OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Amid a sea of Israeli flags at the entrance to the Muslim Quarter of
Jerusalem’s Old City, Abdullah Al-Hajj walked toward a group of far-right
Jewish marchers, some of them yelling racist chants, and raised the Palestinian
flag above his head.
اضافة اعلان
He knew he only had a few seconds.
With cheers from supporters and jeers from the
Jewish marchers erupting around him, Hajj, 61, was quickly seized by three
Israeli paramilitary police officers who wrestled the flag from his hands and
carried him away.
“After I raised the flag I didn’t care what happened
to me, if I got killed, had my bones broken or if I was arrested,” Hajj said at
his home in Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, recounting how he
confronted the far-right rally in late May. “It was important to me to show
that this land belongs to Palestinians.”
The Palestinian flag is not banned in Israel, but
its public display has come under increasing attack by Israeli authorities
seeking to crack down on expressions of Palestinian nationalism. That is
especially the case in East Jerusalem.
In the Knesset, a bill that would ban the flag at
university campuses passed preliminary approval last month. And in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, emboldened Jewish settlers are removing Palestinian
flags displayed inside Palestinian towns, sometimes with the protection of the
Israeli occupation forces.
“What’s happening today is there is a movement
within the Knesset and beyond to focus on the flag as an expression of
terrorism or support for terrorism,” said Fady Khoury, a civil rights lawyer at
Adalah, a Palestinian legal rights group. “It is part of an ongoing attempt to
criminalize certain aspects of the collective Palestinian identity.”
The Palestinian flag has never been banned
explicitly, but under Israeli law it is illegal to raise the flag of any group
the state considers a terrorist organization. Before the signing of the Oslo
Accords in the 1990s, that included the PLO, and by extension the Palestinian
flag was banned.
That changed in 1993 when Israel recognized the PLO
as the representative of the Palestinian people and the flag began appearing
across East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
But when the second Palestinian intifada broke out
in 2000, Israel’s suppression of the uprising included a crackdown on
expressions of Palestinian identity, among them the flag.
Since then, in the absence of a law banning the
flag, Israeli police have used other ordinances, including public disorder
laws, to arrest and charge Palestinians who raise the banner, lawyers and
rights groups said.
“The way it has been justified, especially the
arrests, has been by associating the waving of the flag with disorderly conduct
— which is a separate offense,” Khoury said. “There is no explicit clause in
any legal document that criminalizes the waving of the flag, but it’s been
deemed a crime by individual police officers on the grounds it’s disorderly
conduct.”
Battles over the flag are also being fought in
Palestinian areas like the West Bank.
In the Palestinian town of Huwarra that fight has
become a near-daily occurrence, said the mayor, Nasir Huwari. An Israeli
settler driving through the town was recently videotaped climbing an electrical
pole and ripping down a small Palestinian flag.
Now settlers come regularly to remove flags in
Huwarra, often under the protection of Israeli forces, Huwari said.
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