Israel’s Itamar Ben-Gvir orders police to remove Palestinian flags

• Itamar Ben-Gvir claims he ordered police to remove Palestinian flags.
• Israeli law does not prohibit flags of other countries from being hoisted.
• About a fifth of Israelis are Arab, the majority descended from Palestinians.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new far-right National Security Minister, claimed on Sunday that he had given police the order to take down Palestinian flags from public areas.

Israeli law does not forbid Palestinian flags, but police and military are allowed to take them down if they pose a threat to the peace.

The order from Ben-Gvir, who is the leader of an ultranationalist party in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new administration and who also serves as the minister in charge of the police, appears to take a strict stance in calling for their removal.

It comes after the release last week of a long-serving Palestinian prisoner who hoisted a Palestinian flag while enjoying a hero’s welcome in his village in northern Israel. The prisoner was found guilty of kidnapping and killing an Israeli soldier in 1983.

Waving the Palestinian flag, according to a statement by Ben-Gvir, is an act of support for terrorism.

“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,” Ben-Gvir said.

About a fifth of Israelis are Arab, the majority of whom are descended from Palestinians who stayed in the newly established country following its independence war in 1948.

They have long argued about where they fit into Israeli politics, juggling their Israeli citizenship with their Palestinian ancestry. Many of them identify as or with the Palestinians.

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