PLO official: All Palestinians who visited their Jewish settler neighbors on Jewish holiday should be arrested for causing “damage”
Headline: “Tayseer Khaled: These are not our neighbors, Mr. Netanyahu, rather they are invading settlers”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on Sunday [Oct. 23, 2016] on his Facebook page: ‘A few days ago a group of Palestinians came to bless their Jewish neighbors in the settlement of Efrat (which is located on the lands of Palestinian citizens south of Bethlehem) [parentheses in source] in honor of the Sukkot holiday. They sat in the Sukkah of Efrat Council Head Oded Revivi and they were given a most respectable welcome in the best of tradition. These people harmed no one, but when they returned to their homes, four of them were arrested by the PA,’ and he called for human rights organizations to intervene (for Netanyahu’s actual post see note below –Ed.).
Khaled added: ‘For Netanyahu, the residents of Efrat have become good neighbors who welcome their guests with full honor in the best of tradition, but he ignored the fact that the settlers in Efrat are not neighbors but rather invading, attacking, and thieving settlers. If there is something good that the [Palestinian] Authority can do, it is not to make do with only arresting four of those who greeted their invading settler neighbors in humiliation, but rather to arrest all those who participated in the visit, whose number exceeds 100 village heads and their people, and to demand an accounting from them for the damage they caused the owners of the lands that the governments of Israel expropriated from the Palestinian citizens, and built on them the settlement of Efrat and the rest of the settlements of Gush Etzion.’”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote a post in Hebrew and English on his Facebook page on Oct. 23, 2016, reading: “A few days ago, four Palestinians visited the Sukkah of Oded Revivi, Chief Foreign Envoy of the YESHA Council and Mayor of Efrat. They came to honor the festival of Sukkot and their Jewish neighbors. They were welcomed as guests in keeping with the best of the Jewish tradition.
These visitors did no harm to anyone. But when they returned from the visit, they were arrested by the Palestinian Authority. According to senior PA officials, they will be sentenced and jailed for the crime of “normalization with Israel.”
Where is the outrage of human rights organizations? There is none. To their great shame, they are silent.
This silence is neither new nor surprising. These organizations are silent when the Palestinian leadership pays salaries to the families of terrorists, glorifies murderers and calls streets and city-centers after them.
These organizations prove again and against (sic.) that they are not actually interested in human rights, but only in shaming Israel and libeling it around the world. They use the important ideal of human rights as a political tool to bash Israel.
I call on the international community to work to help free these innocent Palestinians whose imprisonment is yet another proof of the Palestinian refusal to make peace.”