Around 8:30 PM Tuesday, after four and a half hours of hard work, a force from the Home Front Command managed to break through the locking construction set up by Boaz Albert, Hakol Hayehudi reported.
Albert is a resident of Yitzhar, a Jewish town in Samaria, south of Sh’chem. An executive order has been issued against him by the military, to stay out of Yitzhar, an order which Albert was defying. And to make good on his defiance, Albert locked himself up with this iron gizmo, making it impossible to remove him without cutting off parts of his body – something even our violent riot police does not do.
Dozens of riot police (their official name, YaSaM, stands for “special patrol unit”) showed up at the Albert home at 4 PM Tuesday, surrounding the home and fighting through the crowd of locals and additional supporters who had arrived in a long caravan of cars. The riot police did what riot police do everywhere, from Istanbul, Turkey to Oakland, California: beat the daylights out of unarmed civilians and sprayed hot pepper into their faces.
A woman and a 9-year-old boy were among the more severely beaten. Police and civilians also exchanged rocks and eggs (civilians) for stun grenades and tear gas (police). The locals also sprayed the cops with water, it being the eve of Hoshana Rabba, when we pray for water for the entire year. In fact, throughout the event the locals continued to sing holiday songs and raising wine glasses from the Albert family vinyard.
Our friends at Women in Green sent out a press release calling on the government to stop persecuting Boaz Albert and to devote the vast resources spent on tearing him away from his home to look for the Arab terrorists who’ve been murdering soldiers recently.
Boaz Albert has become the cause célèbre of the National religious camp after an incident in August in which riot cops showed up in his house and tasered him several times while hauling him out – despite the fact that Albert was passive and offered no active resistance. That unmitigated cruelty marked a new low in the behavior of Israel’s riot goon squad, and received condemnations from politicians, including from the left.
All this attention also made Albert a favorite target of the riot police, whose career paths may have suffered on account of that August night of electric shocks. Hence the repeated attempts to force Albert to comply with the executive order – and the persistent resistance on the part of Albert and the Jews of Judea and Samaria.
Mind you, the executive order was not issued – back in the winter of 2006 – for things Boaz Albert (and 18 others) have done. It states that the group of 19 settlers are forbidden to enter Judea and Samaria because the GSS, based on “solid intelligence,” believes each one of them is likely to “act clandestinely and violently against Arabs and Arab property.”
The GSS and the riot police tend to make everything personal, and to them making sure this settler is kept away from his home and his family is far more important than chasing after killer Arabs. Angry and brutal – two qualities they prize in cops in hotspots like Moscow and Kuala Lumpur – mark Israel’s special police unit’s treatment of Israeli Jews. They are a stain on Israel’s democracy, much like that executive order that punishes a man for things he will probably do in the future.