AG Defends Decision to Evacuate Amona
Excerpts;
“Attorney General Menahem Mazuz told the special parliamentary investigative committee into the violent events at Amona on Tuesday that settler offers of a compromise that were presented to him prior to the Amona evacuation were untenable, not to the point, and unfeasible.”
“Mazuz added that the Amona structures had to be demolished because, ‘they were tainted with all levels of illegality.'”
“The structures were built on private Palestinian land,’ he said.”
“Mazuz also pleged that any policeman or soldier found guilty of wrongdoing would be brought to justice.”
“Earlier, a social worker at the hearing told committee members that soldiers and policemen had attacked girls during the evacuation with sexual intent.”
“Senior representatives of the Yesha Council also testified. Among them was Yitzchak Bar-Tov, who claimed that he saw police hitting people already restrained by handcuffs or other means.”
“Yaakov Tesler, 17, testified that he saw policemen hitting young girls on the head with clubs.”
“Most of the testimony regarding the sexual attacks came from Noga Cohen, a social worker in the Yesha Council. She read the testimonies of several girls who claimed to have been attacked or had seen attacks on other girls.”
“‘One [soldier] stepped on her and kicked her again and again. The second one was bending over her, and I saw that he was touching her in a very inappropriate way,'” one of the girls said in her written testimony.
“Another girl claimed that a policeman had shoved her up against a wall and said, ‘Stop or I’ll f*** you. You know what? I enjoy this.'”
“‘This raises the question, what exactly is going on here?’ said Cohen.”
“MK Matan Vilnai, a member of the investigative committee, asked Cohen if there were any reports of policemen or soldiers trying to stop their comrades from attacking the girls.”
“‘No, just the opposite,’ she replied. ‘They weren’t embarrassed to do these things in front of their friends.’“
Commentary;
Somehow, Attorney General Mazuz’s assertion that “The structures were built on private Palestinian land” just doesn’t wash with various accounts.
For example, Aaron Klein writes, in his report on the event,
“Israeli Forces Brutalize Protesters”;
“More than 1,500 Israeli Defense Force soldiers and Israeli police officers were called up to demolish the nine homes in the northern West Bank hilltop town of Amona after the court system ruled the houses were constructed without a permit. The government said the homes could be rebuilt at a later date in the same community if the construction is coordinated with the Ministry of Defense.“
There is this quote from MSN group, Jewish Jews from the owner of one of the 9 destroyed Amona houses;
“Yifat Ehrlich, the owner of one of the destroyed homes, was interviewed on Israel Television. Asked about the fact that the State was destroying the buildings legally, she said, “This whole thing has nothing to do with law, but only with politics. The Supreme Court did not order the houses destroyed, but merely refrained from intervening in a political decision of the government. The government decided to destroy the buildings, in spite of the fact that we were in the midst of finalizing the purchase. The land here was never occupied by Arabs, it was totally barren when we came, no one has ever come to claim ownership, and we did not banish any one from this land.”
If the property was documented as “private Palestinian land”, how is it possible that no Arab ever came forward to claim the land during the entire period that the houses were being built? How is it possible for such construction to ever be licensed, to be “coordinated with the Ministry of Defense” if the property was documented as “private Palestinian land?” MB