Ruins of Federman farm
Ruins of Federman farm

The Magistrates Court in Jerusalem has handed down yet another rejection of a police/Defense Ministry request to ban Hevron activist Noam Federman from his home.

The State Prosecution and police asked the courts to have Noam Federman banned from all of Judea and Samaria for the duration of judicial proceedings against him on charges of attacking a policeman. The alleged violence occurred in late October, when large police and army forces descended on the Federman farm in Kiryat Arba in the middle of the night, woke the sleeping children and forced them out of their home in their pajamas, and then proceeded to destroy the building. The ruins have still not been cleared, and much of the Federmans’ property has still not been recovered (see below).

Federman himself was briefly arrested at the time - his wife was arrested the next day - and he was later charged with attacking a policeman during the destruction. Federman denies the charges, saying he was the victim of police violence but did not retaliate. He accused the police of not allowing his family to remove belongings before the home was destroyed, and said that the police had forcibly separated his one-year-old baby from her mother.

The Jerusalem Magistrates Court, with Justice Shulamit Dotan presiding, was the first to hear the case. At the time, in late October, she said she would hand down a ruling in early December - but took the opportunity to sharply criticize the police for not giving Federman a copy of their request and indictment.

The police appealed the decision, asking that the decision be handed down more quickly than the date Judge Dotan set. The police apparently did not bargain, however, for the sharp rejection of their appeal handed down last week by Justice Moshe Drori of the Jerusalem District Court.



Drori ruled that the request to ban Federman from his home and environs was totally unjustified, was in violation of international conventions, and was marked by grave discrimination. Why should a person be banned from living in an entire region of the country merely because of an incident of violence towards policemen in which he was involved, Drori asked. 

'How Would You Act?'

“Let every person decide for himself how he would act,” Drori wrote, “if a police officer turns to him at 1:30 in the night, ordering him out of his house, with his wife and nine young children sleeping in their beds … The State did not bother to explain why it needed a force of 100 policemen to remove a person from a military zone that had been closed for ten months, with no prior warning or attempt at dialogue… The eviction was not balanced, not reasonable, not right and not appropriate.”

No Appeal Yet

Surprisingly, Defense Minister Ehud Barak decided not to take the criticism to heart – and ordered the State Prosecution to file an appeal of the ruling in the Supreme Court. As of five days later, no such appeal has yet been filed.

Federman, for his part, said after the District Court ruling that he plans to turn to the International War Crimes court and sue all those who were involved in the “pogrom” against his home and family.

Meanwhile, the original judge, Justice Dotan of the Magistrates Court, handed down her final ruling on Monday morning. She wrote that after examining the evidence, she found that the policemen contradicted each other and themselves, and that the case appears headed for an acquittal. She also implied that a person brutally woken up at 1:30 in the morning for the purpose of having his house destroyed should be given some leeway in his response.

Federman Keeps Even Temper

Federman is currently living, with some of his older children, in a tent at the site of his farm – in keeping with Justice Drori’s ruling that the “closed military zone” order slapped down on the site does not apply to the Federmans. “This does not mean that I’m allowed to build,” Federman told IsraelNationalNews. “The demolition order is still in effect. The judge merely criticized the manner in which it was carried out.”

“I’m living with what I have,” Federman said simply. “What we don’t have, we do without.” Asked to elaborate, he said, “Tables, cabinets for clothing and other items, beds, laptop computers – those were some of what we saw smashed under the ruins. We had two refrigerators – at least one of them was also broken. Much of the other stuff was either thrown onto army trucks and taken to the Ofer base, or is still under the ruins."

"For instance," he said, "five pairs of tefillin [specially written and packed Torah passages, strapped onto the head and arm during prayer according to Biblical law, costing at least $500 each - ed.] have still not been found." He explained that his sons wear tefillin beginning at age 9, four years earlier than most others, in accordance with a certain approach in Jewish Law.

Army Charges Him For Packing

Asked what the army plans to do with his belongings, he said, “They wanted me to come and see them, but I demanded that an assessor come as well. The army then suddenly claimed that they had packed it up, and are now charging me 20,000 shekels for ‘packing and transport’… Slightly reminiscent of Sodom, no?”

Federman says he would not be surprised if the latest decision, or the previous one by Judge Drori, would be appealed by order of the Defense Ministry.