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Earlier this month, both the Israeli media and parts of the international press focused on remarks by the commander of the West Bank – effectively its military dictator – Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who acknowledged that the Israeli military applies different use-of-force policies towards Jewish and Palestinian stone-throwers in the occupied West Bank because, in his words, “soldiers shooting Jews carries severe sociological consequences.”

But this has always been the case, and the attention directed at Bluth creates the false impression that the discrimination stems from the individual holding the position, rather than from an inseparable feature of the apartheid regime that has existed there since 1967.

On the morning of February 25, 1994, the Kahanist Dr Baruch Goldstein entered the prayer hall at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron carrying an automatic weapon and carried out a massacre of Palestinian worshippers, murdering 29 people and wounding 125 others before several worshippers managed to overpower and kill him. The state commission of inquiry established in the aftermath, headed by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, examined the circumstances that led to the massacre and heard extensive testimony regarding the racist rules of engagement then in force.

In its final report, the commission cited testimony from both junior and senior Israeli military and police officers who said that even if soldiers or police officers had been present inside the prayer hall during the attack, they would have been forbidden from shooting Goldstein to stop the massacre.........

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