Police arrested detained former MK Yehuda Glick Saturday night on suspicion of trying to smuggle an illegal Palestinian Authority resident into Israeli territory at the alWalaja checkpoint near Mount Gilo, south of Jerusalem, two miles northwest of Bethlehem.
After being detained for questioning, Glick claimed that he was driving a PA Arab hitchhiker he had picked up in his car on the way. According to the former Likud MK, renowned for his devotion to Jewish ascent to the Temple Mount, when he arrived at the checkpoint, he himself turned to the police there and asked them to check on his passenger so that he would know if he could continue to drive him.
Glick asked the police officers to return his ID card and when they refused, he refused to accompany them to the patrol car. The police then to arrested him, he was handcuffed, and taken for questioning at the Border Police base in Atarot. He was interrogated overnight and released on NIS 5,000 ($1,500) bail. The illegal resident was arrested and transferred to Ofer Prison.
Hadas, Glick’s wife, told Walla that her husband was the one who asked an IDF soldier at the checkpoint to check on the Arab the couple had picked up. “We spent Shabbat in Mount Gilo, (a settlement near Jerusalem – DI),” she recalled. “When we left, a young man was standing near the guard’s booth and asked for a ride. We talked to him, he said he wanted to get to Malha (a neighborhood in southwest Jerusalem – DI). We asked him where he was from, and he said ‘I’m a neighbor from the village of Walaja,’ and that he had permits.”
When they arrived near the checkpoint, the soldier in charge told them they could continue on their way, but “Yehuda called his attention to the fact that he needed to check the passenger and the validity of his permits,” Glick’s wife continued. Then, after it was discovered that there was a problem with the Arab’s permits, the soldier informed them that they were being detained for attempting to smuggle an illegal resident, and explained that they were not allowed to drive the man to the checkpoint.
“We didn’t know we should have dropped him off before the checkpoint and let him walk,” she said, adding, “It’s a very hard feeling, a terrible feeling. We acted as any human being would have done.”
The Border Police issued a statement that sounds vaguely related to the incident as Mrs. Glick described it, except all the details: “During a routine activity of Border Police fighters stationed at the Yael Crossing in the Jerusalem envelope, the fighters stopped a vehicle for inspection (they didn’t, according to Hadas Glick). Inside the vehicle sat a driver and passenger in the rear compartment (nothing about the driver’s wife). The investigation revealed that the passenger is staying illegally without permits to enter Israel (there wouldn’t have been an investigation had the driver not demanded it). When the fighters informed the driver that he was detained he began to riot and refuse to be delayed (also – he demanded his ID card). The suspected driver was arrested, and together with the illegal detainee they were transferred for questioning by the Border Police, at the end of which the suspected driver was released on bail and the illegal detainee was transferred to Ofer Prison.”
Now, picking up an Arab, especially a PA resident, in the middle of the night is mindbogglingly stupid. Doing so when you are Yehuda Glick, who in 2014 was shot four times in the chest by an assassin and barely came out alive, just leaves one speechless. Mothers, tell your children not to follow Yehuda Glick’s example.