Haredi ministers lash out at police, gov’t treatment
Senior ultra-Orthodox politicians have reacted sharply to incidents of police violence and excessive force Saturday night, accusing the police of discrimination against the haredi public and the government of adopting double standards against the sector.
Several hundred haredi protesters took to major intersections close to the Kiryat Belz and Romema neighborhoods of Jerusalem Saturday night to protest the lockdown of these areas, with some blocking the roads and trying to remove barriers enforcing the closure.
Police personnel sought to clear the protests and claimed that they faced violence from demonstrators, arresting at least 10 people.
Interior Minister and Shas leader Arye Deri hit out, however, at what he described as the double standard in how police deal with the protests by a largely secular crowd in Tel Aviv, where there was little friction, with the smaller haredi protests in Jerusalem,
where police were recorded using heavy-handed and violent tactics.
Construction and Housing Minister and United Torah Judaism chairman Ya’acov Litzman held a meeting Sunday afternoon with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the problem, citing similar complaints.
As a result of their demands, Netanyahu announced that he, together with Health Minister Yuli Edelstein and Public Security Minister Amir Ohana, would meet with Litzman, Deri and senior UTJ MK Moshe Gafni about the closures on ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods on Monday.
“We saw two protests last night, one in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv with 10,000 people and one in Romema in Jerusalem with a
few dozen haredi protesters,” Deri said during Sunday morning’s cabinet meeting.
“In the Tel Aviv protest, they did not always keep the required distance from each other, people weren’t stringent about the regulations, and we didn’t see violence against the protesters,” he said. “In the Romema neighborhood, we saw a video in which a haredi man asks a policeman why he isn’t wearing a mask, and in response, the police man hit him in the face with his fist and stopped him from getting help.”
Video footage from the Romema protests emerged on Twitter depicting this incident, with other police officers then trying to intimidate the haredi journalist who recorded it.
The police officer in question is now under investigation, Channel 12 News reported Sunday night.
Other footage showed police officers charging indiscriminately at protesters, kicking, pushing, shoving and using seemingly unwarranted violent tactics.
“This is deliberate violence of policemen against haredi protesters. It has to stop,” Deri said, adding that he and the UTJ leaders met with Ohana on Friday to discuss the issue. Ohana was “attentive” to the problematic attitude of the police to the haredi public, he said.
During the cabinet meeting, Deri demanded that the criteria for imposing a lockdown on a city, neighborhood or region should be published immediately “to avoid the feeling of discrimination,” which the ultra-Orthodox public has complained of following the lockdown of several haredi areas.
Netanyahu reportedly agreed