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.
