Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein announced that he plans to indict MK Haneen Zoabi for “incitement and disgracing a public servant,” Ha’aretz reported today. The public servants involved are Israeli-Arab policemen who were insulted and threatened by Zoabi.
The charges stem from a hearing in Nazareth on July 6, during which Zoabi called the policemen “traitors” and told a crowd of protesters that Arab-Israelis who worked for the government “should be scared of us.”
Zoabi yelled “ostracism, we should spit in their faces, those who testify against our sons and daughters, those who work with the oppressor against their own people, we should clean the floor with them. Clean the floor with them. Not shake their hands, don’t let them be among us, they should fear us. When they’re in the street they should fear us. They should fear the ‘shabab’ that are arrested by the informants that they send, they are the ones who give information to the police that leads to the arrest of our sons and daughters. They stand here, the height of chutzpah. No fear, no respect, what happened? What chutzpah!.”
The state prosecutor’s office issued a statement on Tuesday that read “MK Zoabi’s statements indicated that she called for violence against the police officers that were at the scene, as well as other police officers of Arab descent who also work against Arab suspects. She encouraged similar acts of violence, which according to her statements, the way she said them, and the circumstances, there was a real possibility of her words leading to acts of violence against Arab police officers, particularly the ones at the scene, to which her words were directed.”
A few weeks after the incident, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported:
An officer of the Nazareth police department said that Zoabi approached him and another officer at the Nazareth magistrate’s court and “began making highly offensive remarks and to address people there in a manner which raises suspicion of insulting a civil servant and incitement to violence,” the police said in a statement on July 9, after it recommended starting the investigation.
JTA further reported that Zoabi penned an article for a publication that appeared to advise Hamas on how to wage war against Israel during Operation Protective Edge.
“The Israelis want a short campaign, the civilian population cannot stomach a prolonged conflict and there are many surprises not only on the military level but also with regard to the number and range of the rockets,” she wrote in an op-ed for Il Felesteen, an Arab-language publication. “We must declare popular resistance instead of security coordination, besiege ‘Israel’ instead of negotiating with it and unite instead of splinter,” she wrote.
In the article, the Jewish state’s name appeared between inverted commas — a style used by some Arab writers to refer to Israel without implying recognition of its legitimacy.
In 2013, Zoabi led an effort to silence Father Gabriel Nadaf, an Israeli-Aramaean priest who is outspoken in his support for Israel. The campaign against Nadaf intensified to the point that he was provided with a security detail.
In addition to her incendiary rhetoric, Zoabi is known for her volatile temper. She was suspended from Knesset for one day in 2012 when she shoved an usher who was escorting her out after she interrupted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he was speaking.
Mohammad Zoabi, a distant teenage cousin of Haneen, was forced into hiding this past summer due to his vocal support for Israel. It was recently reported that Mohammad had been befriended by terror victim Kay Wilson, and has subsequently relocated to the United States for his own safety.
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