Iraqi parliament gives first reading to bill banning normalization with ‘Israel’
Baghdad (QNN)- The Iraqi parliament last week gave the first reading to a bill seeking to ban the normalization or establishment of relations with ‘Israel’.
The Iraqi parliament convened last Wednesday and elected the members of the legal committee.
As its first work, the committee examined the “Banning Normalization and Establishment of Relations with the Zionist Entity” bill, which was later sent to the MPs to discuss and would also apply to the Kurdistan Region.
The legislature gave the first reading to the bill, the committee said in a statement last Wednesday.
The bill requires almost all officials, including those in Kurdistan Region, government institutions and media to refrain from establishing relations with ‘Israel’.
The main part of the bill criminalizes the normalization of relations with the “Zionist entity,” a reference to ‘Israel’, in addition to “banning of the establishment of diplomatic, political, military, economic, and cultural relations and any other sort of relations with the invading Zionist entity.”
The move came weeks after prominent Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a top winner of the country’s October parliamentary elections, called on members of his Sadrist bloc to introduce such a bill.
Sadr said that the “issue of normalization and Israeli ambitions to dominate our beloved Iraq” was one of the core reasons for the Sadrist Movement’s involvement with the electoral process again.
In a move slammed by much of the Arab world and the Palestinians as a betrayal, four Arab countries – the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco – established diplomatic relations with ‘Israel’ as part of the so-called Abraham Accords- a US-led joint Middle East peace initiative.
In September, a conference advocating for Iraq to join the Abraham Accords was held in the Kurdistan region’s capital of Erbil with the participation of more than 300 Kurds, Sunnis and Shias.
The conference, however, drew widespread condemnation in Iraq, prompting the Iraqi judiciary to issue arrest warrants for those who participated in the conference.
