Police used force to disperse a violent protest by members of self-described feminist groups in Tel Aviv Thursday. Eight demonstrators were arrested.
Several dozen demonstrators, most of them women, gathered outside the police station on Dizengoff Street to express their support for the “New Profile” organization, which actively encourages refusal to enlist to the IDF.
Police told demonstrators, who were purposely crowding the entrance to the station, to cross the street to the other side. When they refused, police from the Yassam special operations unit came out of the station, pushed the demonstrators away from the station and arrested eight of them.
Illegal Demonstration
The demonstrators said that they had come to the station in order to submit to interrogation of their own free will. “Please interrogate me, I am a feminist and a peace activist,” they called out to police. “We want to complain against ourselves, we also support refusal to enlist.”
The demonstrators held signs which said “stop political persecution,” “I do not open fire and I do not give birth, arrest me,” and “the Attorney General is the real criminal.”
Seven of the group’s activists are being investigated on suspicion of incitement for draft evasion. The police’s Yarkon Precinct in Tel Aviv is carrying out the investigation.
According to a report in Ha’aretz, a policeman slapped one of the demonstrators in the face.
A police statement said that “in an illegal demonstration held by feminist women and anarchists outside the Lev Tel Aviv station, eight female demonstrators were detained for questioning for disturbing the peace and disobeying police officers. Attempts were made to talk to them after they besieged the station and prevented people from entering and exiting.”
How to Achieve 'Profile 21'
Twenty-three women’s groups sent a letter to the Minister of Defense earlier this week and threatened to flood the interrogation rooms of the Yarkon District because of the investigation against “New Profile.”
Seven activists were arrested April 26 and interrogated on suspicion that they operated the websites of “New Profile” and “Target 21.”
Both of the names are references to the term “profile 21,” which military mental health officers use to denote a person who is unfit for service. The websites encourage potential recruits to fake mental illnesses in order to obtain the “profile 21” designation and be freed from service in the army.
The group’s lawyer claimed that “egregious and improper actions were committed in the conduct of this investigation, such as the interrogation of elderly female activists who have no connection, even ostensible, to any criminal offense and their release under the most restrictive conditions of non-communication with any members of the organization, as if it were an illegal organization; the questioning of interrogatees about their ideological and political views and legitimate expressions; and the issuing of a sweeping search warrant for the offices of “HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual” due to the fact that one of the interrogatees worked there in the past.”
“New Profile” claims that feminist pacifism is the moral alternative to masculine militarism. “In a soldiers’ state there are equal and less equal citizens: the social ladder is topped by those who fight. And those are unfailingly men. In addition, in Israel, they are Jewish men. As warriors, they are held to have privileged knowledge, giving them precedence in decision making… The hegemonic culture in Israel nurtures admiration for might and physical prowess, an aggrandizement of Jewish nationals, and a devaluation of the lives of Arab nationals.”
The website glorifies activists who are under arrest for evading military service.