From the Liveblog of
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Police enforce total travel ban around Meron to prevent Lag B’Omer pilgrimage
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
At a pop-up checkpoint at Ein Zeitim Junction, police officers and Border Police soldiers stop a passenger car heading west on Road 89 in the Upper Galilee.
One officer informs the driver, a Druze Israeli citizen named Wiyam Amar, that the road is closed because the area has been declared a closed military zone in connection with Lag B’Omer, to prevent the annual pilgrimage by Jews to the Meron compound built around the presumed gravesite of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, a 2nd-century sage.
“Brother, we’re Druze. We’re not going to Meron. I want to get home to my village, Ein al-Asad so let me through or you’re sending us on a 70-kilometer (43 miles) detour,” Amar, a local merchant and IDF reservist, tells the officer. He is not let through and turns the car around while shaking his head and speaking to another man sitting in the passenger seat.
The closure en route to Meron, where more than 100,000 had gathered last year on Lag B’Omer, is to prevent large crowds amid exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah in the Galilee and Southern Lebanon.
The checkpoint is one of 11 roadblocks set up around Meron in an effort involving hundreds of police officers to enforce the ban following concerns that some pilgrims would defy it.
The events at Meron are limited this Lag B’Omer to three ceremonial bonfire lighting ceremonies attended by no more than 30 people at any given time.
