A confrontation between Israel’s Justice Minister and a senior PA official at a Tel Aviv conference resulted in the former shaming the latter over his government’s anti-Semitic laws, Kippa reported Tuesday morning.
Deputy Chairman of the PLO Committee for the Interaction with the Israeli Society Elias Zananiri used the Globes Israel Business Conference Monday to attack Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked about the “land theft” that had taken place, in his opinion, in the Samaria community of Amona. He told Shaked, “Israel’s High Court of Justice determined in 1997 that the construction there was entirely illegal, and the land appropriation was illegal.” Now 20 years have passed and nothing happened, he continued.
“If a state like Israel, which keeps saying it respects the rule of law […] does not give me back my land, what can I as a Palestinian do? What answer do you have for me?”
“I have two things to tell you,” Minister Shaked responded. “One is that the government of Israel will honor the court’s ruling. Two, as a Palestinian you can convince the Palestinian Authority to erase the shameful, degrading and racist law prohibiting the sale of land to Jews, which sentences to death anyone who sells land to Jews.”
A few hecklers in the audience argued there was no connection between those two things, to which Shaked responded saying “They’re very much connected. This law is racist, it shames the law book of the Palestinian Authority. Had it not existed it would have been possible to resolve these cases with a straight purchase, and the land owner would have benefited. Because there are – let me tel you from my personal knowledge – many land owners who would have been eager to sell in such cases.”
Shaked added that the sellers would have received “very high returns” for their land. “They would have been compensated very well. But they’re afraid to sell because of the threat of the death penalty.”
In January 2016, Israel’s Channel 2 broadcast footage of Ta’ayush activist Ezra Nawi boasting that he has worked together with B’Tselem activist Nasser Nawaj’ah, posing as a prospective Jewish purchaser of Arab land, then provided the Palestinian National Security Forces with the names and telephone numbers of Arab land brokers willing to sell land to Jews. Nawi said on tape that these brokers are beaten and executed: “The Authority catches them and kills them. But before they kill them they beat them up.”