(JNi.media) Large police forces as well as a SWAT team on Thursday surrounded the community center at the village of Nof Ayalon near Modi’in, inside the 1949 armistice “green line.” The center was hosting a conference of right wing activists, rabbis and public figures, who gathered to debate the sharp rise in the issuing of administrative detention orders by the Israeli government. Police detained two (although there were reports of four) activists who have been expelled from Judea and Samaria attended the conference, although there presence there did not violate the orders against them.
Among the better known activists at the conference were Professor Hillel Weiss, Torah scholar and writer Rabbi Yoel Schwartz—a co-founder of the IDF Nahal Haredi battalion, former MK Michael Ben-Ari, Lehava leader Ben-Zion Gopstein, Noam Federman, Baruch Marzel, attorney Yitzhak Bam, and “hilltop youth” activist Meir Bartler.
Honenu legal aid society chairman Shmuel Medad, who attended the conference, wrote on his organization’s Facebook page, “The landlord is crazy (an Israeli expression meaning the government has lost it). It appears that even a conference against administrative decrees is not to the liking of the Israel Police. Unfortunately, the police receive instructions to act as if there are no restrictions on their force and no limitations on their resources.”
A senior police official confirmed to Maariv that forces were active in the village, and said, “The event was attended by young people who have recently accepted administrative orders. The orders include a prohibition on contacting other activists. These are activists who had violated the ban and met each other in this place. Troops arrived to carry out arrests following a breach of the order. Two activists have been arrested.”
Despite their claim to justification, police confiscated video cameras and erased records of their raid, saying the clips would expose clandestine members of the Jewish division of Shin Bet.