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The other day, at the age of 53, mid-way (or so!) through a life of boring, upstanding citizenship, I was arrested. I was sitting in my local café in Modiin, my “second office,” where I often work over a cup of coffee. As I was tapping away at my computer, a religious man came over to me with an angry face and shouted at me that my kippah is against the law. For the past twenty years, almost, I’ve worn a kippah that has both the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag on it. The reasons behind the kippah are long and complex and related to the messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity; I’ll add later part of a piece that I wrote about my kippah recently, which I did as part of an icebreaker activity, not for publication, but given what happened today it provides some context. Anyway – I smiled at the man who was shouting at me and I said, if you want to sit down with me and discuss politics, I’d be happy to, but it’s not against the law. He said he was going to call the police. I shrugged my shoulders and said, do what you have to do, thinking nothing more of it. But then, five minutes later, the police arrive. Two officers, and they immediately tell me that my kippah is against the law and that they are going to confiscate it. (To be clear: displaying a Palestinian flag in public is not against the law; but there have been attempts – clearly successful – by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister for National Security, to classify it as a “provocation” and ban it from demonstrations and suchlike. Now it was being banned from my head, my kippah, my religious identity itself.) I kept my cool, despite the fact that my heart was pounding away a hundred beats a minute and my hands were shaking. As far as I understand the law, I said politely, there is nothing illegal about this kippah. I began to tell them about the complex Jewish identity that is behind the kippah, thinking that as soon as they saw that I was just a harmless citizen minding his own business, they would leave me alone. How naïve I was. “We are detaining you,” said the officer in charge, a policewoman who didn’t look much older than my kids. “Either you come with us to the station of your own accord, or we will do it by force.” That became the refrain of the entire process. “Either you do X, or we do it by force.” X was: give us your laptop, phone, and everything else from your pockets. (I was not allowed to make a phone call, not even to my wife). Then X was: get in the police car. Then, when we got to the police station, X was: get into the cell. Take off your belt. Face the wall, hands against the wall. They frisked me. Then they locked me in the cell, on my own, no water, no phone, no idea of what was going on or what the process would be. (Note: apparently I was not actually arrested. There’s a difference between being detained and being arrested; but that distinction doesn’t mean a hell of a lot when you’re sitting in a cell on your own without being allowed to speak to your wife or a lawyer). The crazy thing is that I was still naively thinking that it would be okay. Someone, a superior officer, wiser and more experienced, would come along, express regret for the hot-headed actions of the two young beat cops, and send me on my way with an apology and a “we’re here to protect and serve you, sir.” So I sat there in the cell, waiting for common sense to prevail. It didn’t. After about 20 long minutes they opened the cell, and told me to follow them to the front of the police station. There, at the front door, they shoved my backpack into my arms and told me to go – without my kippah. “But that’s my property,” I said. “I don’t want to go without it. Will you at least give some kind of receipt that you are confiscating it?” “You can either go now without the kippah or we can put you back into the cell by force,” said the officer. That refrain again. “I don’t want to go back into the cell,” I said. “But that kippah is important to me.” The officer went back into the station and returned a minute later with my kippah. She had cut out the Palestinian flag. She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it. You can see the “before” and “after” photos linked below. That was it. I walked home, shaken, angry, depressed. I have received enormous and uplifting support from friends and networks that I am part of. I was connected with someone from the Civil Society Protection Hub, an organization I did not know existed. She connected me to a lawyer, who advised me to file a complaint against the police for breaking the law through unlawful detainment and damaging my property. And that’s what I’ve done. I don’t want to over-react to this but it’s hard not to. It’s hard not to say that this is the kind of thing that fascist regimes do. It’s hard not to feel distressed that the police can just come and pull me away from a café in the middle of Modiin because they don’t like my politics. It’s hard not to be furious that they destroyed my kippah that meant so much to me. It’s hard not to feel worried and anxious and frankly devastated that this is the direction that Israel is moving in. Those of you who know me, or who have studied with me, or have been at my talks in synagogues and JCCs and Israel groups, or have read my work over the years, know that I am a Zionist. I believe in the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination, and I believe we have a legitimate historical connection to this piece of land. Believing the same thing about the Palestinians does not make me less Jewish or less Zionist. And it certainly should not result in me being taken from my café seat and thrown in a police cell. In my complaint against the police I have requested that they compensate me for a new kippah as a replacement and give me a written commitment that I can walk around Modiin with it free from harassment. But I’m not holding my breath.
Source: Alex Sinclair on Facebook.
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