ISRAELI JUDGE RULES HEBRON HOUSE DEMOLITION ILLEGAL
Israeljustice.com
Date added: 11/27/2008
www.israeljustice.com/news2.asp?key=150
JERUSALEM -- Amid a bid by Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak to evict
Jewish residents from a home in the West Bank city of Hebron, an Israeli
judge has ruled that last month's destruction of a Hebron Jewish home and
eviction of the residents was illegal.
"The eviction was not balanced, not reasonable, not right and not
appropriate," Jerusalem District Court Judge Moshe Drori said.
Drori rejected a petition by the state prosecution and the police to ban
Jewish dissident Noam Federman from the West Bank after Jerusalem Magistrate
Shulamit Dotan earlier rejected the same petition.
"The State's request to forbid [Federman] from being in Judea and
Samaria is marked by severe discrimination," Drori said on November 26, "as
there is not even one example anywhere in Israeli law indicating a ban on a
person living in an entire area of the country merely because of an incident
of violence towards policemen in which he was involved...the one who bore
the brunt of the violence is totally bruised over his entire body [Federman]
and not the police."
More than 100 security forces, including special police forces, arrived
at the Federman farm outside Hebron at 1.30 on the morning of Oct. 26 to
destroy two homes. Noam and Elisheva Federman and their nine children were
asleep at the time. The second home belonged to Sinai Tor, his wife and
their four children.
After being woken by dogs barking outside his house, Federman said he
walked outside where he said security forces pounced on him, shoved him to
the ground, beat him and cuffed him. Federman said that special police clad
in black uniforms then shattered all the windows of the home whilst the
children slept. After forcefully evicting the children, they arrested the
entire family but separated the mother from her young children. During the
violent eviction, Federman said that police broke several fingers on his 16
year-old daughter Y's hand. Police held the family in separate police
stations until the early hours of the morning while security forces
bulldozed the homes with all their belongings inside of them. Both Noam and
Elisheva have since been indicted for assaulting police officers.
Drori criticized the police for arriving at the Federman farm in the
middle of the night, without prior warning to evict the families, based on
an outdated closed military zone order.
"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 serve 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, " Drori said. "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. I would like to note that the state prosecutor apparently did not
take notice of the weekly Torah portion that was read aloud around the time
he petitioned [the court]. It is written there that God decided to destroy
Sodom and Gomorrah 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."
Drori also rejected the state's petition to heavily fine Federman and he
criticized the state prosecution for even petitioning the district court to
have Federman banned from the West Bank.
"There's no need to mention that it there is no justification, from my
point of view, for this appeal, which relates to the interim period until
the decision of the magistrates court, scheduled for Dec. 1," Drori said.
"It would have been appropriate for the appellant to have waited patiently
like every other judicator."
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who signs eviction orders, said he would
order the state prosecution to immediately appeal to the Supreme Court.
For his part, Federman said he was satisfied with Drori's
precedent-setting ruling but he said that this was a decision that could
easily be overruled by the higher court.
"This is one judge with one decision," Federman said. "It doesn't mean
it will stay like this. Ehud Barak will appeal to the Supreme Court and we
all know who is sitting there, leftist judges."