New Tactics Allow Israel Police To Ignore Multiple Threats At Once

Jerusalem, October 13 – Few police forces must consistently straddle the line between civilian law enforcement and defense against external terrorist threats as Israel’s does, challenging them to develop methods to effectively avoid all potential incidents taking place at a given time.

In addition to the typical police work involving local beats, domestic incidents, forensic investigation, crowd control, and the like, the simmering tensions with often-hostile Jewish and Arab populations cheek-by-jowl in many locations in Israel frequently boil over into genuinely military situations that elsewhere would be the province of army forces to confront and control. The myriad types of disturbances call for the Israel Police to implement innovative tactics that enable them to continue engaging in leisure or corruption while pretending to respond to all calls.

The most recent venue for the execution of these tactics involves Jerusalem, where Arab rioters have attacked Jews in multiple locations for months. The light rail, which once ran through the northern neighborhood of Shuafat, must now bypass that portion of its route, as the police have been occupied not suppressing the rock-throwing and sabotage that have damaged 40% of the fleet’s train cars. Disturbances continue almost daily at the Temple Mount, where Muslims have attacked Jews with fireworks and used the compound’s holy sites as positions from which to stage their attacks, and police have struggled to maintain an appearance of responding while not actually staging any effective response or preventive action. Cars carrying Jews have been stoned as they pass through Arab-majority neighborhoods in the city, resulting in injuries and damage, while police work hard to avoid those areas.

It takes focus and training to ignore multiple incidents simultaneously, says Police Commissioner Yochanan Danino. “Few police forces have as much experience diverting crucial personnel away from the places where they would prove decisive,” he explains. “Our regimen places a unique emphasis on the nexus between crime-fighting and anti-terrorism measures, and drills our officers in how to keep police away from, for example, neighborhoods of Jerusalem’s Old City where Muslims are always attacking Jews. We can draw on decades of experience in avoiding confrontations and ceding the day to terrorist mobs.”

The biggest challenge facing the police at the moment involves the lack of donut shops. “In fact one can only obtain donuts of any real quality in the weeks before Chanukkah, and even then they are of limited variety and inconsistent quality,” says Minister of Internal Security Yitzchak Aharonovich, under whose aegis the police operate. “No one produces non-filled donuts in any real variety or quantity, and the fillings that are available tend to be absolutely repulsive: ‘chocolate’ is a token smear of cocoa for color in some sugary paste; ‘caramel’ is nondescript; and there are various forms of ‘jelly’ that are slightly different shades of bright red and equally disgusting.” Around Chanukkah time, when Israel celebrates with deep-fried foods, some bakeries and confectioners invest real effort and money to make a passable, even tasty product, he notes, but that lasts only the few weeks in November and December each year, and only includes filled varieties.

“There was a Dunkin Donuts franchise here about thirteen years ago, but it didn’t last, and since then we’ve faced serious obstacles in proper police deployment,” laments Danino. “But we’ll make it through.” He cited a case from last night, when multiple complaints of loud noise and badly performed karaoke from a house in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighborhood in the middle of the night was successfully ignored for more than a hour and a half before police deigned to pay the offenders a visit.