Ariel Danino, a Zionist activist from Yitzhar in Samaria, received a summons on Thursday from OC Central Command Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, informing him of his intention to bar him from Judea and Samaria for a six-month period.
This would be the second eviction for Danino, who had returned to his home less than a month ago after serving seven months in prison without charge, followed by a six-month restraining order forbidding him to enter the region.
“The meaning of the order is to tear us away from our home, our studies, our work, and our children’s educational institutions,” Danino said.
He characterized the order as a continuation of the conceptzia (governing assumption) of the previous IDF head of Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, whom Bluth succeeded in July. That upside-down policy ignores rising Arab terrorism and harasses Jewish residents instead, Danino told JNS.
Danino is still in Yitzhar, south of Nablus. “I have three days to file an appeal for this. These appeals, as far as I know, are never accepted,” he said. He doesn’t know where he’ll take his family.
He is being harassed, he said, because after his detention he exposed on social media and to the press the political motives of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and its head, Ronen Bar.
“I have written several things about it, which made a lot of noise and a lot of waves,” he said. “I write on Facebook, on Twitter [X], and this is what bothers them, without a doubt.”
Danino represents perhaps the clearest example of what critics say is the Shin Bet’s abuse of administrative detention, a tool meant to imprison terrorists on the verge of committing violent acts, but which had been used increasingly against Jews under former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
On Nov. 22, current Defense Minister Israel Katz ordered an end to the use of administrative detention against Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria.
Danino was taken from his family by masked police armed with rifles at about 2 a.m. on Oct. 29, 2023. He was presented with an arrest warrant on which no crime was listed. He turned to his wife in the doorway to tell her the warrant was illegal before being whisked away.
After being questioned for 15 minutes the morning of his arrest, he was never spoken to by the Shin Bet again for the next seven months in prison.
Danino’s original detention order was for four months. The day before his release, he was informed that the Shin Bet had extended his detention by three months, part of an effort, he said, to break him.
It came as a shock, Danino said. “If I hadn’t been in a cell with two friends, two other administrative detainees at that time, I don’t know if I would have made it through.”
Volunteer information center
Following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, Danino had set up an emergency information center together with friends.
“I can’t say for sure that I was arrested because of the information center, because it doesn’t say on the official arrest warrant why I was arrested. But when I was released from administrative detention, they handed me an order prohibiting me from contacting seven people, and those seven people are the seven people who were involved in the information center,” he said.
The volunteer group collected information about terrorist activity and incitement in Judea and Samaria by monitoring what was coming out of the Palestinian Authority and the social media of Arab municipalities.
The incitement that they discovered forced the Israeli army to take action, he said. It never occurred to Danino and his friends that they were doing something the authorities perhaps wouldn’t appreciate.
In the seven months he’s had to think about it, he said, he’s come to believe that the Shin Bet was working under the conceptzia, false in his view, that taking action against terrorist incitement only invited more trouble.
“They didn’t want these things investigated,” he said.