Palestinian Authority calls peace-building, economic efforts with Israelis ‘treason’

An important part of the people-to-people peace-building between Israelis and Palestinians that Israel encourages are the joint economic projects that bring financial gain to both.

One Israeli prominent in advancing such peace-building is businessman Rami Levy, who has built a number of supermarkets where Palestinians and Israelis work side by side. The chain not only successfully employs both Palestinians and Israelis, but in the aisles of the supermarkets Israelis and Palestinians are shopping together as well.

But the Palestinian Authority doesn’t share Rami Levy’s or Israel’s interest in peace-building. In fact, it opposes it and works against it.

When a new Rami Levy complex opened recently in the Atarot industrial area in northern Jerusalem, official P.A. TV broadcast this cartoon of a woman with a shopping cart filled with various items. In the reflection in the mirror, her cart is full of skulls, the symbol of death. The text asserts that Palestinians shopping there would be committing “treason” and called for “boycotting” the supermarket:

Text, upper-left: “Do not be the occupation’s partner in the Judaization of the city.”

Text, upper-right: “Economic normalization is treason.”

Text, bottom-right: “Calls from the national and Islamic forces to boycott this [Rami Levy] complex as it finances the occupation and strives to Judaize the city [Jerusalem].” [Official P.A. TV, Affairs from the Capital, Jan. 13, 2019] Read the full PMW report.