Sheikh Salah rejects Israeli ban on Islamic Movement

On Monday, Israel’s security cabinet outlawed the Islamic Movement of Northern Israel, arrested a senior officer and shut down 17 affiliated charities with police confiscating computers and hard files, amid claims the organization incited acts of violence against Israeli civilians and police over recent weeks.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement today aimed at providing the occupied territories with 3G mobile access, so far out of reach to Palestinian mobile firms, Israeli officials said.

The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement of Israel, which provides religious and educational services for Israeli Arabs, routinely accuses Israel of trying to take over a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem, a charge Israel denies.

The organization’s daily protests at Al-Aqsa – Islam’s third holiest site – against perceived threats to the mosque from Israel, have irked the government, leading to dozens of its activists being blacklisted from entering the mosque and its leader Salah being sentenced to prison for “inciting violence”.

The ban was part of a crackdown promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a bid to stop a series of knife, gun and car-ramming attacks. Salah, a former mayor of the Israeli Arab city of Umm al-Fahm who has in the past been convicted of incitement and moving funds to Hamas, said the movement will continue its campaign to protect the Al-Aqsa mosque “by all legitimate means”.

The decision saw Islamic Movement offices raided and closed, and due to the move those working with the group can be jailed, and all property belonging to it can be seized.

“Issuing a statement on Facebook, Sikkuy said they “.condemn wholeheartedly the decision of the Government of Israel to ban the Northern Islamic movement.

“All these measures taken by Israel are unjust and unacceptable”, the movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, wrote in a Facebook post.

“All these measures taken by the Israeli establishment are unjust and unacceptable”, Salah said in a statement.

Various Israeli security experts and Palestinian activists have attributed the recent wave of Palestinian violence to incitement, particularly over false charges that Israel is threatening the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Perhaps the most problematic issue in regard to the relationship between the Movement and the Israeli state is its continuing relationship with Hamas. At least 78 Palestinians, 47 of them assailants according to police, have been killed by security forces at scenes of assaults and many others in violent protests in the West Bank and near the Gaza border.

Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed the area.

The northern branch of the Islamic Movement has always been on Israel’s radar. “We believe it’s a risky attack not only against the Islamic Movement, but against the Arab minority inside Israel”. Salah was previously imprisoned for funnelling money to Hamas, which rules Gaza.

In 2010, Israel announced plans to build 1,600 settler homes in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in mainly Arab east Jerusalem.

The surge in violence across Israel, Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank has been fuelled in part by a dispute over access to a site in Jerusalem holy to both Muslims and Jews. Since 2001, the Islamic Movement has bussed tens of thousands of supporters to the mosque compound each year to strengthen the Muslim presence.

Israel has beefed up security across the country, sending soldiers to back up police and setting up checkpoints and concrete barriers in Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, where numerous attackers have come from.