Police officials call response to right-wing violence 'farce'

Senior police officers, both active and retired, are highly critical of the Jerusalem police's conduct Sunday night when they failed to prevent Jewish rioters from pelting homes and cars in the East Jerusalem village of the Mercaz Harav terrorist.

The police opted to let the Jewish demonstrators vent their anger after the terrorist attack at the yeshiva on March 6, in which eight youths and young men were murdered by a gunman from the village of Jabal Mukkaber.

"Such an incident should not have been allowed in Jerusalem, at any price," a senior officer said. "Any confrontation of this sort is explosive. It was particularly ugly behavior on the part of the Jewish rioters that could have and should have been prevented."

The first failing was in the police's decision to allow the demonstration, even though it was unauthorized. The second mistake was that the police did not meet with organizers to warn them against letting the demonstration turn violent. Another failure was that the demonstration was not quelled forcefully.

Major General (res.) Mickey Levy, a former police commander for the Jerusalem District, had trouble hiding his dissatisfaction with the police's conduct and the decision to allow an unauthorized demonstration to take place.

"In this incident there was no need to collect any classified information ahead of time. All the information was open and available. The demonstrators announced their intentions to commit an illegal act in posters," Levy said.

"The Jerusalem police should have called in the organizers for questioning even before the incident to warn them not to attack the homes in the village and gain their signed commitment that the incident would not deteriorate. In addition, the police should have been organized, operationally, in a completely different fashion," he added.

"The police are responsible for the safety of the entire public, whether they are Jewish or Arab. The minute the demonstrators reached the village through the flanks, the police should have dispersed them with force. As simple as that."

According to a senior officer in the force, "It has been a long time since I saw the police behave so poorly. This was a farce. The police had four days to prepare for this incident. They had all the intelligence they could have asked for, and still, they opted for the most trivial form of security: a chain of officers around the promenade, and securing the home of the terrorist in the village," he said.

"The Jerusalem police command did not think that the demonstrators would simply aim for something less glamorous than razing the terrorist's home, and simply seek to do damage to other homes in the village."

Chief Superintendent Amnon Alkalai, who was in charge of the forces at the scene, admitted on Sunday evening that the police had failed in countering the Jewish rioters.

"We were surprised by the level of violence," he said.