During demonstrations against the Israeli army's assault on Palestinians in the occupied territories, the police fired live ammunition and rubber bullets on unarmed protesters and deployed, for the first time, an anti-terror sniper unit.
The head of the commission, Justice Theodor Or, found that the police viewed Palestinian citizens in similar terms to the army's conception of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza: As an enemy to be crushed with brute force.
Systematic discriminationJustice Or also identified systematic and institutionalised discrimination against the Palestinian minority over many decades as a major contributing factor in their protests.
Their towns and villages were heavily overcrowded, and homes often declared illegal because of meager land allocations and oppressive planning restrictions. Their communities were deprived of industrial zones and overlooked in the state budget, leaving their local municipalities penniless. Their schools were massively underfunded, and universities placed obstacles in their way to higher education.
But what Justice Or failed to understand, or perhaps admit, was that the attitudes of the police, government and the Israeli public were shaped -- and still are -- by a more general political atmosphere that derives from Israel's founding ideology, Zionism.
Israel's Palestinian minority is viewed as the state's Achilles' heel; an opening for Palestinians in the occupied territories to undermine the state's Jewishness.
The threat is seen as two-fold.
Demographically, Palestinian citizens can erode the Jewish majority by reversing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian population in 1948 through, for example, winning citizenship for spouses from the occupied territories. Israel closed that door in 2003 with legislation effectively barring such marriages.
And ideologically, Palestinian citizens have risked exposing Israel's lack of meaningful democracy by proving, through their own treatment, that a Jewish state cannot be fair to them.
Equality is subversionA political campaign by the minority for equality -- urging Israel's reform from a Jewish state to a "state for all its citizens" -- is officially classified as "subversion."
Israeli Politicians -- from the right and the left -- share a common view, often expressed or implied, that Palestinian citizens can never truly belong to a Jewish state. Instead, they are described variously as a "fifth column," "Trojan horse" and "demographic time bomb."
Revealingly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exploited Hamdan's death to issue a series of further warnings that the Palestinian minority was unwanted.
At a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu told his interior minister to examine ways to strip of citizenship anyone who "acted against the state" or attacked the police.
The next day, Netanyahu told demonstrators to leave Israel and "move to the Palestinian Authority or Gaza."
His comments have consciously blurred the distinction between the legitimate anger unleashed by Hamdan's killing and the spate of recent attacks by Palestinians from the occupied territories on Israelis in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Tel Aviv. Dangerously, Netanyahu has implied that they are all part of the same "terrorism."
His two most senior coalition partners have echoed him.
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