Israel’s far-right national security minister has ordered police to ban Palestinian flags from public spaces in a symbolically fraught move by the new government.
Far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees police in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government, said that waving the Palestinian flag is an act in support of terrorism.
Under Israeli law, flying the Palestinian flag is not a crime but police and soldiers have the right to remove them in cases where they deem there is a threat to public order.
Mr Ben-Gvir tweeted on Sunday: “It cannot be that lawbreakers wave terrorist flags, incite and encourage terrorism, so I ordered the removal of flags supporting terrorism from the public space and to stop the incitement against Israel.”
The move marks the new hardline government’s latest retaliation after a Palestinian push for the UN’s highest judicial body to give its opinion on Israel’s 55-year military occupation of the West Bank.
In reaction to a flurry of punitive steps taken by the government, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh accused it of blocking “even the most non-violent ways of fighting the occupation”, in an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The red, green and white Palestinian flag is greatly symbolic in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
In 2014, an attorney general ruled that an ordinance decades earlier granted police the authority to confiscate a flag if it results in disruption of public order or breach of peace, or is done in support of terrorism.
Police given ‘unfettered discretion to ban’ waving flag
One group said Mr Ben-Gvir’s order falsely implies that any public display of the Palestinian flag is itself such a disruption.
“This gives the police unfettered discretion to ban the waving of the Palestinian flag under all circumstances,” according to a statement from Adalah, an Arab minority legal rights group.
Israel once considered the Palestinian flag that of a militant group akin to the Palestinian Hamas or the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.
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But after Israel and the Palestinians signed a series of interim peace agreements known as the Oslo Accords, the flag was recognised as the Palestinian Authority’s, which was created to administer Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank.
The move by Mr Ben-Gvir follows last week’s release of a long-serving Palestinian prisoner, convicted of kidnapping and killing an Israeli soldier in 1983, who waved a Palestinian flag while receiving a hero’s welcome in his village in northern Israel.
Mr Ben-Gvir, who heads an ultranationalist party, is known for his anti-Arab rhetoric.
Mr Netanyahu’s new government took office at the end of December.
