Dozens of residents in Judea and Samaria have had their personal firearms taken away by the army and/or Ministry of Internal Security. At the same time, an order from the Judea and Samaria Brigade tells residents to, “Carry their firearms with them regularly throughout the day.”

As a way to combat the current wave of terror, the Judea and Samaria Brigade has ordered residents with gun permits to keep their guns on them as they go about their day’s.

This order highlights what has become an absurd situation. While the army recognizes that armed residents are crucial in order to fight terror and save lives, they and the Ministry of Internal Security have recently confiscated guns from dozens of Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria for no apparent reason.

In the Shomron for example, there is one neighborhood with twenty families on the edge of a town and only one person has a weapon. Given that many recent infiltrations have been carried out by several Arab terrorists in tandem, there is a clear and present danger with the current situation.

“Anyone who has carried a weapon has envisioned many times ‘what would happen if,’ if someone entered their house at night, if someone penetrated the town, how he would act in that situation,” said Yaakov Malkiel to Hakol Hayehudi. He is a resident of the Tekuma neighborhood near Yitzhar and a former member of the town’s emergency security response team. A few months ago both his personal weapon and the weapon issued to him by the army were taken away and he was forced to resign from the response team. He explained, “A weapon can save a life and in many situations weapons have saved lives. When you suddenly no longer have a weapon, you still have the same dreams about ‘what if,’ but suddenly you’re helpless with no way to respond. You have to rely on a miracle.”

The army sent Malkiel a notice a few months ago telling him to return the weapon he received from the army as part of his membership in the emergency security response team and give it to the security coordinator of the town. The next day, Malkiel received a call from the Internal Security Ministry telling him to bring his personal firearm to the nearest police station as soon as possible. In a letter he received later, the ministry explained that the reason for the confiscation of his weapons was the fact that there are ‘five files against him in the police.’ Malkiel notes first that he only had three cases, that they were all closed,  and that they all occurred long before he was issued his weapon. They simply decided suddenly that they didn’t want me to have a weapon and they dug in their old files to find a reason. There was no connection between the given reason and the timing of the confiscation.”

“On the one hand I feel strange that they are preventing me from defending myself, but on the other hand I am reminded that true security comes from G-d and that we must rely on Him. There is clearly a present danger, as they themselves admit. When they took away my gun, they basically left me for dead.”

Malkiel also commented on the irony of the order by the brigade, “There are two ways I feel about it. On the one hand I would like to ask from one Jew to another, ‘Doesn’t my life matter too?’ On the other hand and at a deeper level, I realize that the army want us to be reliant on them and if that’s the case then I say, ‘Don’t bother.’ If I wanted to live in absolute safety I could move to the middle of nowhere and never leave my house. Instead I want to serve G-d and that means living in this world. I won’t grovel and plead before the army, but I will demand my rights and demand that decisions be made according to reason.”

“It is clear that the army is stuck in a reactive way of thinking and that the true way to restore security is to expel the Arab enemies. On the other hand it is nice for once that they are at least telling people to carry firearms, rather than suggesting we all walk around with bullet proof vests behind cement barriers,” concludes Malkiel in reference to the placement of cement barriers at junctions after terror attacks.

http://www.hakolhayehudi.com/guns-taken-away-from-jews-in-judea-and-samaria/