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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 11/6/14

Israel moves to outlaw Palestinian political parties in the Knesset

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Last week she was informed that the state prosecution service had approved a police recommendation to put her on trial for criminal incitement for "humiliating" two policemen.

She is alleged to have referred to the policemen, who are members of the Palestinian minority, as "collaborators" as she addressed parents of children swept up in mass arrests following protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza over the summer.

Faina Kirschenbaum, the deputy interior minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, has also drafted two bills directly targeting Zoabi.

The first would strip someone of the right to stand for the Knesset if they are found to have supported "an act of terrorism," while the second would strip them of their citizenship.

Because ministers are not allowed to initiate private bills, the task of bringing the measures to the floor of the parliament has been taken up by the Knesset's Law, Constitution and Justice Committee.

Intentional subversions

Zoabi further infuriated fellow members of Knesset this month when she compared the Israeli army to the Islamic State, the jihadist group that has violently taken over large parts of Syria and Iraq and has become notorious for kidnapping westerners and beheading them.

In an apparently intentional subversion of Netanyahu's recent comparison of the Islamic State and Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, Zoabi described an Israeli Air Force pilot as "no less a terrorist than a person who takes a knife and commits a beheading." She added that "both are armies of murderers, they have no boundaries and no red lines."

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, was among those who responded by calling Zoabi a "terrorist."

"The law must be used to put the terrorist -- there is no other word for it -- the terrorist Haneen Zoabi in jail for many years," he told Israel Radio.

A poll this month found that 85 percent of the Israeli Jewish public wanted Zoabi removed from the Knesset.

"There is a great deal of frustration among Israeli politicians and the public at their army's failure to defeat the Palestinian resistance in Gaza," said Awad Abdel Fattah, the secretary general of Balad, a political party representing Palestinians in Israel. "At times like this, the atmosphere of repression intensifies domestically."

Silencing all political dissent

The initiatives against Zoabi are the most visible aspects of a wider campaign to silence all political dissent from the Palestinian minority.

Last week, Lieberman instructed one of his members of Knesset, Alex Miller, to initiate a bill that would outlaw Salah's Islamic Movement.

The legislation appears to be designed to hold Netanyahu to his word from late May. Then, the Israeli media revealed that the prime minister had created a ministerial team to consider ways to ban the movement.

At the same time, the Israeli security services claimed that Salah's faction was cooperating closely with Hamas in Jerusalem.

After Israel barred the Palestinian Authority from having any presence in Jerusalem more than a decade ago and expelled Hamas legislators from the city, Salah has become the face of Palestinian political activism in Jerusalem.

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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: (more...)
 

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