Posted on 12/31/2018 6:34:40 AM PST by Olog-hai
A Palestinian court sentenced an American-Palestinian on Monday to life imprisonment for violating a ban on selling land to Israelis, judiciary officials said.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, called in November for dual national Issam Akel to be released, saying his suspected crime was “selling land to a Jew” and his incarceration violated American values.
Akel was accused of attempting to sell a property in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem without the permission of his business partners or Palestinian authorities. Palestinian officials have not publicly identified the intended buyer.
The Higher Offences Court in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, convicted Akel of “attempting to sever parts of Palestinian land and annex it to a foreign state,” the judiciary media office said. […]
Palestinian law bars selling land to “a hostile state or any of its citizens”. It requires the permission of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank, for all land sales in East Jerusalem. …
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
If that land is in Israel, the Israeli government owns all land - there is no private ownership. You pay rent for the land. That is what we were told at while asking question at the American Embassy Tel Aviv in 2006.
This is leniency. Used to be they got summary execution for this ‘crime’.
Hey, they wanted to address human rights concerns raised by the UN, y'know, after they'd been doing it for decades and the UN hadn't mentioned anything about it until finally called out on it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.