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Rabin Vows to ‘Teach a Lesson’ to Arabs Who Refuse to Pay Taxes

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From Reuters

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Tuesday that Israel will teach a lesson to Palestinians who refuse to pay taxes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Beit Sahur.

Participants at a closed-door parliamentary committee meeting said Rabin told them: “There will not be any attempt to boycott taxes. If it takes a month, it will take a month, but they will break.

“We are going to teach them a lesson,” he told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

The town’s mayor says some 600 merchants, artisans and workers in Beit Sahur, a mainly Christian, middle-class village of 12,000 people near Bethlehem, are boycotting Israeli taxes under the slogan, “No taxation under occupation.”

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Rabin angrily rejected criticism by human rights groups, Palestinian nationalist leader Faisal Husseini and Western diplomats of army seizures of furniture, household equipment and merchandise worth more than $750,000 from residents withholding taxes.

His blunt language recalled tough statements last year, when he vowed to crush the Palestinian uprising with “might, force and beatings.”

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