The ‘Only
Democracy in the Middle East’ Bans Israeli Palestinian Organisation

Israeli Police Raid Offices of Northern Islamic Leagues Seizing Computers and Files

Sheik Raed Salah – leader of the Northern Islamic Leagues

Despite the repression and racism, it can nonetheless be said that Israeli Palestinians
still enjoy certain, albeit very limited democratic rights.  Foremost among these are the right to form
their own political parties and groups.

Under arrest in court

Sheikh Raed Salah

Israeli ban on Islamic party marks a ‘dangerous turning point’

Palestinian leaders in Israel warn that Netanyahu is exploiting
Paris attacks to ‘shut door’ to minority’s political activity
Middle East Eye – 17 November 2015

The decision by the Israeli government on Tuesday to outlaw the country’s
main Islamic Movement marks a dangerous turning point in Israel’s relations
with its large Palestinian minority, Palestinian leaders in Israel have warned.

The move effectively drives underground a religious, political and
social movement representing the views of a sizeable portion of Israel’s 1.6
million Palestinian citizens, comprising a fifth of the population.

Sheik Raed Salah and the Northern Islamic League Supporters

Jamal Zahalka was among the Palestinian members of the Israeli parliament
who called the decision a “declaration of war” against the country’s
Palestinian minority.

“It is an attack not just on the northern Islamic Movement but on our entire
community,” he told Middle East Eye.

Sheik Raed Salah

He and other community leaders noted that the Islamic Movement has not used
or called for violence. He said the ban was driven solely by the agenda of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right.

“Netanyahu is a leader who needs to create enemies,” Zahalka said. “The
recent US deal with Iran deprived him of his main bogeyman. The PA is helping
him with security in the West Bank. Gaza is quiet. So he makes an enemy of the
country’s Palestinian citizens.

Sheik Raed Salah and the Northern Islamic League Supporters

“In the elections [in March] he began his ugly incitement by saying we were
coming out to vote ‘in droves’. Now he has the Islamic Movement in his sights.
But he won’t stop with this.”

Netanyahu first mooted plans two years ago to shut down the northern wing of
the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah.

However, fear of international condemnation, as well as advice from his
intelligence services that such a step could not be justified on security
grounds, appeared to stay his hand.

Declared ‘illegal organisation’

Asad Ghanem, a politics professor at Haifa University, said Netanyahu had
moved now to exploit the attacks in Paris last Friday, which were claimed by
Islamic State (IS) and left 129 dead.

“He is making an entirely false comparison between the Islamic Movement and
the most violent armed Islamic groups so that he can persuade the Europeans
that this is connected to their fight against terror,” he told MEE.

Declaring the northern Islamic Movement an “illegal organisation”, Netanyahu
said it “denies [Israel’s] right to exist and calls for the
establishment of an Islamic caliphate in its place.”


Early on Tuesday morning, police raided the movement’s head offices in Umm
al-Fahm, as well as dozens of Islamic charities and welfare associations in
communities such as Nazareth, Jaffa, Kfar Kana, Turan, Beersheva and Rahat.

Some 17 related organisations were also served with orders shutting them
down. The group’s leaders were called in for questioning. Computers and
documents were seized and the organisations’ bank accounts frozen.

Ghanem said the move would signal to Palestinian citizens that the “door is
closed to them when it comes to participating in the democratic process”.


He added: “As well as being politically dangerous, this will also be seen as
an assault on Islamic belief. The movement funds and organises student
associations that teach the Koran. They will now be treated as illegal.”


Ghanem said nothing about the Islamic Movement had changed in the past
decade. “The only thing that changed is the political extremism of Netanyahu
and his government.”

Draconian measure

Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, said the order from the defence
minister, Moshe Yaalon, was based on emergency regulations from the British
Mandate period.

The decision threatens with arrest and imprisonment anyone who continues to
be involved with the organisation or offers it services.

Adalah called it “an aggressive, draconian measure” that would “suppress a
political movement that represents a large part of the Palestinian public in
Israel”.


Salah denounced the ban, saying his movement would continue to defend
Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City from what he termed
Israeli threats.

For more than a decade Salah has clashed with Israeli officials by leading a
campaign under the slogan “Al-Aqsa is in danger”, warning that Israel is
seeking to erode Islamic sovereignty over the mosque area.

In September the government banned
the Murabitoun, Muslim students organised by the Islamic Movement in the
al-Aqsa compound. They had regularly clashed with Jewish extremists allowed into
the area in ever-increasing numbers by the Israeli authorities.

Netanyahu and other ministers have accused Salah of incitement and blamed
him for the wave of Palestinian protests and so-called “lone-wolf” attacks,
many of them stabbings, of the past few weeks.

Salah said: “I will take every possible legitimate step, in
Israel and internationally, to remove the measures taken against the movement.”

