Chaya Belogorodsky, a slight, fair-haired and devout 14-year-old girl, is considered such a grave ”danger to public peace” that Israel’s highest judges dare not let her out of prison and back to her home in a Jewish settlement.
Chaya and two other teenage girls have been the only prisoners in a special women’s wing of Maasiyahu jail — converted to hold hundreds of opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip this month — since their arrest a month ago during a right-wing demonstration against the pullout.
Chaya was detained for trying to prevent the arrest of another girl, for being insolent to a police officer. She was also detained for defying a court order banning her from protests after a previous arrest.
Israel’s Supreme Court ordered that she be held until the end of her trial in several weeks after prosecutors said she may incite other teenagers to violent protest.
”They aren’t the first girls arrested,” said Chaya’s father, Moshe Belogorodsky, a builder who lives in the religious settlement of Shiloh in the West Bank. ”But the government learned that these kids are not afraid of spending a few days in jail and they decided to make them understand that it’s not a few days any more, that they can be held for months.”
Children of school age have been at the forefront of protests against the Gaza pullout, and arrest has become a badge of honour. Hundreds have been detained for blocking roads, incitement and assaulting police and troops. The police say that teenage girls deliberately seek physical confrontation in the hope that pictures of policemen manhandling them will appear on Israeli television. The authorities say that in prison some girls behave like hardened criminals, ripping taps and sinks out of the wall, scrawling death threats against Sharon in their cells, and taunting their interrogators as traitors to the Jewish people.
”Everybody asks me, how could you conduct this political fight on the backs of your children? It’s such a ridiculous question,” said Chaya’s father. ”These kids are not dumb. They understand what this disengagement means. It means that tomorrow the bulldozers will come to Shiloh, they will raze the kindergartens they grew up in … they will raze their homes. Are they expected to just sit and do nothing? But don’t … blame me for this.”
In June a 12-year-old girl spent three weeks in jail for refusing to sign a commitment not to participate in any more demonstrations. Many Israelis were shocked that her mother backed her.
”She might be in the body of a 12-year-old girl, but her perception and understanding is more mature than ours,” her mother told Israel Radio.
The families of the three girls in Maasiyahu jail have put up hundreds of posters in Jerusalem and West Bank settlements with their daughters’ pictures under the slogan: ”Sharon can sleep peacefully — the enemies of the nation are behind bars.”
Meanwhile, Sharon has said that more than half the settlers due for evacuation under the Gaza withdrawal plan had applied for compensation by August 1, effectively agreeing to leave. — Â