Anti-draft protest leader threatens to block Bnei Brak before Shabbat

Ayelet HaShachar Saidoff, founder and head of the Mothers at the Front protest movement, said Thursday morning on ynet that the ultra-Orthodox demonstrations the day before against arrests of draft evaders were not protests but “riots.” She was referring to slow-moving convoys that drove to Prison 10 in support of the detainees.

Saidoff threatened that her group would retaliate on Friday by blocking Bnei Brak before the start of Shabbat. “Blocks will be met with blocks,” she said. “We will block there before the entrance of Shabbat, disrupt the lives of those people.”

She said residents of Bnei Brak and the ultra-Orthodox community should expect no tolerance for their disruptions. “We saw that in every ultra-Orthodox protest there was a disaster, they have no value for human life, even their own,” she said. “The Israeli public is fed up with their behavior, and if they do not connect with reality and start understanding that there are state laws and the police are not restoring order, then we will restore order and disrupt theirs.” Saidoff added, “We did not send our children to die defending the homeland for this.”

Saidoff, who said she is the mother of a combat soldier, accused the protesters of trying to remain criminals and claimed police allowed them to do whatever they wanted. She also said she had not seen any other group in Israel allowed to shut down an entire country, and accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of making a deal with the ultra-Orthodox and “trading in our children’s blood.”