A suspected Iranian spy arrested in March was once a member of the Arab Balad Party. Ayman Haj Yahya was arrested in a joint Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Israel Police operation. He was indicted for spying for Tehran in April. According to the investigation, Yahya had been in contact with Iranian intelligence officials and Khaled Yamani, an operative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group in Lebanon.Yahya had been a member of the hard-line, anti-Zionist Balad Party. He was head of the party branch in Taiba in the Triangle region and was a member of its political bureau. Yahya is believed to have left the party several years ago and, according to a Balad spokesman, has not been a party member for 10 years. According to a newspaper article in Al-Arab and other Arabic news sources, he was a party member until October 2014. At that point, it appears Yahya split from Balad due to a dispute over the party’s stance on the Syrian civil war, and he set up a new political movement. if(window.location.pathname.indexOf("656089") != -1){console.log("hedva connatix");document.getElementsByClassName("divConnatix")[0].style.display ="none";}He also appears to have been active in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, appearing as a speaker at a BDS conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in December 2014. “Once again we see the connection between BDS activists and supporters of terrorist organizations and regimes like Iran,” said Amit Deri, founder of the Reservists on Duty anti-BDS organization.Balad founder Azmi Bishara, who served as an MK in four Knessets, infamously fled Israel in 2007 while under investigation for allegedly passing information to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Basel Ghattas, another former Balad MK, was convicted in 2017 of smuggling phones to jailed terrorists and served almost two years in prison for the offense.
