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Israeli Arab riots last October felt like Yom Kippur War, Or panel told Asst.-Cmdr. Dov Lutzky, the chief operations officer of the Northern District, testified yesterday that during the Israeli Arab riots last October, he felt the same as he did as a soldier in the Yom Kippur War. 'I find it hard to differentiate between the feelings I had then and now,' he told the Or Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the riots. 'It was the same force of the events, the same unbearable experiences, and the same accumulative exhaustion and emotional drain.' Lutzky made the comment when asked by commission chairman Justice Theodore Or why he had not immediately ordered an investigation into the events that led to 13 killings in the Israeli Arab sector. Lutzky said it took him almost two weeks to recover from the trauma and begin investigating the incidents. At the end of the first day of widespread rioting on Sunday, October 1, when two Israeli Arabs were killed in Umm el-Fahm, the top echelon of the Northern District met to determine how to prevent any more deaths, said Lutzky. If that was the case, asked Or, why were police ordered to keep the Wadi Ara highway open, even if it meant clashing with rioters? Two Arabs were killed by snipers of the police special forces the following day. According to Lutzky, 'The decision-makers considered the highway a central and strategic artery which was supposed to serve anyone on his way to the battlefront.' Lutzky said that no one ever dreamed that the Wadi Ara road would be blocked, and that the order was given not to clash with the local population but to keep the road open. Nevertheless, he said, it was clear that the police might need force to do so. Lutzky told Or there were not enough trained policemen to handle disturbances. The only ones who were properly trained were the special task force and the special patrol forces, whose numbers were 'tiny.' The rest of the force include regular blue-uniformed policemen who were not adequately trained, experienced or in proper physical shape to put down riots. Their training, said Lutzky, was also 'not serious': an entire group of policemen fired a single tear gas shell or a handful of rubber bullets, not enough to give them the confidence they needed. Lutzky defended the use of rubber bullets by policemen, saying they needed a means of riot prevention more severe than tear gas and less severe than live bullets. Otherwise, every time policemen felt their lives were in danger, they would either shoot real bullets or run away. He told the commission that Northern District chief Cmdr. Alec Ron said there were 'red line' situations past which policemen should not hesitate to open fire with real bullets. He gave two examples to explain what he meant. One was to save the life of someone caught by the mob and threatened with lynching. The other was when a mob of rioters tried to break into a Jewish settlement.
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