The Oregonian · Portland, Oregon · 4 June 1997

CP-1997-002

Murders linked to land sales reopen an ugly chapter in Israeli-Palestinian history

Trouble in Palestine

Barbara Demick, Knight-Ridder News Service, Jerusalem

Scan 1011 × 1700 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM — Ali Jumhour kissed his wife goodbye at 9 a.m. Saturday and headed off to driving school. A few hours later, the 34-year-old waiter was found on a roadside, where he had been unceremoniously dumped with two bullet wounds through the neck.

‘God only knows who killed him,’ said his widow, Layla, as she sat with grieving family members at the Shofat refugee camp the next day. ‘If my husband was involved with some kind of illegal deals, I, as his wife, would surely have known.’

But Israeli authorities insist they’ve unraveled the mystery of Jumhour’s murder: They say he fell prey to Palestinian vigilantes who executed him for selling Arab land to Jews. Jumhour is the third suspected land dealer to be murdered in the past month… Palestinian officials adamantly deny involvement.

Nevertheless, the murders have become a cause celebre in Israel, adding fresh venom to the increasingly poisonous relationship between Israeli and Palestinian leaders… ‘Senior officials of the Palestinian Authority … openly encouraged these murders,’ Netanyahu said later on Israel’s army radio.

‘This is simply standing the peace process on its head. There cannot be a situation in which residents of Jerusalem are being murdered, and we go on as though nothing had happened.’

At the least, Israeli officials have said, the Palestinian Authority is guilty of creating a climate in which vigilantes are encouraged to summarily execute any Arab suspected of selling land to Jews… Just four days later, the body of 79-year-old Farid Bishiti, a Jerusalem real estate broker, was found bound and gagged, his head split open, near the police station in the West Bank city of Ramallah… The murders reopen a particularly ugly chapter in Jewish-Palestinian relations that dates to the 1930s.

Then, as now, a number of Arabs who sold land to Jews were deemed traitors and summarily murdered… ‘I can’t believe he was involved in any land sales. They wouldn’t have released him if he’d done anything wrong,’ insisted Jumhour’s 27-year-old widow, Layla. ‘I never heard about him doing anything out of the ordinary.

He went to work. He came home. That was his whole life.’… ‘I have no problem accepting the death penalty for the one who sells land to the enemy,’ Layla Jumhour said.”

Context added by this archive

The page runs four boxes beside the story — U.S. Aid, Marked for Death, Arrest Warrant, Fight Over Schools — and a second article by Karin Laub on corruption in the Palestinian Authority. The widow is quoted three times and named.

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