AP News, April 25th, 2007
Police said Wednesday they suspect Israel's most outspoken Arab leader of aiding enemies of the Jewish state, a case that threatens to inflame volatile relations between the country's Jews and its Arab minority.
Lawmaker Azmi Bishara, who has left Israel, says he is a victim of political persecution. But hard-line Israelis see the case as proof of a growing internal threat from the country's Arab minority.
Since joining parliament in 1996, Bishara has antagonized many Jewish Israelis by meeting with some of Israel's bitterest enemies, including the leaders of Syria and Hezbollah.
He fled Israel a month ago without providing a reason, prompting much speculation about the case but few details, because a gag order kept most information out of the public eye.
After a court eased the order Wednesday, police disclosed that Bishara is suspected of crimes against Israel's security, aiding the enemy during wartime, passing intelligence to the enemy, contacting foreign agents and receiving money in violation of anti-money laundering laws.
No charges have been filed, and key details remain classified until next week. Some of the alleged offenses occurred during Israel's summer war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
Bishara was questioned twice by investigators and he has reneged on promises to return for further questioning, Rosenfeld said.
Bishara, who quit parliament over the weekend, accused Israel of trying to frame him.
"The aim is to convene a court to turn Bishara into a petty criminal facing security violations," he told the Arabic television channel Al-Jazeera from Qatar.
Israel, he said, is using him to cover up failures during its war with Hezbollah. Bishara also said he would not return to Israel in the near future.
A 50-year-old Christian from Nazareth, Bishara frequently speaks out in favor of Palestinian rights. He advocates replacing Israel with a state that would also incorporate the 3.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel rejects that idea as spelling the end of the Jewish state.
Bishara's views have repeatedly gotten him into trouble with authorities.
Following a 2001 visit to Syria, where he spoke at a memorial ceremony for Syrian President Hafez Assad, Israeli lawmakers took the unprecedented step of lifting his parliamentary immunity.
He was then charged with inciting to violence and supporting Hezbollah. Israel's Supreme Court later restored his immunity and dismissed the criminal charges.
Then Israel's Central Elections Committee tried to disqualify Bishara and his party from running in the 2003 parliamentary election on the grounds that the party sought to destroy the Jewish character of the state and supported the armed struggle against it. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling, too.
Bishara's National Democratic Assembly Party called the suspicions being voiced against him part of a wider persecution of Israeli Arabs.
"The real target are all the Arabs, as a genuine national minority that lives in an unequal Jewish state that denies them their rights to live honorably and equally in their original home," the party said in a statement.
Although they officially hold equal status with Israel's Jewish population, the 1.4 million Arabs who account for one-fifth of Israel's population have suffered from decades of second-class status. Unequal funding and employment discrimination help to keep Arab towns regularly at the top of unemployment lists and the bottom of national income.
The ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, headed by Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, said that "Bishara and his friends crossed the line long ago, but the state buried its head in the sand," the Haaretz newspaper reported.
Lieberman has proposed stripping tens of thousands of Israeli Arabs of their citizenship by transferring their towns to Palestinian jurisdiction and annexing large Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Israel.
Jafar Farah, the director of Mossawa, an Israeli Arab advocacy center, said a study his group plans to publish next week shows that in the past nine years, 12 Arab lawmakers have been questioned 36 times on suspicions involving alleged incitement and visits to enemy states.
Courts rejected all charges in the six cases that were filed, Farah said.
"The aim is to strip us of the right of political participation ... to exclude us from the circle of being influential," he said.
