Israel Matzav

Muhammad Abu al-Hawa was a 42-year-old father of eight when he died last Wednesday night. As Israeli Jews were beginning our Pessah Seders and retelling the story of our exodus from Egypt and our rebirth as a free nation, Abu al-Hawa was being tortured by Fatah terrorists. As we ate our Seder meal, he was shot seven times. As we called out "Next year in Jerusalem," Abu al-Hawa's body and car were torched.

Abu al-Hawa was tortured and murdered because he stood accused of committing what the Palestinians consider a capital crime. Eight young children were orphaned last Wednesday night because their father allegedly sold an apartment building in Israel's capital city to Jews. The building in question is located in Jerusalem's A-Tur neighborhood, just above the Temple Mount on the Mount of Olives.

Muhammad Abu al-Hawa was buried in a makeshift cemetery on the road between Jerusalem where he lived, and Jericho where he was murdered. His body was buried there because the Palestinian Authority's mufti in Jerusalem, Ikremah Sabri, has barred all Muslims accused of selling land to Jews from being buried in a Muslim cemetery.

When the PA was established in 1994, the first legal step its chairman Yasser Arafat and its justice minister Freih Abu Medein took was to declare null and void all laws that had been in force until that date. After plunging Palestinian society into legal chaos, Arafat and Medein reinstated one law. That law was a Jordanian law which Israel had revoked in 1967. It made selling land to Jews a capital offense.

SINCE 1994, dozens of Arab Israelis and PA residents have been murdered on suspicion of selling land to Jews. Abu al-Hawa's murder - like those that preceded it - tells us several important things about Palestinian society. It tells us that like the PA today, any successor Palestinian state will be a racist, apartheid state where laws will be promulgated based solely on race and religious origin. Jews will be denied all basic human rights and Arabs who peacefully coexist with Jews will be accused of treason and made targets for murder.

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Neither Abu al-Hawa nor countless other victims before him had an opportunity to answer the charges leveled against them. According to Palestinians and to Jews involved in purchasing lands from Palestinians, in the majority of cases, the Arabs murdered for the "crime" of selling land to Jews never sold land to Jews. At most they were "guilty" of having ties of friendship or commerce with Israelis. The fact that merely having relations with Jews can expose an Arab to allegations of collaboration is enough to convince most Palestinians that they shouldn't have anything to do with Israel or Israelis. So by murdering people like Abu al-Hawa, the Palestinian leadership ensures that Palestinians will be too afraid of being killed to risk peaceful coexistence with Israel.

YET WHILE once marked as a land seller Abu al-Hawa could expect no protection from the Palestinian leadership, as a resident of Jerusalem he had a legal right to expect Israeli authorities to protect him.

Indeed, it was the responsibility of the Israel Police to protect him. Disturbingly, not only did the police not protect him, they may well have made it impossible for him to escape death.

Last month the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ordered the police to evict squatters from the building formerly owned by Abu al-Hawa who had moved in during the previous weeks. Sources intimately involved with the story allege that rather than carry out the eviction order as quietly as possible in order to minimize local Arab attention to what was already shaping up to be a difficult and dangerous situation for Abu al-Hawa, the police leaked the court-ordered operation to Israel's TV Channel 10.

Last Sunday and Monday nights, Channel 10 led its primetime news broadcasts with footage from the police operation at A-Tur. The footage showed riot police ejecting the squatters and their personal effects from the apartment building. Reporter Assaf Zohar portrayed the Arab squatters as innocent victims and the Jews who bought the building legally, guarded the building legally and moved into the building legally as arrogant bullies and greedy, wealthy fanatics.

Abu al-Hawa described Jews approaching him with a suitcase filled with cash offering to buy his apartment. He vociferously claimed that he refused their pushy offers because he would never sell to Jews. Zohar made no mention of the fact that the PA conducts extrajudicial murders of those accused of selling land to Jews.

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