Members of the official Palestine solidarity movement were invited last night to the House of Representatives in Rabat. The meeting was marked by discussing old bills penalizing normalization with Israel while claiming that Al-Quds is in its entirety the capital city of Palestine. MPs and lawmakers met on Monday, 11th of December, in a joint session at the Parliament. Their meeting, which was attended by the Palestinian Ambassador to Rabat, was an opportunity for the Moroccan parliamentary groups to comment on the U.S. President's latest decision, recognizing Al-Quds as the capital of Israel and moving the American embassy in Tel Aviv to the holy city. Unanimously condemning Trump's announcement, lawmakers protested against the communiqué issued before the session and which calls for establishing the Eastern part of Jerusalem as a capital for the Palestinians. Angered with this, they called for demanding the liberation of the city as a whole including the Western parts. After a fierce discussion, the parliament finally proved that the MPs were right. Nevertheless, the communiqué issued at the end of the session did not include what the MPs had been calling for. The text was clearly for a «two-state solution» and for the creation of a «Palestinian state» according to the borders put in 1967, before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Old law bills penalizing the normalization with Israel Moreover, during the meeting the president of the parliamentary group of the Istiqlal party (Independence), suggested penalizing normalization with Israel. Mohamed Modiane explained that it is time to «update» the texts presented four years ago regarding this topic in order to overcome the «current blockage». On the other hand, he did not mention when these bills were submitted to the House of Representatives. More cautious than his colleague from Libya, Driss Azami (PJD) only condemned rapprochement with Israel, calling for the adoption of laws criminalizing normalization. For the record, in the summer of 2013, the pan-Arabist and Islamist circles had managed to convince five political parties to agree on two bills that penalize all forms of normalization with Israel. The first was supported by four groups in the House of Representatives : PJD, PPS, USFP and Istiqlal. The second was a WFP-specific initiative before the PJD MPs backed down. Both texts provided up to «five years of imprisonment» and fines ranging from «100,000 to one million dirhams» against the perpetrators of «standard-setting crimes». Since then, these bills have never been examined by the Committee on Legislation and Justice.
