Tuesday, January 10, 2017, 10:29 An administrative order prohibiting a minor to be in
The current administrative order
contact with 170 specific individuals, among them an army officer and soldiers in elite units, has been served to a 16-year-old Yitzhar resident. The order is signed by the GOC of the Central Command, Major-General Roni Numa. The youth is completely unacquainted with dozens of the people on the list, whose place of residence or yeshiva in which they learned have apparently turned them into targets of the Jewish Department of the ISA.
On Sunday, January 8, police detectives detained the minor at the Geulat Tzion outpost, and after he had a discussion with the ISA, served him with an administrative order imposing on him house arrest at night at his parents’ house in Yitzhar and prohibiting him to make contact with 170 specific people, an unprecedented number double what was stipulated in the order served to Meir Ettinger. As with all administrative orders there is no evidence and no judicial procedure has been carried out.
The minor was distanced from his own home by administrative order on May 30, 2016, and later detained after he informed the authorities that he did not have a place to stay. His plight launched the “A Bench for the Yitzhar Minor” social media protest. The order expired approximately six weeks ago. See here for more information.
A quick reading of the 170-name list reveals that in addition to one name being mentioned twice, it includes the names of approximately 30 people with whom the minor has never met, and dozens more who are not associated with hilltops or any ideological activities, and whose connection to him is merely superficial. He has not spoken to some of them in several years.
The list includes an officer in a secret unit who had lived in Yitzhar, a soldier in a Givati reconnaissance platoon with whom the minor is not acquainted (a quick search revealed that he had studied as a youth in a yeshiva in the Shomron), a youth with whom the minor had met once on a Shabbat at an outpost five years ago, who is currently living in Tel Aviv and for years has had no connection to hilltop communities, married students at a yeshiva in the central region of Israel who are more than a decade older than the minor whom he has never met and neither has he ever heard their names, and they have not been involved with ideological activities over the past few years either, and more.
The list also includes a 12-year-old neighbor of the minor, dozens of Yitzhar residents, among them a rabbi and educators, Yitzhar’s youth coordinator, dozens of high school yeshiva students from several schools throughout Israel, with some of whom he is not acquainted and with some of whom he has only a superficial connection, and also hilltop youth who are known to the authorities.
Honenu is of the opinion that the list is testimony that the Jewish Department of the ISA has lost its sense of reason: “The list of 170 individuals with whom the minor is forbidden to make contact proves once again that the administrative orders are not rational and that everyone who does not have the correct mindset turns into a target of the Jewish Department of the ISA, over which there is no oversight.
“When the ISA defines Nof Ayalon, a community on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway in which judges reside, as a ideologically problematic environment, and an officer in a secret unit is included in an administrative order, public figures must re-think their relationship with the Jewish Department of the ISA.”
The minor’s father, Shai, stated that, “It is sad to see that when Jews are being murdered, what the Israeli Police does is give a youth an administrative order. There is no reason for the order. It is not able to be implemented and neither is it logical. A youth is supposed to wander around the streets with a list, checking constantly whether or not someone in his surroundings is one of the the 170 people with whom the order prohibits him to make contact, some of whom he does not know and with whom he has never met. All this without being accused of anything and without being given the right to defend himself.”