The Palestinian Authority Cracks Down on Sales of Land to Jews in Jerusalem

Earlier this month, agents of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction apprehended a Palestinian businessman named Khaled al-Atari and subjected him to a violent interrogation; he is currently in hiding. Atari’s crime? He had purchased a three-story house in east Jerusalem from an Arab family and then sold it to a group of Jews for $17 million—in violation of a Palestinian Authority (PA) law forbidding any sale of property to Jews. Atari’s apprehension, writes Yoni Ben Menachem, is part of a larger PA crackdown on land sales in eastern Jerusalem; it is also a violation of the Oslo Accords:

On October 20, 2018, the Jerusalem police and the Shin Bet apprehended Adnan Gheith, the PA’s Jerusalem governor, and Jihad al-Faqih, director of the PA’s intelligence office in eastern Jerusalem. . . . They were arrested on suspicion of abducting [an Arab resident of Jerusalem], a realtor . . . whom they suspected of selling a property in the area of Herod’s Gate in the Old City. The realtor is an Israeli citizen who also holds a U.S. passport. According to Palestinian sources, he is still incarcerated in an interrogation cell of the PA General Intelligence Service in Ramallah.

His family has submitted a complaint to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem regarding his arrest, but according to sources in Fatah, . . . Abbas has instructed that the realtor should not be released from custody. [Moreover], he wants to create a policy of deterrence against the sellers of land and property to Jews in the Old City, and he is looking [to make an example of someone].

According to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian security forces are not allowed to operate in east Jerusalem. However, the PA has been openly violating [this aspect of the agreement]. As a result, the PA security forces have been playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the Israeli police and the Shin Bet. Residents of eastern Jerusalem relate that during 2018, after President Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the PA security forces stepped up their operations in the area. They are threatening residents on a daily basis and summon them to interrogations in the offices of the [PA’s] Jerusalem district governor. . . .

[T]he abduction of an Israeli citizen with U.S. citizenship is extremely serious. . . . This type of incident has not occurred in Jerusalem for many years. . . . It is time for Israel to take a strong stand against the Palestinian security services, who are violating the Oslo Accords in east Jerusalem to strengthen Abbas’s position.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: East Jerusalem, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Oslo Accords, Palestinian Authority

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society