An apology to Israel’s Arab population and the No. 10 position on a Knesset coalition list for former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was the Meretz party's price for agreeing to a proposed merger with Barak’s Democratic Israel party.

Barak has experience with apologies of this kind. Everyone remembers his 1997 apology to the Jewish Mizrahi community over the Labor party’s attitude toward the group in the early years of statehood. Now he has concluded that if he really wants to be relevant in the September election, he has no choice but to apologize for the events of October 2000, and that this apology should be directed at the Arab citizens of Israel in general and the victims of those events in particular. In these events, 12 Israeli Arabs and one non-Israeli Palestinian were killed by police during demonstrations that followed the ascension of then-Likud head Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount. Barak was then prime minister.

The trigger for his apology came in the form of a July 23 editorial in Haaretz by Knesset member Issawi Freij of Meretz. In a piece titled “Things that Barak Needs to Say,” Freij called on Barak to apologize for the deaths of 12 Arab citizens of Israel, who were shot to death by the police. “As an Arab citizen of Israel, this is what I would want to hear from Ehud Barak,” Freij wrote. “The events of October 2000 happened under my watch. During my tenure as prime minister, 12 Arab citizens of Israel were shot dead by the Israeli police. As the person who stood at the head of the entire system, the responsibility is mine, first and foremost, even if I did not pull the trigger personally.”

What is strange is that in a radio interview just two weeks earlier, Freij called Barak a “dangerous and divisive honeytrap. As an Arab, I cannot forgive him for the events of October 2000. Don’t apologize to us. Stay seated in your luxury towers and don’t interfere.”