Welfare services threatened

The Islamic Movement was founded in the 1970s as both a political party and
a provider of religious and welfare services. It split into two factions in the
mid-1990s, with Salah’s so-called northern group refusing to participate in
parliamentary elections.

The organisation runs kindergartens, health clinics, mosques, a newspaper
and a sports league.
It is also a key member of the Follow-Up Committee, the Palestinian
minority’s only representative national body. Mohammed Barakeh, the committee’s
head, said the Islamic Movement would continue to participate in defiance of
the ban.

Only a fortnight ago, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported that a
year-long investigation by Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin
Bet, had been unable to find security grounds for closing the organisation.

Two unnamed government ministers told
the paper that Yoram Cohen, head of the Shin Bet, had told the security
cabinet he objected to any move to criminalise the movement’s more than 10,000
members. It would do “more harm than good”, he reportedly told them.

Ghanem said the Shin Bet’s view was based on an assessment that allowing the
Islamic Movement to operate “ensured its political activities were more open
and more mainstream, and would avoid it being forced underground.


“The fact that Netanyahu has taken the opposite view tells us this is a
political decision, not a security one.”

Both Zahalka and Ghanem said they feared that Netanyahu would next target
Zahalka’s democratic nationalist party, Balad. Last month the Israeli prime
minister accused
the Balad party of conspiring with Hamas and Islamic State.

Terror link claims

The government immediately launched a media campaign implying that Salah’s
movement had colluded with “terrorism” against Israel.

A document issued by Netanyahu’s office stated that the group was “a sister-movement of the Hamas
terrorist organization. These organizations are secretly and actively
cooperating with one another.”


The public security minister, Gilad Erdan, went further, saying:
“The Islamic Movement, Hamas, ISIS [Islamic State], and the other terror
organizations have a common ideological platform that leads to terror attacks
in the world and the wave of terror attacks in Israel.”


Ghanem said it was preposterous to claim that the Islamic Movement shared
common ground with Islamic State.

He also observed that, while the Islamic Movement and Hamas shared a
political and religious ideology, Salah’s group forswore violence and militant
activity in pursuit of its aims.

Zeki Aghbaria, a spokesman for the northern Islamic Movement, called the
government’s characterisation of the organisation, as “political incitement”.


“Today I suddenly found I had become a criminal,” he told MEE. “That means
they just criminalised any support for the defence of al-Aqsa, or for the
Palestinian people under occupation, or for equal rights for Palestinian citizens
in Israel, or for welfare provision for students and the handicapped.”


The decision effectively puts the Islamic Movement on an equal footing with
the Kach movement, a Jewish extremist group banned in the 1990s after one of
its members, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi
mosque in Hebron.

Kach members, who still have strong representation in some West Bank
settlements, call for violence against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied
territories and demand their expulsion.

‘Anti-democratic persecution’

Ayman Odeh, leader of Joint List faction of all the Palestinian parties in
the parliament, said of the move against the Islamic Movement: “This is
indisputably a case of political, anti-democratic persecution that is part of
the de-legitimization campaign waged by Netanyahu’s government against the
country’s Arab citizens.”


However, the decision won overwhelming support from Israeli Jewish parties,
including the main centre-left opposition party, Zionist Union.

The timing of Netanyahu’s announcement takes advantage of the growing
climate against Islamic political activism at the local, regional and
international levels.

Given the mood in Europe and the United States after the Paris attacks,
Netanyahu can probably count on the international community not studying too
closely the comparisons between the Islamic Movement, Hamas and Islamic State.

Regionally, meanwhile, the Islamic Movement is at its weakest. Its sister
organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been outlawed in neighbouring Egypt,
while Cairo has joined Israel in isolating Hamas in Gaza.

And locally, the Israeli Jewish public wants someone to blame after weeks of
Palestinian attacks, including stabbings, in Jerusalem, the West Bank and
Israel.

Intelligence services have admitted they have little idea how to deal with
the so-called “lone wolves”, individual Palestinians not affiliated with any
political faction, behind most of the attacks.

Zahalka said Netanyahu wanted a scapegoat and had found a convenient one in
Salah. In statements on Tuesday, Netanyahu blamed the weeks of unrest on what
he called “incitement” by the Islamic Movement about the status quo at al-Aqsa.

Haifa University sociologist Sammy Smooha told reporters his polls suggested that 42 per cent of
Palestinian citizens identified with the Islamic Movement.

Salah is due to start an 11-month prison term next week after an Israeli court found
him guilty of incitement over a sermon he delivered in Jerusalem in 2007. It is
the latest of several jail terms he has served.

Israel Outlaws Nation’s Leading Muslim Group

Contemplate this: the Department of Homeland Security announces that
henceforth the Nation of Islam, the Westboro Baptist Church, and Zionist
Organization of America are outlawed organizations.  They are
considered supporters of a terrorist ideology and must completely dissolve
their organizations and their programs.  Anyone found to be a member
of any of the groups is liable to criminal prosecution.

