AL-ARAKIB ACTIVIST HIT WITH 7-MONTH JAIL SENTENCE

NOVANEWS

Al-Arakib activist hit with 7-month jail sentence for … operating garage without license

Commenting on the conviction [Dec. 30] of former president Moshe Katsav for rape, the current Israeli President Shimon Peres declared, “There are no two states of Israel, just one state. There are no two kinds of citizens here; citizens of only one kind exist in Israel — and all are equal in the eyes of the law.”

By Max Blumenthal

Right. Ask Nuri el-Okbi who attempts to return to his family’s rightfully owned land near al-Arakib; his tribe was ethnically cleansed from the area in 1951:

As Israelis celebrated the conviction of Katsav, the “eyes of the law” also focused in on a Bedouin activist named Nuri el-Okbi who heads the Association for Protection of the Rights Bedouins in Israel and who has tried to stop the ethnic cleansing of Al-Arakib, which has been marked as the site for the Jewish National Fund and GOD TV’s Forest of Hate. In a municipal courtroom in Ramle, el-Okbi was sentenced to seven months in prison and a 40,000 NIS fine by a Ramle municipal court judge. His crime? He operated a garage without a license (that was constantly denied to him by the municipality).

The judge who sentenced him declared that lenient treatment of el-Okbi “would constitute a negative message to the public, and especially to the Bedouins.” In other words, the harsh sentence was directly not just at el-Okbi, but at all Bedouins living inside Israel — it was a collective punishment.

El-Okbi, who is 68 years old, collapsed upon the reading of his verdict and is now handcuffed to a hospital bed.