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Yaacov is a clinical psychologist in Beit Shemesh, Israel.
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By Yaacov
July 4, 2005
Well. thanx to this list, to Aryeh, and tp our driver Shimmy, we managed to get down to the Maoz Yam Hotel yesterday before they closed the Gush. We were given sleeping bags and stayed the night in the hotel.
In the a.m., upon hearing that Gush had been closed, some of us decided to stay on since it would be hard for others to get in to take our place.
Some observations, thoughts, suggestions:
1) My encounter with the police was chilling. They were not violent to me, personally. I did not resist, and was carried away briskly but without violence. The same cannot be said for others. However, the police -- two in particular -- refused to identify themselves; they refused to tell me whether I was meukav (detained) or atzur (arrested); they refused to say where they were taking me. All of this is disturbing enough (because essentially it is like you have been kidnapped. Police MUST identify themselves, give their badge number, etc.) The looks on some of their faces was what really disturbed me. Blank looks. I believe these were the "Yasam" ones.
2) The police I saw were all armed. They entered the hotel in SWAT team style, with machine guns in prepared posture, helmeted, with ladders, crowbars and sledge hammers. Those who carried me away were carrying pistols. I thought the police had agreed that those doing the gerush (eviction) would not be armed? What if in the pressured situation, amidst the screams and crying, some unbalanced individual (or government plant, a la Avishai Raviv, for that matter) were to grab one of their guns and start shooting? The guns were within easy reach. Why did they come in with guns?
3) Why were religious teenaged women who were not resisting, and who had tied their own hands and were sitting passively (although crying), handled roughly and carried away by male policemen? There has always been a policy to use female police for that purpose. There was certainly no shortage of manpower, and I did see some female police. Was this a policy decision?
4) For all the mantra-like repetition of "extremists" and "extremist hotel" in the media (it does seem that they all get told what words to use), even the "hilltop youth" and Kahanistim responded immediately to the requests of the leadership at the hotel, and came down from the rooftops where they had been barricading themselves with barbed wire, tires, food etc. They agreed to adopt nonviolent means. Otherwise it would have taken many hours or days to remove them. This moderation is the only reason that there were not serious injuries or even deaths at the hotel, and why it was so easy and fast for the police to remove everyone. The police SWAT invasion of a private hotel, breaking the law by not identifying themselves etc., was "extreme." The people at the hotel were models of restraint and moderation, in my opinion.
All of the problems with police conduct I have mentioned, when dealing with people who were showing tremendous restraint while being ripped -- mothers and babies -- from their homes (remember: families have been living in the hotel for years), has the effect of radicalizing the opposition, and increasing exponentially the risk of severe violence.
A father sees his wife and infant child being roughly removed from their home by a blankly-staring policeman in a ridiculous space-man SWAT outfit, while his religious teenaged daughter is being manhandled by other male police -- they are pushing this person to the limit. I'm frankly surprised that no one has seriously attacked the police, and judging from the way the police came in, I think they were also surprised.
I will never forget the little girl happily riding her bike around the hotel courtyard -- perhaps the only home she has ever known -- shortly before the Israeli SWAT teams stormed in -- literally -- to drag her and her parents onto buses, to drop them many miles away on a secluded highway, some barefoot, and without water in the Negev sun. I saw this with my two eyes, which are teary as I write this.
All because someone decided Jews can't live there anymore.
We will never forget this.
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