Interior minister bars firebrand Arab Israeli cleric from leaving country

Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked on Monday signed an order prohibiting extremist Muslim cleric Sheikh Raed Salah from leaving the country.

Security officials had advised Shaked to take the measure in order to stymie Salah’s ability to renew his activities for the Islamic Movement, according to Hebrew media reports.

Salah has long been one of Israel’s most prominent Islamists. He led the Islamic Movement’s radical Northern Branch until it was banned by the government in 2015 for its alleged terror ties. Israeli authorities charged that the Northern Branch had helped incite a wave of stabbing attacks and car-rammings against Israelis.

Salah was arrested two years later and eventually convicted of incitement to terror, as well as supporting a banned organization — in this case, his own movement.

He was released in December last year after serving 17 months and given a hero’s welcome in his hometown of Umm al-Fahm in the north of the country.

Salah was incarcerated for praising a 2017 attack by three Arab Israeli terrorists at the holy Temple Mount site in Jerusalem’s Old City; the assailants gunned down two Druze police officers before being killed by Israeli forces.

The hilltop is Judaism’s holiest place, as the site of both Biblical Temples, as well as the third-holiest sanctuary of Islam. The incident — and an Israeli decision to intensify security on the hilltop — precipitated days of intense clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians. Several Palestinians were killed, both while committing attacks and during clashes with Israeli troops.

According to the verdict against him, Salah gave a sermon in the midst of the crisis in which he praised the “martyrs of Al-Aqsa.”

Salah gave a similar speech at a symbolic funeral for the three gunmen in Umm al-Fahm, and a would-be stabber from the city who was arrested in Tel Aviv days later indicated he had been inspired by Salah’s words, according to the conviction.

Israel’s Islamic Movement was founded in the early 1970s by Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, a preacher from Kafr Qasim.

In the 1990s, the Islamists split over the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians that led to the Oslo Accords. Darwish’s Southern faction embraced the peace process, eventually entering the Knesset as the Ra’am faction. The party is now a member of the ruling coalition.

The more radical Salah and his disciples — the so-called Northern Branch — staunchly opposed the Oslo Accords and Israeli parliamentary politics alike. The division was rarely publicly acknowledged, with both parties continuing to call themselves simply “the Islamic Movement.”

Salah had previously been convicted on a number of occasions of terror charges and in 2017 was released from prison after serving a nine-month sentence for incitement to violence and racism.

Nonetheless, his 2020 conviction was slammed by Arab Israeli parliamentarians as an attempt to suppress free speech.