Yitzhar Archives - Israel Rising

A special ministrial committee met on a specific case concerning the forced distancing of a 15 year old boy from his parents home in Yitzhar on the grounds that he engaged in violence towards Arabs.

MK Yehuda Glick was present at the meeting. “This kind of sentence ought to be reserved for emergency situations in which there is a ‘ticking bomb.’ A 15-year-old boy is not a ‘ticking bomb,'” Glick said. “If there is a suspicion that he is going to vandalize a mosque or punch a hole in some car tires, then there are ways to deal with this. The boy has no criminal background […] the means used against him are extraneous.”

Glick connected the plight of the boy to his own situation. “The police fought against me, libeled me, demonized me, made me out as the most dangerous man in the Middle East – thank G-d, the court awarded me damages.”

“The police justified their behavior by saying that I had wanted to disrupt the status quo. A citizen in a democratic country is allowed to want to change the status quo. There is a feeling that security forces are taking on a role that goes beyond their function – that of ‘educator of the correct ideology.”

The police have increasingly used their authority to force youth from Judea and Samaria to suffer harsh conditions by being distanced from their families or even jailed with no charges.

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ouths from Yitzhar were sentenced to eight months in prison for stone throwing, while Arab youths go free under similar circumstances.

The District Court in Lod, sentenced six Jewish youths to eight months in prison for throwing stones in Yitzhar two years ago. The six were arrested in a police provocation near the town and have been under house arrest since the incident.

Residents from Judea and Samaria have compared the length of the sentence given to these Jewish youths to the more common cases of Arab youths who throw stones. In most cases, Arab youths are never even indicted for stone throwing and even when they are, they rarely end up serving prison terms in cases where no physical harm was caused.

The Facebook page of the “Shomron Residents Committee,” posted a story by ‘Gadi’ a member of the committee, about the army’s response to Arab stone throwers. The suspects were of similar ages to the Jewish youths who were recently sentenced.

He wrote as follows:

“It was around Purim 2011. We were stationed in a base near Karmei Tzur and we were responsible for the area that included Al-Arub, which is known to be a problematic village.

Every Friday, youths from the local school would hold protests after their school let out and they would throw stones at vehicles on Route 60. It was our job as soldiers to prevent them from doing so.

One time, after a short chase, we caught two youths around 15 years old, who had thrown stones. We brought them to the Etzion station where the commander thanked us for our efforts. I then saw with my own eyes how the commander called the father of one of the youths and spoke to him in Arabic. He explained to him that if his son was caught again, he would be arrested. He then released both youths without questioning them or recording any information about them at all.”

The Shomron Residents Committee also noted the case of Muhammad Yusuf Darwish, an adult Arab who was caught throwing explosive devices at soldiers and who admitted in his interrogation that he had also thrown stones many times. For all of his offenses, he received only five months of prison and a small fine. It is noteworthy that prison sentences below 6 months in Israel can be automatically converted to full-day community service, thus Darwish did not have to serve any prison time at all.

This article was originally published in HaKol HaYehudi.

Yitzhar

Yehuda Glick: “A 15-year-old boy is not a ‘ticking bomb'”

A special ministrial committee met on a specific case concerning the forced distancing of a 15 year old boy from his parents home in Yitzhar on the grounds that he engaged in violence towards Arabs.

Stone Throwing: When Justice is not Blind