Palestinian lawmakers in Israel have found an unexpected ally inside the government against a new bill banning mosques from using loudspeakers to broadcast the call to prayer. A parliamentary vote was delayed after worries from health minister Yaakov Litzman that the bill might apply to synagogues too. The setback, however, is likely to prove short-lived.
In the tangle of back streets in the city of Umm al-Fahm, the three-storey building that until recently housed the headquarters of the northern Islamic Movement stands dark and empty, its front-door padlocked shut.
The movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has been forced to decamp to a large covered market on the outskirts of the city that has been hurriedly converted into an unlikely hub of political activity for Israel’s Palestinian minority.
Tens of thousands of visitors have come to Sheikh Raed Salah's protest tent in the past three weeks, since Netanyahu declared his Islamic Movement an “illegal organisation”. In an interview, Salah calls the move “a declaration of war not just against our movement but against Islam and against the whole Palestinian community [in Israel]. Everyone feels targeted.”
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | November 24, 2015 With dismaying predictability, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost no time in exploiting the massacre in Paris. As he has done many times before, he claimed Europe’s trauma was just a taste of the suffering Israelis have long known. Discounting decades of a brutal Israeli […]
The decision by the Israeli government to outlaw the country’s main Islamic Movement marks a dangerous turning point in Israel’s relations with its large Palestinian minority. 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.
