Hebron settlers seek to join leftists' petition

The Jewish settler community in Hebron has asked the High Court of Justice to be added as a party to a petition filed by left-wing group Breaking the Silence. The move would allow the settlers to have their day in court to argue that they have been the victims of police discrimination.

The petition demands that the police allow the group to conduct study tours of Hebron's Jewish community, which were suspended recently by the army and police because of public disturbances in their wake. Settlers blamed the disturbances on provocations by the left-wingers.

The settler's request, written by Orit Struk, director of the community's legal department, states that Breaking the Silence's activity goes beyond study tours, that it is provocative, entails disruption of the peace, confrontations with civilians, police officers and soldiers, blocking roads while endangering people's lives, and agitation of Hebron's Arab populace against the Jews living there.

Struk also states that one of the petitioners has been the subject of several investigations over the past year on suspicion of acting illegally during those "study tours," organizing provocations and unlicensed parades, behaving riotously, and assaulting members of the security forces.

All these suspicions were not detailed in the petition, Struk writes in the request submitted last night.

The Hebron settlers claim severe discrimination in the way law enforcement is applied to them. They note that the Israel Police regularly prevents political activists from entering residential areas where this might lead to rioting or offend the people's sentiments.

For example, right wingers are prevented from entering Arab towns, and just recently the police announced they would not permit a Gay Pride parade through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods or even in their vicinity.

But whereas Hebron Jews are always punished to the full extent of the law and even removed from their homes and families if they disturb the peace in their hometown, the police "let members of the radical left come into the residential areas of Hebron's Jews, to taunt them deliberately time after time, to incite against them and defame them, and do not grant [Hebron's Jews] the protection they deserve as citizens and as residents with equal rights."