Israel bans Islamist Arab party, says it’s inciting violence

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given approval for the sale of hundreds of homes still to be built in an East Jerusalem settlement, an official said on Tuesday.

Police said they had shut down 17 Islamic Movement offices and seized documents, computers and funds and had frozen a few of its bank accounts.

The move by the government to ban the northern branch of the Islamic Movement is unlikely to be carried out in a complete fashion, since it would require a massive crackdown on thousands of Arab citizens.

Radical cleric Raed Salah, the group’s leader, was defiant, saying his party would fight the measure and continue its mission.

“All these measures done by the Israeli establishment are oppressive and condemned”, Salah said, adding that he and two other party leaders were summoned to police questioning.

In October, Salah was sentenced to 11 months in jail on charges of inciting violence at the mosque compound in a 2007 speech.

Kach members, who still have strong representation in a few West Bank settlements, call for violence against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories and demand their expulsion. He said there would have been more Israeli deaths if not for Israel’s aggressive policies “to control the ground, go into the villages, demolish terrorists’ homes and take preventive action against the infrastructures of terrorism”.

Israel’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan linked the decision to the attacks in Paris, saying in a statement that “Israel must act as an example and spearhead the struggle against radical Islam whose emissaries we saw massacring innocent people in Paris” and elsewhere.

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.

Israel has repeatedly accused the northern branch of the Islamic Movement of fueling the past two months of violence.

Mohammed Barakeh, the head of an umbrella group of Arab Israeli political parties and community leaders, called the decision “an unjustified draconian step”.

This is not the first such ban by Israel.

The current round of violence erupted in mid-September over rumours that Israel was trying to expand the Jewish presence at Jerusalem’s holiest site.

Israeli forces have killed at least 78 Palestinians, 45 of whom Israel says were carrying out or were about to carry out attacks.

On Monday, two Palestinians were killed in a gunfire exchange with IDF personnel in the West Bank’s Qalandiya refugee camp, between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

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.

Fully disbanding the movement would require a massive security operation on par with what Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has undertaken against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – imprisoning its members, preventing their supporters from preaching in mosques, and so forth.

The movement also helped form groups of male and female activists, known as “Morabitoun” – loosely translated as defenders of Islamic lands – who spend hours each weekday at the shrine trying to disrupt visits by Jews.

The Islamic Movement’s northern branch also can count on support from the more pragmatic – not moderate – southern branch, which has chose to play the political game and has the UAL party in the Knesset as part of the Joint List.