The police turned Israel's nonviolent protest into terror

"Our policy is to use force to restore quiet," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday, at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.

And the translation: "Force," i.e., disproportionate violence; "quiet," i.e., suppression of the opposition that interferes with our ability to rule and do whatever we feel like doing; "to restore," i.e., it had previously been quiet, everything was in order and we just want to return things to that previous state.

It was in keeping with that policy that unreasonably large contingents of inspectors, policemen and special unit forces were sent to use violence against a few demonstrators who were holding a legitimate protest on Rothschild Boulevard, and the next day in other parts of Tel Aviv.

If "we" need to "restore" quiet, it is clear that someone else disturbed a situation that was perfectly fine, and thus it is "our" policy to use force to restore quiet. The reasonable citizen might assume that even if undue force was used, surely there had first been violence directed at the police and perhaps the latter simply overreacted.

But as is clear from the endless pictures, videos and first-person accounts that have been posted online, the demonstration on Rothschild was totally nonviolent. What made it violent was the brutality used by the inspectors and police forces. Simply put: They started it.

This is no guess. A month-and-a-half ago, a police officer told Alon-Lee Green, one of the social protest leaders, "This time we're not going to treat you with kid gloves the way we did last summer. This time you're going to get an iron fist."

This statement makes clear the identity of the "our," of those who exercise this policy: Anyone who is bothered by those protesting his regime. And the less legitimate his regime gets, the more the demonstrations threaten it, and the less hesitant he is to use violence to suppress them.

In this context it's nice to see the congruence of interests between Netanyahu and the media outlets that are owned by the wealthy. Each is trying to suppress the protest with the force at his disposal. "The police is the state's police, not the government's police," Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino told an Israel Bar Association conference in Eilat. Well, it sure didn't seem that way over this past weekend.

Also, there's no "quiet" that can be "restored." There's disquiet, there's bitterness, there's frustration, there's collapse, there's distress, there's an awakening and an understanding that we're being robbed, deceived and oppressed. And as a result of all this, there's a protest.

For a generation there has been in Israel a social protest that has gotten no response other than suppression. Its distresses have not been addressed, they have merely accumulated, and gotten deeper and broader. In each case police officers were sent, and with violence turned the protests violent, and then suppressed them with more violence. That's how they now turn Daphni Leef, who is as nonviolent as they come, into a dangerous terrorist.

The regime's violence is suppressing the protest, but en route it is making it illegitimate in the eyes of the rest of the public. And the moment the protest is defined as violent and illegitimate, there is no point in taking its content and demands seriously, since after all, the government of Israel doesn't talk to terrorists or anyone who's "not nice," as Golda called the Black Panthers.

But even when we are nice, they still just piss on us. Israel's history is full of social struggles that were nice, but failed. Even the prime minister's decision to free Gilad Shalit was not the result of the huge public protests, but of his wife Sarah's persuasive powers, as he revealed to the German newspaper, "Bild."

Last year's "nice" protests didn't achieve anything either. The Yonah-Spivak committee's report, due out in two weeks, details how even the conclusions of the Trajtenberg committee were basically not applied, even though that committee was set up by the government itself, not even threatening to change the rules.

Why does this dynamic seem so familiar to us? Ah yes, from our dealings with the Palestinians, of course. When they conduct an armed struggle, we don't talk to terrorists, but when there's no terror and they try a nonviolent struggle we have no reason to talk to them, because all is "quiet."

Indeed, Netanyahu's remark, "Our policy is to use force to restore quiet," was said about the recent confrontation with Hamas. How appropriate. Soon quiet will be restored and they'll be able to continue not talking to us, either.