Afula protesters want Arab-won housing tenders revoked
200 demonstrators claim bidding on 50 plots of land was rigged, also object to Arab neighborhood in city
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Some 200 angry local residents demonstrated on Sunday night outside Afula’s municipality building, demanding that dozens of tenders for new housing plots be revoked because they were all won by Arab bidders who live outside the northern city.
Gathering outside the city hall, the protesters claimed that the winning tender applicants may have coordinated their bids to both win and ensure the neighborhood is populated by Arab residents. They also charged that the tenders were poorly publicized within the city, and only announced in two local newspapers.
Mayor Yitzhak Meron came out to speak to the protesters, but was heckled with shouts of “traitor” and “terrorist” as well as calls for his resignation. Police advised the mayor to leave the unruly demonstration and return to the municipal building.
Beyond calling for a fair tender for the people of Afula, many of the protesters also expressed objections to the idea of an all-Arab neighborhood in the city.
The demonstrators want the tenders canceled and preference given to city residents in all future land projects, protest organizer Ilona Goldstein told the Hebrew-language website NRG.
“We would also have liked to buy that land,” she said. “The residents of Afula first, and afterward all the rest.”
Yaakov Dadon, whose daughter Shelly was murdered by an Arab taxi driver in 2014, attended the demonstration.
“They are doing an injustice to Afula,” said Dadon. “They [the Arabs] want to set up a village and a mosque and school. What have we come to? Just like I don’t go and buy land in their villages, they shouldn’t buy land near us. They have no shortage of land. This is insufferable.”
The tender was run by the Israel Land Administration, which accepted bids on almost 50 plots for homes in a planned community next to the Afula Illit neighborhood. When the results were published last week, it became clear that none of the plots had been won by current residents of Afula and all had been awarded to residents of Arab villages in the area.
Meron said after the protest that he would look into allegations of wrongdoing in the way the tenders were managed, the Hebrew-language Ynet news website reported, but also noted that the process had not been under municipal control.
Arab lawmakers on Monday called for Housing Minister Yoav Galant to fire his chief of staff David Suissa for indicating support for the campaign to invalidate the tenders.
The uproar came after Suissa, a resident of the city, took part in the demonstration.
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Meretz party MK Issawi Frej called on Galant, of the Kulanu party, to immediately fire Suissa for taking part in the demonstration and for reportedly telling Channel 10 that he backs the movement to cancel the Arab-won tenders.
“The Housing Ministry should campaign against racism in housing and not promote it,” he said. “The fact that the minister’s chief of staff is a card-carrying racist who calls for Israeli citizens to be prevented from buying apartments in Afula is a disgrace to the Housing Ministry, to Minister Galant, and to his whole party.”
“If Galant doesn’t fire him immediately, I intend to appeal to the civil service commissioner and if necessary to the High Court so that the racist Suissa does not continue in a position that enables him to put his racist teachings into practice.”
Joint (Arab) List MK Ahmad Tibi wrote to Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein asking him to look into Suissa’s comments, which he said “reeked of hardcore racism.”
“The man who has a government position as the chief of staff at the Housing Ministry, expresses himself in a grave and aggressive way against the population that took part in the tender and won under the law.”
Tibi also also claimed that Suissa was sending a subliminal message that action would be taken against the Arab families who were “a foreign plague that should be expelled.”
