Almagor head in ‘near-lynch’ situation on Mount of Olives

Meir Indor asks how there were no police in the area when he and his wife were attacked by rock-throwers.

By MELANIE LIDMAN
mt olives cemetery 311 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
mt olives cemetery 311
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
The head of an organization that aids terror victims found himself and his wife in a terrifying lynch situation on Wednesday afternoon on the Mount of Olives, Almagor Terror Victims Association director Meir Indor told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
He and his wife, Batsheva, were leaving the Mount of Olives cemetery after Hoshana Raba prayers when they encountered a traffic jam about 500 meters from the exit, on the main street of the Arab neighborhood next to the cemetery.
“We were caught in a traffic jam in all directions – in front and behind, on the right and left side,” Batsheva Indor explained. “We couldn’t move. They were all Arab taxi drivers.
When they saw we were Jewish, they started to throw huge blocks on us one after the other.”
Indor said that he could see about 10 Arab youths organizing to throw rocks at their car, but because they were in the traffic jam, they couldn’t move to get away. Indor was injured when a rock hit him above the eye, causing him to bleed profusely.
“I saw them organizing and I didn’t know what to do,” Indor said. “I just kept driving and kept praying, but there were no police.
How were there no police in a place that’s so central, where people are going to the cemetery for funerals and for prayers?” He said at one point they were throwing rocks that were so big, they needed two youths to carry the rocks. The windshield of their vehicle was broken. The Indors only escaped the mob situation when a truck blocking them on one side moved a little bit forward, allowing them just enough room to maneuver out of the traffic jam and drive directly to the hospital.
“I want people to know what this was like for me, not just two or three lines from a police update,” he said. “This was not just rock throwing, this was a lynch situation.”
Through his work with Almagor, Indor has rescued people from lynch situations twice, but this was his first time in a lynch situation himself. He plans to protest in front of the prime minister’s house on Saturday night with his family, demanding to know what Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is going to do about the security situation.
“We’re not going to give up on security in Jerusalem,” he said.