PA demands punishing relatives of Arabs who "severely betray society" and sell property to Jews

Excerpt of an op-ed by Dr. Ramzi Oudeh, regular columnist for the official PA daily

Headline: “What is required: Both deterrence and punishment”

“In this article I call for the need to carry out resistance against the crime of selling real estate [to Jews], which is anticipated to increase in the coming years, and I call this activity ‘resistance’ because I mean that we must act on all the fronts and levels in order to put an end to this crime, and not just to curb and reduce it.

As part of this, I propose three levels for this resistance:

First, legal resistance at the local level:

This requires developing a national system of laws to deal with the crime of selling lands. In this context, I propose – in addition to punishing those involved in the act of selling… [that] we must interrogate the relatives of those who sold their property in order to confirm how much they knew about this crime, and if this is proven, the relevant security bodies must turn them over to the legal system and expropriate their property, so that this will constitute a serious deterrent for those who are considering selling their lands to the settler Jews.

Secondly, legal resistance on the international level:

We must establish a national network comprised of governmental and security institutions and the relevant civil society institutions in order to put on trial those who sold their property and fled beyond the borders of the occupied Palestinian state’s legal jurisdiction. We must also submit international lawsuits against them and ask Interpol to summon them to stand before the Palestinian legal system.

Thirdly, social popular resistance:

I think that this kind of popular resistance to the crime of selling property constitutes one of the most important kinds of resistance. This is because it has the greatest capability of curbing this phenomenon socially and tribally and of defining it as a severe betrayal of the society. As part of this, the families involved in selling can have the tribal protection denied to them, and the families can be prevented from enjoying the social and economic benefits of interacting with society. I mean here denouncing these familiesand not interacting with them at the social and economic level. The religious leaders must also focus in their religious sermons on the ban on selling lands, and also the education system must raise the students’ awareness about this crime’s danger to Palestinian society. Here we remind our dear readers that the fact that the [Arab] residents of Jerusalem do not pray for the dead who are involved in selling their property and do not bury them in Islamic cemeteries constitutes a kind of important and effective popular resistance against the phenomenon of selling property, but this must be expanded to include the first-degree relatives of those involved, particularly if it becomes clear that they knew about this crime.”