In response, the groups refuse to accept the decree.  They announce
that in order to continue representing the legitimate interests of their
followers and co-religionists, they are going underground.  They denounce
the decision as a serious violation of the Constitution and call upon the
nation to protest it.  The result: dead silence.  Everyone who hasn’t
been banned is too cowed to put up much of a fight, though scores of the
remaining legal groups know the new policy is unjust and a grave violation of
civil liberties.

That scenario sounds pretty far-fetched here in the U.S. (though China
currently does precisely this to Tibetan Buddhists and the Falun Gong, and Iran
does the same to the Bahai).  But it isn’t far-fetched at all in Israel.
 Defense Minister Yaalon, a political ally of Kahanist Moshe Feiglin, took
advantage of the terror hysteria sweeping the globe to outlaw
the northern branch of the Islamic Movement,
Israel’s leading Islamic organization.  Keep in mind that this is the same
guy whom the NY Times’ Tom Friedman called “Israel’s very
decent defense minister,” in a recent column.  Can you imagine what
Friedman’s definition of ‘decent’ is?  Or better yet, what his definition
of ‘decency’ is?

Its leader Sheikh Raed
Saleh, has just been jailed
for the umpteenth time for some offense or another.  Saleh, who
successfully fought banning by the UK Tory government, is the equivalent of
Malcolm X in the Israeli Palestinian community.

He is a fiery, uncompromising advocate for Muslim unity.  An implacable
opponent of Israeli oppression of his co-religionists.  The Movement
spearheaded resistance to Israeli encroachment on the Haram al Sharif.
 Though it has never advocated violence or been charged with engaging in
it, nevertheless the Israeli government blames the group for fomenting all of
the Palestinian attacks against Jews over the past two months.

According to the Israeli Jewish narrative, everyone is to blame for anti-Israel
terror: ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Islam–and now the Northern Movement.
 Everyone, that is, except Israel.  It is never to blame for the
bloodshed and massacres it inflicts.  It is merely a victim, defending
itself against terrorist monsters like those who struck in Paris.

Is Saleh and the Northern Movement angry and defiant? Yes.  Is it an
implacable foe of injustice against Israeli Muslims?  Yes.  Is its
rhetoric intemperate at times? Yes.  But is it a terror group?  Does
it commit or advocate violence? Does it advocate overthrowing the State?
 No, to all of the above.

I warn the pro-Israel crowd here that you can dredge up misquotes and
mistranslation from the Jerusalem Post and MEMRI all you want.  It won’t
change the fact that this banning is inherently racist and Islamophobic (no
Jewish terror group has been similar banned though there was talk of banning
the Jewish fascist group, Lehava).  I have no interest in parsing
propaganda tracts alleging Saleh said this or that, which you will all
undoubtedly be marshalling to defend this outrageous decision.  So I put
you on notice and a short leash.

— Noam R (@noamr) November 17, 2015

As I wrote above, this banning is a cynical ploy by the defense minister
seeking to kiss-up to his Kahanist settler constituency.  It seeks also to
criminalize a large cross-section of Israeli Muslims who are loyal to the
NOrthern Movement, which plays a huge role in providing a social safety net
among this community.   As NoamR tweeted (“What Yaalon did today in his
infinite wisdom, was to take a large, cautious organization which was under a
magnifying glass, whose every step was openly reported, and send it
underground: a declaration of war”), this decree is not just anti-democratic,
it will drive the Movement underground just as the Egyptian junta has driven the
Muslim Brotherhood underground.  In Egypt, the result has been a series of
bloody bombings and terror attacks by Egyptian Islamists angry at the massacres
of the military regime directed against their followers.

This move by Yaalon will drive an even greater wedge between Jews and
Muslims within Israel.  It will provoke more violence on both sides, more
hatred.  As Noam wrote, it is nothing less than a declaration of war.
 Until this time, the most savage violence was between Israeli Jews and
Occupied Palestinians.  Henceforth, the action will gradually shift to
within Israel itself.  The Palestinians of Israel are a loyal,
long-suffering and generally quiescent regarding their second or third-class
citizenship.  That may all be changing.  When it does, you will not
have just a war between Israel and Palestine.  You will have a civil war
within Israel: Israeli Jewish citizens murdering Israeli Palestinian citizens.
 In the name of nationalist supremacy.

Israel is a State going to Hell in a handbasket.  It’s worst enemy is
itself.  I have never witnessed a train wreck.  But
watching this insanity slowly unfold is the closest thing to it.

I have been exploring what sort of organized protest or movement may spring
up around this issue.  It is the sort of grave injustice which demands
mass protest and the cooperation of disparate groups.  Speaking of which,
watch what the Israeli “left” does and says around this issue.  Remember
what I wrote above about “silence?”