Who will take responsibility?

The mass march by opponents of the disengagement that will set out today in the direction of Gush Katif will be blocked, according to the plan, by reinforced Israel Defense Forces and Israel Police units. The marchers will not be allowed to enter the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. The intriguing question is whether the elements responsible for enforcing the law - the police, the Prisons Service and the courts - will be able to deal firmly but fairly with the thousands of demonstrators who are threatening to block the Kissufim route with their bodies, "settle" on the road and prevent movement into the settlements that are slated for evacuation.

The protest activities that have been carried out in recent months by opponents of the disengagement have proven that those responsible for enforcing the law are finding it hard to cope with large masses of demonstrators who interfere with traffic, block main transportation routes and scatter oil and spikes on the roads.

There is no doubt that the main bottleneck in the law-enforcement system is the courts. They are not equipped to process large numbers of people under arrest, to consider requests by police and the prosecution for the arraignment of demonstrators and those who disturb public order. Since the beginning of this year, many hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested and more than 500 of them - half of them minors - have been indicted. However, the arraignment process in the courts has been long, slow and complicated, to a large degree because the suspects have not cooperated with the police. Some of them have refused to disclose their names, and their parents have not wanted to release them on bail.

The demonstrators' attorneys have sharply criticized the conduct of the courts in arraignment deliberations. "The police investigators arrived at the court at 11 o'clock at night with investigation files on hundreds of people suspected of illegal assembly or of endangering human lives on a transportation route. The judges begged the investigators: Come into our chambers; we can't check the material in this way," related attorney Efraim Katzir on June 8 at a meeting of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, which has been holding regular sessions on the law-enforcement system's preparations for the implementation of the disengagement.

Katzir said that he had represented approximately 200 demonstrators who had been arrested and felt himself to be a "fighter for human rights. People are simply plucked from the area of a legitimate demonstration straight to the court," he said. He did not have good things to say about the conditions in the jails. "The holding cells smell terrible. The attitude toward the people under arrest is humiliating," he said.

The distress of the arraigning judges

Attorney Naftali Wurtzburger said that the police had arrested 152 people during demonstrations in Jerusalem , but was unequipped to hold so many people in its facilities and therefore the people had to wait for hours in buses. He also expressed concern as to the courts' ability to deal with such a large number of cases. "The court in Jerusalem enlisted four or five additional judges, but very quickly they realized that they were incapable of conducting serious deliberations in the short time that is allotted to each case. The result was that just as there had been wholesale arrests, there was a wholesale release of all 152 detainees, apart from a few individuals who had committed more serious violations.

"My feeling is that as long as the demonstrations continue, the tool of arrest involving sanctions is not going to be effective. Therefore, the question that is bothering me is how the courts intend to prepare for mass arrests," he said.

Jerusalem District public defender Moshe Cohen also criticized the absence of systemic preparation for the arrest of hundreds of people within a short period of time. "The system needs to be prepared in a different way with respect to manpower and other resources. The entire system is unprepared. There has been no thought given to the budgetary aspect. There has to be an integrated system. In Jerusalem, for example, there are two arraigning judges, who within the space of a few hours have to deal with hundreds of people under arrest. This is impossible.

"It is impossible to make high quality judicial decisions under these circumstances. It is very problematic for a judge to deal with such masses. In my opinion, the police have to employ more serious judgment and sort people out more carefully on the question of whom to bring for arraignment. The feeling in the first wave of demonstrations, on May 16, was that they brought everyone they arrested to court, and some of them, including minors, were held in buses for many long hours," Cohen said.

Deputy Attorney General attorney Shai Nitzan, responding to the criticism, acknowledged that "the conditions for arrest are no picnic." He said that new wings have been built at Ma'asiyahu Prison in Ramle and at Dekel Prison in Be'er Sheva, places for holding 900 people have been prepared in preparation of the disengagement.

Nitzan said that in the framework of the preparations for the disengagement, it has been decided to set up courtrooms at Ma'asiyahu and Dekel, "something that will make it easier for the people under arrest."

Constitution, Law and Justice Committee Chairman MK Michael Eitan (Likud) questioned Nitzan closely. "Have scenarios been prepared based on estimates of how many people will be arrested?"

"Of course there are scenarios."

"Who is in charge of this?"

"The Prisons Service commissioner and the police. The State Prosecutor's Office does not direct the logistics of the jails."

"There is a system with many branches here. Youth parole officers, prisons, justices, logistics for bringing people and transportation. Who is responsible for all of these?"

"The head of the operations division at the police, who is responsible for the readiness of the prisons and the jails."

"I believe that you are the one who bears responsibility for the preparation of the law-enforcement system in this country for the disengagement and all it entails. You need to have enough authority to call upon the different elements and know how to reply to the question of how prepared is each unit. If on a single day, hundreds of people are arrested and children are held in buses and they won't have water and, heavens forefend, one of them is hurt, they will come to you and say, `What have you done?' How will you answer them - it wasn't me; someone else is responsible?"

"If they come to you and say, `Why didn't you initiate a discussion of relations between Israel and China?' will you say, `It wasn't me, go to the room of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee?'"

"I wouldn't say that, because every night I ask myself, `Am I doing my duty?' If one day they ask me, `What did you do to prevent a child from suffocating in a bus because they held him there for a long time?' I will answer that I asked Shai Nitzan and held discussion with him."

At the end of the tense session, it was decided that a special meeting would be held with the participation of representatives of the police, the Prisons Service and the courts administration, so that they would be able to report on their preparations for the disengagement.

`Huge chaos'

At the meeting of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee on June 12, District Court Judge Boaz Okon, director of the courts, said that "the courts have prepared an entire roster of those on call as duty judges. If there is a need, judges will be moved from one court to another to relieve the pressure. Our assessment is that if all the judges are enlisted in the effort, they will be able to cope with the expected number of arrests, as projected by the enforcement branches."

The deputy head of the operations divisions at the Ministry of Public Security, Police Brigadier General Avi Ben-Hemo, made it clear at the start of his remarks that "we are not accustomed to mass arrests and we do not have the infrastructure for this at the jails and the courts. In advance of the disengagement, we have prepared, in coordination with the Prisons Service, a facility at Ma'asiyahu Prison that can take in a large number of people under arrest, under normal conditions. At the demonstrations that have occurred until now, we transferred the people under arrest to this facility and afterward, we studied what changes to make."

Prisons Service Commissioner Lieutenant General Yaakov Ganot said that the service is already prepared to take in about 2,500 to 3,000 arrestees under appropriate conditions, in the center and the south of the country.

Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra expressed satisfaction with the preparations. "I have witnessed preparations for many operations, but I have never seen preparedness like that of the police and the Prisons Service," he said at the meeting of the Knesset committee on July 5. He said that he had arranged with the IDF that if the Prisons Service does not have enough places to hold people, security prisoners would be transferred to the care of the IDF and the places that are vacated would be filled by people arrested in the framework of the disengagement.

Summing up the meetings that have been held thus far to examine preparedness for the disengagement, Eitan said that he believed that all the elements concerned are making maximum efforts to improve preparedness. "I have the impression that they are prepared to take in quite large numbers of arrestees, but it is clear that if there are extraordinary circumstance in which hundreds and perhaps thousands of people are arrested, there will be huge chaos and the system will not function," he said.

"There is no doubt that the bottleneck will be at the courts. They are unprepared to arraign hundreds of arrestees simultaneously," he said.

	Anti-pullout activists praying in Ma'asiyahu Prison on May 17 after being arrested for blocking intersections. Prisons Service