New police chief will tackle East Jerusalem violence, deputy says

Israel Police’s deputy commander in Jerusalem said Sunday that the new national police commissioner, who has yet to be announced, will invest a significant amount of time on dealing with the violence in East Jerusalem.

“The incidents we’re dealing with are vandalism and desecration of graves, shootings, stabbings, car-ramming attacks, rock-throwing, firecracker throwing, arson, attacks against security guards and police officers, camera-smashing and road-blocking,” said Avshalom Feld, during a tour with Knesset members of the Mount of Olives cemetery.

The Mount of Olives cemetery, overlooking the Old City, has been a flashpoint of violence in past months, with frequent vandalism of graves and near-weekly attacks on mourners by Palestinian youths.

As the lawmakers on the Knesset Interior and Environment Committee evaluated the damage, Feld speculated that the next police commissioner would spend half of his time focused on violence in East Jerusalem, while maintaining that attacks in the cemetery have “significantly decreased” of late.

“For every incident reported here, a file is opened, and the problem is that most of the detainees are minors and that we are dealing with their parents who are invited to interrogations. The legislation does not provide an answer to this issue,” Feld said.

The deputy commander of the Jerusalem district said police were planning to set up 160 security cameras in the cemetery over the next four years and bolster security in the Afghan section of the cemetery — the section most frequently vandalized — as well as throughout the East Jerusalem site.

Feld maintained the number of attacks on the Mount of Olives “has significantly decreased” and said the police held a daily security briefing on the subject.

Despite the reassurances, several Knesset members slammed the police for what they called a failure to secure the cemetery.

“You talk about a decline, but the public doesn’t feel it,” MK Uri Maklev of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party said. While the police make promises, “orphans are begging not to bury their parents on the mountain,” he said.

“You said there was no [police] station — we added one. You asked for technology — you got it. The penalties were made more severe, the budgets grew, and the result was an abject failure,” Maklev said. “So long as people avoid the Mount of Olives, attempts to secure the area have failed.”

Committee head MK David Amsalem (Likud) said that if he were the police chief, “I wouldn’t sleep at night.”

“The great leaders of Israel are buried here, fallen IDF soldiers, and great rabbis,” he said, adding that the security situation made him “ashamed as a citizen and as a Knesset member.” He pledged that lawmakers would “follow the situation on the Mount [of Olives] until it is secure and open to those visiting it.”