. But we are really eager to talk to them and find out the facts.”

Guard commanders and Justice Ministry officials interviewed recently condemned the violence and said they are trying, through increased training and educational seminars, to combat the trend. Border guard trainees, who already have been receiving specialized police and anti-terrorism classes along with six months of basic training, will now be given expanded instruction in such areas as when to use force, officials said.

Nevertheless, they cited several reasons for the escalation, including the changing mission of the guard because of the peace process, a declining ratio of career officers to conscripts and lingering anger over September gun battles between Palestinians and Israelis, including many border police.

More than 75 people died and about 1,000 were wounded in that violence, which flared across the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israel’s opening of a tunnel entrance in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Attacks within Israel have also added to the tension, including Thursday’s bomb blasts in Tel Aviv that wounded 13.

“One reason for these events is the frustration that develops in the field, the hostility [the border police] feel” from the Palestinian population, said Brig. Gen. Nir Tsafrir, who commands the Jerusalem region’s 1,250 guards. “The guards can accumulate a lot of negative feelings when they are in violent surroundings. They are human beings, and sometimes their violence comes out.”

In a September report, the Israeli human rights group B’tselem described 11 incidents in which Palestinians ages 13 to 48 complained of beatings or mistreatment by Israeli security forces, including nine involving border police. The cases, all in June and July, raised “the fear that the hands of the authorities are being freed, particularly those of the police, regarding Palestinians from the occupied territories,” the report said.

The allegations gained new credibility with the Israeli public and acknowledgment from the government after Channel 1 broadcast the amateur videotape in November. Government officials, including Netanyahu, denounced the two guards shown in the tape and declared that such abuse is not typical of the behavior of Israeli security forces toward Palestinian civilians.

The guards, David Ben Abu, 20, and Tzahi Shmaya, 19, are awaiting trial on charges of aggravated assault and abuse of power. They are being held under house arrest.

Four other guards were charged the same day in connection with the beating in June of another Palestinian caught in Israel without a permit to be there. The man was taken to a wooded area and, according to the charges, beaten on the head with a baton until the baton broke and he lost consciousness.

Human rights activists and Palestinian officials dispute assertions by Netanyahu and others that the treatment of Palestinians exhibited in these incidents was unusual, and have said they feel vindicated by the statements and figures later released by Justice Ministry officials.

“This kind of violence by border guards against Palestinians is the rule, actually,” said Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab who is a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “Many of them are violent and brutal in their behavior, and some are sadistic. The only unusual thing in [the videotape] case was that there was a photographer present.”

Majdi al Salayani, 27, a Palestinian security officer in Hebron, said he witnessed an incident several months ago in which Israeli border guards forced an Arab man to bend over, then put a donkey saddle on his back. “They know how to harass us,” he said.

Without exception, the Palestinians interviewed said they believe the worst abusers among the border guards are Israeli Arabs, primarily Druze. Members of a tiny Muslim sect, Israel’s Druze are, along with Bedouins, the only Arabs allowed to serve in the Israeli army and security forces, and there are more Arabs in the border guard than in other departments. Indeed, military officials suggested that Arab guards can bring special cultural sensitivities to bear on their work.

Border guard officials said they do not maintain statistics that would reflect the number of violent incidents involving Druze members of the unit. But they said they do not believe Druze are involved in such cases more frequently than other guards.

Tsafrir, the Jerusalem commander, speculated that the Druze, who speak Arabic, may be blamed more because they often are the guards chosen to communicate with Palestinians.

Azzam Maraka, the Palestinian money-changer who videotaped the beating from a relative’s apartment, said he waited more than a month to release it because he was afraid he would be harassed by Israeli authorities if his identity became known.

Within days of the broadcast, border police began loitering outside his Jerusalem shop, Maraka said. They stared through the windows, made obscene gestures and muttered verbal threats to him, his family and his friends, he added. Concerned, the money-changer lodged a complaint with the Israeli Justice Ministry.

Nonetheless, he has been arrested twice since then--both times, he said, on trumped-up charges that are part of a campaign of harassment by the border guards and the regular police. “They want to frame me,” he said.

Police and border guard officials dismissed the claims as “nonsense.” They described Maraka as a “troublemaker” and “provocateur” who was arrested in each instance because he interfered with police officers.

“We are only sorry about one thing: that these incidents were not filmed too,” said Tsafrir, the Jerusalem commander. He said his men behaved properly in both instances.

Tsafrir said the reaction by border police to the videotape was shock and dismay at a setback for a unit struggling to change its image. Unlike verbal complaints, the videotape and the violence it displayed were impossible to refute.

The guards, many of whom were required by their commanders to watch the footage, “saw that this was the reality,” Tsafrir said. “You see the tape, and the ugliness of it slaps you in the face.”

Since then, he and other commanders have used the incident in a renewed effort to teach those they command about the difference between legitimate and improper uses of force, Tsafrir said. They have also held seminars at which border guards discuss the frustrations of their jobs, in an effort to keep them from venting their anger in the field.

But the guards face increased pressures of late, not least because of Israel’s frequent closures of the border, he said. The shutdowns have created severe economic hardship in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinians often try to circumvent the checkpoints to reach jobs in Israel. When they succeed, they sometimes return to taunt the guards.

Also, in recent years, the number of career officers in the border force has declined; more guards than ever are being drafted into the force to fulfill mandatory three-year army service. Tsafrir said that career officers, who tend to be older and more experienced, have been shown to be less likely to use violence.

In some units, as many as seven in 10 border guards are draftees, officials said, and such ratios tend to produce more complaints of brutality. “When you’re a kid, you’re looking for action, and that can be negative,” Schendar said.

The peace process itself has also created new challenges. Even as they carry out joint patrols with Palestinian police in West Bank cities, guards often face what Tsafrir described as a more restive Palestinian population in areas still under Israeli control.

“The peace process has made the Arabs behave with a lot more cheek than before,” Tsafrir said.

When guards pass through Arab villages on patrol, said Benny Davidov, a 19-year-old draftee who has served one year with the border police, “you can see the . . . hatred in their eyes.”

Batsheva Sobelman and Muhammed el-Hasan of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.