Last month he deployed reservists across Jerusalem and Israel, and erected 14 new checkpoints inside of Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.
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The worldwide community opposes Israeli construction in east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and the Palestinians claim as their capital.
Israel’s Security Cabinet has outlawed the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, accusing the group of incitement and links to terrorism. He also says that the number of Arabs who see Israel as a democracy will decline and as a result we will see a drop in Arab political participation.
Police raided the Islamist group’s offices overnight Monday, seizing documents, computers and money in chapters across the country. “It will also be possible to seize all property belonging to the organization”.
Cleric Raed Salah, the group’s leader, was defiant, saying his party would fight the measure and continue its mission.
In October, Salah was sentenced to 11 months in jail on charges of inciting violence at the mosque compound in a 2007 speech. It has also been behind a campaign alleging Israel is trying to take over a holy Jerusalem site known to Muslims as the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
“The streets of Jerusalem will be purified by the blood of the innocents whose souls were taken by the Israeli occupation soldiers”, he is quoted as saying. The latter group became a leading Arab party in Knesset, now in coalition with the Joint Arab List, Israel’s third largest political faction. It is the holiest site in Judaism and was home to the biblical Jewish Temples. But the attack in Israel’s economic hub of Tel Aviv returned the violence to the Israeli heartland, shattering a lull that had set in outside of the West Bank and stoking Israeli fears that a full-fledged Palestinian uprising could erupt.
The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee declared the strike in response to Tuesday’s security cabinet decision to outlaw the group.
Half a million Palestinians are now deprived from the social aids, which have been given by the Islamic Movement, said Salah.
But, while Netanyahu vehemently discounts claims of Israeli encroachment at al-Aqsa and even blames the Northern Islamic Movement via the Morabitat for escalations at the site, numbers show that what has changed at al-Aqsa is not so much the presence of the Morabitat, but that of nationalist-religious Israelis.
The Israeli defence ministry unit that manages civilian affairs in the occupied territories announced the “memorandum of understanding” and said it had been signed with Palestinian civil affairs minister Hussein al-Sheikh. “It’s not just a religious symbol”.
Yet Israel’s own Shin Bet security service is anxious that the ban could backfire, a political source told Reuters. “This move is not directed against the Arab and Muslim public in Israel, the great majority of which upholds the laws of the state and disavows incitement and terrorism”, the Prime Minister’s Office emphasized.
Arabs make up roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population, holding citizenship rights but frequently suffering discrimination in jobs, housing and public services.
The decision to ban the group threatened to worsen already strained relations with the country’s Arab minority and was condemned by Arab leaders. Early this year, Netanyahu angered the community on election day when he urged supporters to get to the polls because Arabs were “voting in droves”.
According to one minister who participated in the latest deliberations, as cited by Haaretz, Cohen said the northern branch had more than 10,000 members – Arab citizens of Israel – and it was neither wise nor practical to declare all of them criminals.
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Information for this article was contributed by Mohammed Daraghmeh and Ian Deitch of The Associated Press.
