Police conduct midnight search of former MK Yehudah Glick’s home

Officers were looking for documents they suspected Glick took from police earlier when he was first detained for “walking slowly” on the Temple Mount

By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN
MK Yehuda Glick on the Temple Mount, December 23, 2018 (photo credit: YEHUDA GLICK)
MK Yehuda Glick on the Temple Mount, December 23, 2018
(photo credit: YEHUDA GLICK)
Former Knesset member and prominent Temple Mount activist Yehudah Glick has accused Israel Police of “harassing me” and threatening to “leak materials that would embarrass me,” if he continues to protest their detention of him on the Temple Mount.
Overnight, Police searched Glick’s apartment based on a court order on suspicion of “theft and disrupting court procedures,” according to a statement by police.
Israel Police national spokesman to the foreign media Micky Rosenfeld said that it was suspected that Glick had stolen investigative material from the police investigation room in the Old City Police Station earlier in the day, and, “based on those suspicions, police turned to the court and requested to carry out a search of the suspect’s home, for which they received a search warrant.
“Police arrived at his home last night and searched the area,” Rosenfeld continued. “The suspect was detained for questioning and then released under conditions.”
A police officer told the Hebrew press Tuesday, “The search was wholeheartedly necessary.”
Officers arrived at the former MK’s home shortly before midnight, nearly 15 hours after Glick was detained and questioned for “walking too slowly” during his tour of the Temple Mount with visiting Republican congressmen Mike Johnson of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio.
On Tuesday morning, soon after the two prominent Evangelical Christian US congressmen descended the Mount, Glick returned for private reflection and in celebration of his wedding anniversary. Police said he was being “provocative” and therefore detained him in handcuffs and removed him from the scene.
“During the investigation, they told me, ‘You are arrested because we told you to go faster, and you didn’t go faster,’” Glick told The Jerusalem Post.
During the late-night search, Glick posted photos on Twitter of the police scouring his house.

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“Police arrived at my house with a warrant and started flipping things over,” he tweeted. “Police officers are in my house at midnight after a day of harassing me.”

Honenu attorney Adi Keidar, who is representing the former MK, said that the police acted aggressively rather than just picking up the phone and asking Glick if he had inadvertently picked up the documents.
He said that from the moment police entered his home, Glick cooperated with police and told investigators he did not know about which papers they were referring. Despite Glick’s insistence that he did not have the requested documents, Keidar said, officers spent an hour “turning his home upside down” in search of the documents. When they could not find them, they once again brought his client in for questioning.
“The Israel Police are once again demonstrating impulsive and problematic behavior,” Keidar concluded, “all in light of the fact that the arrest made earlier in the day was false and embarrassed the police.”
Several Knesset members defended their former colleague, including Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, who called the police’s conduct “violent” and “contemptible.
“It cannot be that in the State of Israel police detain a person because he walks too slowly in their eyes,” Edelstein tweeted. “It cannot be that they harass a man in the middle of the night just on a suspicion. It cannot be that human rights can just be cast aside willy-nilly.”
Glick has been one of the most prominent figures fighting for improved visiting conditions for Jewish and non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount, which is considered the holiest site in the Jewish tradition. He runs the Shalom Jerusalem Foundation, which aims to make the Temple Mount a center of peace, as described in the Torah.
In 2014, Glick was shot in the chest at point-blank range by a Palestinian terrorist for his activism. He narrowly survived the assassination attempt.
“I will continue the completely just struggle to make the Temple Mount a house of prayer for all nations, without any discrimination against anyone,” Glick said Wednesday. “I call on the public from Israel and the world to join the global campaign my Shalom Jerusalem Foundation has launched, which includes posting and tweeting with the hashtag #TempleMount4all.”


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