Last update - 02:10 09/03/2004
People and Politics / Attacked an Arab? No problem
By Akiva
Eldar
When the government gets the money to send the fence contractors to Mt. Hebron, the little village of A Tuwany and the cave dwellers nearby will become the hot story of the fence. Lately, the thugs with the scullcaps and tzitziyot from the Mt. Hebron area are trying very hard to clear the are of a few hundred peasants from the heart of an Area C, right on the route of the fence.
The police, army and even the courts meanwhile are obeying perverted orders that are meant to protect the trespassers from the legal owners of the land. For example, one day a gang of teenagers who were thrown out of school moved a mobile home onto one of the hills near the settlement of Maon. The next day the local military commander forbade the residents of villages in the area to work their farmlands without prior coordination with the army. In other words, instead of throwing out the aggressor and protecting the victim, the Israel Defense Forces protect the aggressor and dispossess the victim.
There's no limit to the imagination of the settlers and their helpers. To reduce the living space of the Palestinian farmers, they opened a "tea house" at the foot of the antiquities site at Susiya. The next day, the entire area was declared "off-limits" to Arabs. The daily routines in the area include swimming with dogs in the drinking water wells of Tuwany village, spraying the fields with poison and demonstrative visits to the homes of collaborators for whom the Israeli authorities built large homes in the centers of the villages of the vicinity.
One of the favorite pastimes of the thugs is to chase shepherds and steal newborn lambs. Last Wednesday, we reached the area just as the police investigators were collecting the bullet shells that the settlers had fired at the villagers of Tuwany a little while earlier. Three suspects waited by the police jeep. They did not look particularly worried.
The next day, 10 settlers were brought to the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court. Staff Sergeant Amitai Amosi told Judge Rafael Yaacobi that the suspects chased some Palestinian shepherds, used slingshots to stone them and fired in the air. On the way they encountered a Palestinian vehicle, threw stones at it and drove off their passengers. Amosi did not ask for the suspects to be arrested or remanded. When Arabs do the same things, there's no need to take them to court. Administrative detention works just as well. But in this case, Amosi asked that the gang be ordered to keep away from the area for three months. Judge Yaacobi turned him down. The Judea and Samaria district police and the officers in the central command were not surprised. Senior officers say that the settlers know that the law does not apply to them.
