Why does “the National Interest” demand that Jewish children hitchhiking home remain in jail, while Arabs approaching Jewish towns with hammers and screwdrivers be released?
Thursday night, a friend and I are hitchhiking home from yeshiva for Shabbat. We left late and thus find ourselves stuck at Elad Junction at 3 A.M. (classic teenage planning….) Suddenly, a white vehicle stops next to it. Two men in plainclothes jump out from it and present themselves as police officers. Apparently our long payos, caught their attention… They immediately begin searching our bags. Suddenly one of them victoriously raises an object in the air and shouts, “A cutter and a marker!” Before we even realized why my hobby of carving trees was so important, we found ourselves in handcuffs being led to the Unit for Nationalistic Crimes. One of the officers snidely told us, “They’ll know how to deal with people like you.”
We got to the Unit’s headquarters in Maale Adumim and the officers there were quite pleased to see us. They were happy to deal with “dangerous, Jewish terrorists.” I found myself being interrogated for several hours for “Involvement in a crime with racist motivation.” They accused me of intending to use the cutter to puncture ‘Palestinian’ tires, even as I began explaining my hobby of wood-carving to them. The lack of Arab towns near Elad also seemed to be lost on the interrogators. But no matter, they brought me the next day for a hearing in court.
Just before our hearing, we got to observe the hearing of an Arab youth caught with a firebomb in his hand. The judge ordered the boy released because he was just a youth. It seemed as though I’d have good chances with this judge…
Somehow in my case, the judge’s compassion was not so forthcoming. She explained that she could not release me because there is “a national interest against this youth.” In short, she ordered me kept in jail for four more days and gave the interrogators more time to harass me for hours on end. As part of one interrogation tactic, they even arrested my mother in order to apply pressure on me. This tactic that has been explicitly banned by the courts, but the ‘national interest’ here must have overruled that precedent. After four days, and many conversations on wood-carving, I was ordered released.
Yet the story does not end there. After the prosecution realized they could not connect the two ‘Jewish terrorists’ to any crime, they decided to try another route and filed an indictment for possessing a knife. They then requested remand for the duration of the proceedings relating to this misdemeanor offense. While the judge did not agree to their request, he did place me under house arrest. From what my lawyers have told me, I may be the only person in the history of the State to sit under house arrest for this charge. I guess that shouldn’t be so surprising though, given the ‘national interest….’
Just a pair of kids from Hizme
Let’s move a year forward to recent days of violence and rioting. The Henkin Couple was murdered a few months ago and since then, shootings and stabbings have become commonplace throughout Israel. On Wednesday March 2nd, another regular day, two Arabs penetrated the town of Eli and attacked the father of a family. Later that night, two Arabs penetrated the town of Bracha and stabbed two soldiers. As that attack was going on, two other individuals were seen approaching the town of Yitzhar. The Emergency Response Team was called and forces arrived at the scene. Two Arab youths from Hizme were caught in the area with iron bars, hammers, and gloves.
Shabak interrogators arrived and questioned the two ‘innocent’ Arab youths. The youths claimed they came from the Jerusalem area to look for gold near Yitzhar. The interrogators immediately recognized this as a reasonable claim and decided to release the two youths. They were just looking for gold! After all, Yair Lapid did say that all of the money is buried between Itamar and Yitzhar! It makes perfect sense!
The mother of these two youths was not arrested. They were not even brought for a court hearing. The gold-seeking Arabs were sent home without any restrictions. After all, I guess there simple was no ‘national interest’ against them…
From Hakol Hayehudi, here.