Police intelligence told to target activists joining social protests. But, unlike the directives about Jewish demonstrators, which focus on social justice activists and leftists, a directive issued to intelligence officers does not specify which type of Arab demonstrators police should watch out for.

Police intelligence officers have been told to collect information about Arab-Palestinian citizens who join the social justice protests, Channel 10 reported last night, most of them Hadash and Communist Party members. Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino issued a directive to the police top brass ordering them to document every “involvement of the Arab community in the protests.”

A social justice demonstration in Wadi Nisnas, Haifa, last summer (Photo: AIC)

According to a “Haaretz” poll conducted on last Monday, a large majority of Israelis – 69 percent – supports the renewed social-justice protests, but Israelis are about evenly split over who was responsible for the violence that characterized Saturday night’s rally in Tel Aviv. The proportion of respondents who said there has been no improvement in social justice since last summer’s protests was, at 67 percent, about the same as those who support this year’s demonstrations. Sixteen percent said the situation has deteriorated in the past year, but 15 percent said it has improved in that time.

The poll, conducted under the supervision of statistics professor and pollster Camil Fuchs, found that 27 percent of the 508 respondents, all of them Jewish, said the police were the only ones at fault in Saturday’s rally. There have been several amateur videos posted online that appear to show police officers using excessive force against protesters. Twenty-one percent blamed the protesters for the violence, and 29 percent said police and protesters were both at fault.