Ramallah: Eight Arab residents of occupied east Jerusalem were arrested on Monday on charges of inciting anti-Jewish violence through their online postings, but activist in the holy city categorically rejected the Israeli claims and denied accusations, and initially claimed they were willing to challenge the accusations and prove they were baseless and totally fabricated.
A police spokesman told AFP that the detentions were for “inciting hatred, violence and terrorism” against Jews and Israeli security forces, largely via the social media site Facebook.
According to the spokesman, the Israeli police operation was the “biggest aimed at repressing this kind of incitement to violence on social networks and the Internet.”
The arrests are the latest development in the climate of heightened tension between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
Palestinians argue that the campaign to arrest activists in the occupied east Jerusalem is an Israeli strategy to dictate to them what was allowed and what was not allowed underlining the need to keep the mouths of Palestinians shut. Sources in occupied east Jerusalem said that the Israeli campaign aims at restricting the freedom and prevent Palestinians from feeling any kind of safety even when they login to the facebook.
According to Fakhri Abu Diab, a member of the Higher Committee in Defence of Jerusalem (occupied), the eight detained Palestinians have been known in the holy city as moderates and that their facebook pages are popular and free of any kind of incitement. “There has not been even a single sentence in the facebook pages of all the detainees calling for incitement. Those activists only address the rights of the Palestinians and the Jerusalemites,” he told Gulf News. “Recently there have been no major incidents in Jerusalem to be addressed in any kind of incitement.”
He said that the Israeli ongoing detention campaign among Palestinians will reach many other activists in the holy city under such fake and baseless grounds such as incitement on the facebook and the social media. “Let it be real reasons. The Israelis want us to reach a point to completely shut our mouths,” he said. “In the very near future, when a Jerusalemite will be arrested by Israel for opening a facebook page. We are sure of this,” he said.
The Israelis, he said, are helplessly trying to find a way to arrest, deport, and kill the Palestinians in the occupied east Jerusalem. “We believe that they were done with the blood bank and now they moved to the information bank,” he said.
Jerusalem activists challenged Israel to review the pages of the detainees in search for incitement, but at the same time they said they were ready to provide thousands of facebook pages and Jewish websites which clearly call for killing, deporting, and seizing the properties of the Arabs. “We follow their pages online and we are ready to provide the information on the Jewish incitement against the Arabs,” said Abu Diab. “This is yet another undisputed proof that Israel is a mere racist state which fabricate charges against the Palestinians but turn a blind eye on the clear and undeniable violations of the colonists,” he said. “Israel wants to show the Palestinians that they are carefully tied and restricted.”
