Another year passes on the anniversary of the October 2000 events, and the murders of 13 young Palestinian citizen protestors by the Israeli police are absent from the minds of the Israeli authorities, as if it they never happened.  In the past year, the police continued its repressive and brutal treatment of Arab protestors, while the Ministry of Justice’s Police Investigation Unit, “Mahash”, continued to cover up cases of police brutality committed by its officers by failing to investigate or prosecute them.

A few days before the October 2000 anniversary, Meni Mazuz, the Israeli Attorney General from 2004 to 2010, was appointed as a new justice to the Supreme Court. In a cruel twist of history, the same man who closed all the investigation files on the killings of the 13 protestors in 2008, was selected to defend the constitutional rights of all Israeli citizens, including their right to protest. 

In Adalah’s view, Mazuz’s appointment does not advance human rights in Israel, especially the rights of Palestinian citizens. The Supreme Court is increasingly legitimizing the Knesset’s discriminatory laws and the Israeli government’s oppressive policies, ignoring Palestinian citizens’ constitutional rights and relegating their just demands for equality and anti-discrimination to procedural questions.
 
This is why the Supreme Court can claim that there is “no public interest” in the demolition of an entire Arab Bedouin village like Umm el-Hieran in the Naqab, and refuse to accept their request to appeal to save their homes. This is also why the Supreme Court can uphold the Admissions Committees Law, which furthers segregation by essentially preventing Palestinian citizens from living in hundreds of small communities built on ‘state land’ in the north and south.