Police pounced on expelled Yesha residents in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood Wednesday afternoon, throwing some of them out of windows, an eyewitness said. Protesters fought police, and three of them were injured in the fracas. Six people were arrested.
Authorities have not said if there is a link between the police action and the infiltration and attack on an army base in Samaria Monday night, violence against IDF soldiers and a small fire that arsonists started in an unused Muslim mosque in Jerusalem before dawn Wednesday.
Thirteen residents of Judea and Samaria had been ordered out of the area and were living in an apartment house in Kiryat Moshe, a mostly national religious community with many French immigrants and home to Machon Meir, the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva and many other religious institutions.
During the police ambush, students from the yeshiva protested the ambush and arrests, and fought with police officers. A window of a police vehicle was smashed, and tires were punctured.
The fracas occurred just as Israeli politicians and media are staging a massive campaign against the national religious community for not preventing “price tag” activists from using violence to protest government demolitions of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee Wednesday that the army should have shot the infiltrators of the army base Monday night. “Terror is terror,” he said, adding that “lethal fire” should have been aimed at them, although had anyone shot at an Arab for vandalism, he would face a jail sentence.
The heated atmosphere is similar to the frenzy that pervaded the country following the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, when most political leaders and media conducted a campaign against the national religious community.
However the killer of Rabin, Yigal Amir, was a resident of Haifa and not of Judea and Samaria, and hilltop activists in Samaria said that many of the youth who acted violently against the government this week are from urban areas that are not in the region of Judea and Samaria.
National Union chairman and Knesset Member Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz said Tuesday that he suspects Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and leftists have planted provocateurs to incite nationalist youth to act against the army. He explained that the modus operandi is to create a bad image for the Land of Israel movement and make it easier to gain public support to carry out demolitions of Jewish homes.
