Hussein Jaber, the man who annually buys Israel’s chametz, says Qatar, Dubai, and Kuwait offered to buy it all — not to eat, but to destroy.
In a dramatic and unsettling revelation, Hussein Jaber of Abu Ghosh, the man entrusted with purchasing Israel’s leavened food ahead of Passover, has disclosed that representatives from Qatar, Dubai, and Kuwait made covert offers to buy the entire stockpile he legally acquired from the State of Israel. The offers, first reported by Matzav Haruach, were not business ventures but what Jaber calls an attempt to “cause severe economic damage” to the country.
“These were not offers based on need or trade,” Jaber claimed. “They were designed to invalidate the religious legality of the sale and to eliminate vast inventories of leavened food, everything from warehouses and food plants to dairies and even industrial machinery.”
The timing and nature of the proposals suggest a calculated effort to exploit a critical religious-economic tradition in Israel. Under Jewish law, leavened food must be removed or sold to a non-Jew before Passover. Any leavened food owned by Jews during Passover becomes forbidden even after the holiday ends.
To avoid massive economic waste, businesses and institutions sell their leavened food in a legal transaction under Jewish law. For years, Jaber has served as the state’s non-Jewish buyer in this arrangement, a trusted, if symbolic, role now revealed to carry geopolitical weight.
Jaber noted that this is not the first time he has faced such pressure. “In the past, even Saudi Arabia approached me with a similar offer,” he said, recalling that they, too, had no real use for the goods. “Saudi Arabia didn’t need Israeli biscuits,” he remarked wryly, “they just wanted to cause damage.”
