Demonstrations are a basic democratic right. But in a democratic country, there are rules for staging them, and the demonstrators are obligated to abide by them. The moment that these rules are disobeyed, the police have ways and means to deal with the violators of the law.
This begins with mounted police circulating among the demonstrators and sometimes even trampling them. The next step is the use of clubs pounding on the heads of the violators, throwing shock grenades, water canon and the well-known use of stink sprays. These are the familiar means used by the police to break up violent illegal demonstrations.
These methods are graded. Certain ones are used against chareidim, others against Ethiopian demonstrators and yet other against settlement rights protests employed by the 'youth of the hills' movements, and the police are trained to differentiate between the different kinds of demonstrations.
There is one sector, however, where they have not crystallized a method of control and dispersal, i.e. the Leftists, secularists and anti-religious public. And here, suddenly the police are at a loss for any means and tools to subdue them. And so, they maintain a hands-off attitude. (Relatively speaking, since there are some officers who relish unleashing their violent natures upon any and all kinds of demonstrations.)
And that is what happened this past Monday when a protest demonstration was licensed for Jerusalem. However on their way, the demonstrators barred the Netivei Ayalon junction, the entrance to the Ben Gurion airport and other main roadways, causing tens of thousands of citizens to be stranded on the road, to arrive late to work, perhaps also to a doctor's appointment, or miss a flight. The police did nothing to halt these anarchist actions. Some of their shock tools were probably left behind for repair, their stink bombs in the cellars.
The demonstrators were given free rein to do what they wanted without anyone intervening or enabling citizens to reach their destinations. During the period of hitnatkut, Judge Aharon Barak determined "the right to protest does not mean the right to stop the country. The freedom of speech does not protect the right of a woman in labor to reach the hospital or prevent fire fighters to reach the site of a fire."
But that was in the past when the demonstrators where from the Rightist camp who were altogether outlawed by the judicial system which saw no reason to meddle when basic rights were dishonored by the Sharon government. The basic laws of human rights were not honored when they appealed to the High Court against the eviction from their homes by a squashing government which took sadistic pleasure in the expulsion.
Today we have a Rightist government, but the police has remained the same as before. The new minister for National Security maintains that his appointment enables him to control the police and rule it as he pleases. Along the way, however, he is discovering the hard way that an appointed minister doesn't have much leeway or power. He can reprimand the Chief of Staff, attempt to circumvent him in various ways, to insult him in public, but in the end, everything remains as before.
The police is the same police, the commander is the same commander and the media is the same as before.
