Israel Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh apologized on Thursday night to Israelis of Ethiopian descent for his controversial comments of Tuesday, despite his insistence earlier in the day that he would not do so.

In a meeting with the joint steering committee for the police and the leadership of the Ethiopian community in Israel, Alsheikh promised that encompassing work would be done in all police districts to evaluate if existing cases were due to over-policing and to continue to promote the closing of as many cases as possible.

The steering committee raised hard questions regarding the amount of cases opened for minors of Ethiopian descent. At their request, the police presented data showing a decrease of about 20% in the opening of cases this year when compared to the parallel period of last year.

The commissioner apologized to anyone who felt insulted from the publications of his statements and added, “There was no intention, Heaven forbid, to offend, but rather to raise the problem to promote agreed-upon solutions.”

The Israeli embassy in Washington is currently discussing with the White House whether it would be possible for Netanyahu to fly from New York to Washington and meet with President Obama.

The idea was also raised that if such a meeting were to take place, Netanyahu could sign a military aid package deal for the next decade. Indeed, the Israeli prime minister has already declared his inetrest in signing the agreement prior to the conclusion of Obama’s presidency.

Seventy years after the most daring attempt of Jewish Holocaust survivors to seek revenge against their former tormentors, the leader of the plot has only one simple regret — that to his knowledge he didn’t actually succeed in killing any Nazis.
Joseph Harmatz is one of the few remaining Jewish “Avengers” who carried out a mass poisoning of former SS men in an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1946 that sickened more than 2,200 Germans but ultimately caused no known deaths. A recently declassified U.S. military report obtained by The Associated Press has only added to the mystery of why the brazen operation did not kill Nazis, because it shows the amount of arsenic used should have been fatal to tens of thousands.

Still, the 91-year-old Harmatz says the message echoed into a rallying cry for the newborn state of Israel — that the days when attacks on Jews went unanswered were over.

“We didn’t want to come back (to pre-state Israel) without having done something, and that is why we were keen,” Harmatz said in a hoarse, whispery voice from his apartment in north Tel Aviv.

Despite a visceral desire for vengeance, most Holocaust survivors were too weary or devastated to seriously consider it, after their world was shattered and 6 million Jews killed during World War II. For most, merely rebuilding their lives and starting new families was revenge enough against a Nazi regime that aimed to destroy them. For others, physical retribution ran counter to Jewish morals and traditions. For even more, the whole concept of reprisals seemed pointless given the sheer scope of the genocide.

But a group of some 50, most young men and women who had already fought in the resistance could not let the crimes go unpunished and actively sought to exact at least a small measure of revenge. The Nuremberg trials were prosecuting some top Nazis, but the Jewish people had no formal representative. There was a deep sense of justice denied, as the vast majority of Nazis immersed themselves back into a post-war Germany that was being rebuilt by the Americans’ Marshall plan.