ISRAELI JUDGE RULES HEBRON HOUSE DEMOLITION ILLEGAL

Israeljustice.com

  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for arriving at the Federman farm in the middle of the night, without prior warning to evict the families, based on an outdated closed military zone order.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."