By Stan Goodenough
Nov 26, 2008
A Jerusalem District Court judge ruled Tuesday that an Israeli police effort to prevent a Jewish settler from living near Hebron, in what Israel's enemies call the West Bank, was unconstitutional.
What was described as a mob of policemen, acting under court orders of some kind, raided the family home of Noam Federman and his wife in the early hours of the morning on October 25, reportedly smashing windows and doors, then pulling nine sleeping children out of their beds, hitting some of them, forcing them to get out, and then bulldozing their home, with all the family's possessions still inside.
Federman was arrested for allegedly using violence against the police. They then petitioned the courts to uphold a ban against him entering Judea and Samaria.
Judge Moshe Drori said the police request to have Noam Federman banned from entering Samaria and Judea was disproportionate " inasmuch as they sought to prevent Federman from living in a significant portion of the land of Israel."
The judge also noted, cynically, that whereas the police were wanting to charge Federman with using violence against them “the one who came out of the violence totally bruised on his entire body because of that ‘violence’ was actually [Federman] and not the police.”
Israel's police, who have the unenviable task of working 24/7 to combat both crime and terrorism, have not been averse to working with the left side of the country's political establishment and acting against the so-called settlers - the strongly Zionist Jews many of who live in Samaria and Judea precisely because they believe God has commanded them to settle that land.
The police, in turn, are acting on the orders of an Israeli government too weak or too cowardly to stand up against the world's demand that they vacate the land of their forefathers and surrender it to the Arabs.
Drori, a kippa-wearing judge, referenced the Bible in his ruling in Federman's favor.
“I would like to note," he wrote: "that the State’s representative apparently did not take notice of the Weekly Torah Portion that was read aloud around the time he made his claims. It is written there that G-d decided to overturn Sodom and Gomorra because of their heavy sins. Yet even there, where the sins were 77 times worse than we could imagine, the Creator enabled the Patriarch Abraham to plead for them before He delivered any punishment.”
While not condoning any alleged acts of violence on Federman's part, Drori asked:
“Let every person decide for himself how he would act if a police officer turns to him at 1:30 in the night and wants to give him papers ordering him out of his house, with his wife and nine young children sleeping in their beds, and their father sees himself responsible for their welfare and safety… The State did not bother to explain why it needed a force of 100 policemen to remove a person from a military zone that had been closed for ten months, with no prior warning or attempt at dialogue… The eviction was not balanced, not reasonable, not right and not appropriate.”
Defense Minister Ehud Barak has reportedly decided to appeal the court's decision.