On Thursday, around 7:30 PM, some 300 individuals demonstrated outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private home on Gaza Street in Jerusalem. The demonstrators carried torches and chanted, “The house in Gaza is burning, Bibi is afraid.” Some protesters burned a tire and lit flares. Meanwhile, a right-wing activist who arrived at the scene carrying a sign saying, “Treacherous Leftists,” was apprehended and removed by the police.
After about an hour, the demonstrators began marching toward the Prime Minister’s official residence on the nearby Balfour Street and then advanced to the city center. During their march, the demonstrators blocked the light rail at the King George-Jaffa streets intersection, and three of them were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct. When the protesters arrived at the Mahane Yehuda market area, several water balloons were thrown at them from a nearby building, and the police aggressively stopped the protesters and prevented them from entering the market. The protesters then retreated to the city center.
In a conversation with a senior member of the PM’s office, Ben Gvir said the commissioner is having difficulty dealing with the explosive situation on various fronts, from protests through crime to governance.
Thursday night, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir invited the Jerusalem District Commander Superintendent Doron Turgeman for an inquiry following the loss of police control to a group of anarchists
in the capital.
Ben Gvir issued a statement saying: “The Jerusalem police lost control over the anarchists. An incident in which tires were set on fire near the Prime Minister’s residence, and Highway 1 and light rail traffic were blocked – all of these are extremely serious incidents in which police and security forces were on the scene, but received explicit instructions not to enforce the law and not to confront the rioters.”
In response to his growing breach with Police commissioner Yaakov Shabtai, Ben Gvir decided to establish a team that includes three retired senior police officers, including Uri Bar Lev, who served as Commander of the Southern District, founded elite police unit 33, known as “the Gideonites,” and was the representative of Israel Police and the Internal Security Ministry in the United States. He was summarily dismissed by Israel Police Commissioner David Cohen in late August 2008, after turning down Cohen’s offer of study leave. A dyed-in-the-wool conservative, Bar Lev refused to be sent for academic studies in the US, arguing it would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money since he already had two academic degrees. It was also the commissioner’s convenient way of getting rid of the pesky Bar Lev. This and other right-wing characteristics blocked his path to further advancement.
And so, in November 2010, when Bar Lev was the front runner for the job of police commissioner, the prosecution trumped up a case of sexual harassment against Bar Lev, which was later dropped, but only after someone else was picked for the job.
