Israeli Arabs have called a general strike against the decision of the Israeli government to outlaw the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, accusing it of inciting violence.
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The Islamic Movement was founded in the early 1970s, with the goal of “establishing an Arab Islamic state in Palestine”, inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, according to a 2000 report by the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) think-tank. Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Israeli Knesset from Israel’s Palestinian minority defended the northern group as “an authentic movement” and denounced the ruling as “a pure, political rightwing decision”.
An Israeli government official, who asked not to be identified, said Mr Netanyahu gave the go-ahead on Monday to market 436 homes in Ramat Shlomo and another 18 in Ramot.
After the decision, police closed 17 organizations affiliated with the movement and raided more than a dozen of its offices, seizing computers, files and funds.
The group’s leader, the radical cleric Raed Salah, said his party would fight the measure and continue its mission.
“The statement declared the organization a “sister movement of the Hamas terrorist organization”, and that the Islamic Movement “…organization that does not recognize the institutions of the State of Israel, denies its right to exist and calls for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in its place. He said he and two other party leaders had been summoned to police questioning. But more visits in recent years by Jewish religious activists and ultra-nationalist Israeli politicians to the complex where two biblical temples once stood have done little to convince the Palestinians. 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.
An Israeli official has linked the violence that has gripped Israel in recent months with Friday evening’s attacks in Paris, which left at least 129 dead and wounded hundreds others.
Some 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and East Jerusalem among 2.4 million Palestinians.
Arabs make up roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population, holding citizenship rights but frequently suffering discrimination in jobs, housing and public services.
The current round of violence erupted in mid-September through rumors that Israel was attempting to enlarge Jewish existence at the Jerusalem shrine and disperse to Israeli cities, the West Bank and the Gaza boundary.
In a recorded message played at a rally in Jordan on Saturday, Salah said his imprisonment would strengthen his resolve “to work for the eventual liberation of Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque”.
Since October 1, 14 Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians.
(JNS.org) The chairman of the Dutch Socialist Party, Jan Marijnissen, said he believes the perpetrators of the Paris terror attacks that killed 129 people were motivated in part by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A man carries a photo inside the offices of the The Islamic Movement northern branch in Israel after …
Salah has spent time in Israeli prisons on charges ranging from incitement, to spitting on a policeman to funding Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas.
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In September the government banned the Murabitoun, Muslim students organised by the Islamic Movement in the al-Aqsa compound.
