Detainee calls for cancellation of administrative orders

Thursday, August 3, 2017, 20:34 Moshe Shahor, a detainee in the Ela Prison, Be’er Sheva, was not released from detention because he has refused to accept the condition of not violating the administrative distancing order outstanding against him. Shahor wrote a letter to the GOC of the Home Front Command, Major-General Tamir Yadai, calling on him to cancel administrative orders served to Jews and asserted that even a thousand orders would not break his spirit.
Moshe Shahor (18), a Ramleh resident, was detained on Monday, June 12 in Jerusalem on suspicion of violating an administrative order outstanding against him. Shahor refused to be released from remand after he again received an extension on the order, the fifth administrative order he has received within the past three years, which includes house arrest at night, distancing from Yehuda, Shomron and Jerusalem, and a prohibition on making contact with a large number of his friends. By order of the Deputy Jerusalem Magistrate Court President, Judge Yehoshua Zimmerman, Shahor has been detained until the end of proceedings.
Shahor wrote a letter from prison to Major-General Yadai, demanding that he stop the persecution and cancel the administrative orders served to youth associated with hill-top communities. “After all, you don’t think, Tamir, that if a youth meets with a friend for a few minutes to eat a pizza that it is an incident which is likely to constitute a danger to the peace of the region. On the contrary, it [the conditions of the order] clearly shows that this order is designed to destroy ‘the hill-top youth’ in the guise of safe-guarding the security of the State,” wrote Shahor in his letter. “Do you really expect a youth to abruptly cut off relationships with all of his good friends and the house of study where he learns?! And all of that without a single reason or justification!
“When I was detained on the 18th of Sivan (June 12), the judge once again offered to release me if I signed that I would fulfill the administrative order and not speak to whomever I was forbidden to speak to, but I decided that I had had enough. No. This time I will not sign, and I will not accept the order which separates me from my friends and my close surroundings. No. I also will not accept the order which tears apart my family. And it’s all without any explanation. I have had enough, because I think that Jews have the right – certainly in the Land of Israel – to live as Jews, to dream as Jews, and to realize the 2,000-year old dream of the Jewish nation in exile.”
In his letter Shahor describes what has become the reality for the past three years: Administrative orders have turned into a sad joke and a routine action. Every 14-year old who visits a hill-top receives an administrative order which violates his freedom and destroys his personal life. “There is a crazy amount of administrative orders which are given without any consideration, reason or discernment, but rather for one single purpose, and that is to eliminate the phenomenon called ‘hill-top youth’, which apparently is not acceptable to certain people in the government,” continues the letter.
“Tamir, you entered the post of Major-General not so long ago, and unfortunately you are continuing in the way of your predecessors and continuing to serve as a rubber stamp and arbitrarily signing on administrative orders and not checking facts, wrote Moshe and concluded his letter with a call to cancel administrative orders against Jews, “whose only crime is that they wanted the best for the Jewish nation in its land for the Torah. Every week we hear in the news about another terror attack or an attempted attack, rock-throwing on the roads has become routine, all over the Land of Israel Jews are run-over and stabbed, and you are concerned with Jews?! In short, Tamir, start dealing with what is really endangering the security of the nation and the Land, and not Jews who are ready to die for the sake of the nation and the Land.”
Shahor closed his letter with, “Tamir, I would like to tell you that a thousand orders will not wipe the smile off of my face.”
Rivka Shahor, Moshe’s mother, describes a vindictive system which ceaselessly detains him, and after not finding any connection between him and the charges attributed to him, serves him with order after order. “As if repeated house arrest orders aren’t enough, they constantly update the list of friends with whom he is forbidden to make contact. If he learns at a yeshiva in Tsfat, they add his friends from there to the list.”
Although Rivka would be happy to see Moshe return home, she is not willing to accept the current conditions. “Part of it is that he does not want to be released, out of consideration for us. The night house arrest is at our house, and we can’t even think of how policemen will return to knocking at the door or calling on the intercom at all hours of the night. We are a family with children. The order aims to harass us and therefore he does not want to return home. I can’t accept him home under these conditions. It harms us as a family.
“I don’t see them allowing him and the other youths a future. From conversations with the probation officers who have handled his case, I understand the great absurdity of the situation. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the State of Israel. They try to do everything to rehabilitate and avoid filing indictments against every youth who is classified as at-risk. With the hill-top youth it is exactly the opposite. They don’t allow them rehabilitation of any kind. The State is fighting an all out war with this youth and is not allowing them normal lives, instead of doing so with the terrorists who actually harm us,” she said sadly.
Honenu Attorney Nati Rom, who represented Shahor, received the decision by the court to order the remand of Shahor until the end of proceedings and in response to Shahor’s remand stated that, “It is very sad to see youths, most of them minors, without any criminal record, rudely cut off from the routine of their lives – friends, family, school, work – for long periods of time without a judicial decision on their cases.”
Rom directed his criticism towards the use by Major-Generals Roni Numa and Tamir Yadai of administrative orders: “These are unheard of proceedings. They take orders which are fundamentally emergency measures for extreme situations of danger to life, orders which are meant for limited periods of time, until the cases can be examined by a judge, and they turn them into a regular means of penalizing youth whose actions do not please the Major-Generals, and that is for periods of years. It is obvious that there has been an error in judgment here.”
In his conclusion, Honenu Attorney Nati Rom related also to the conduct of the police: “We hear more than a bit about the lack of resources which prevents the handling of the genuine and serious problems with criminality in the country, such as crime in south Tel Aviv, vehicle theft, organized crime and more. Where are the resources, you ask? They are in entire units which were created solely to deal with youths, minors in Yehuda and Shomron in a manner in which no criminal, no matter what the severity of his crimes is, is treated.”