Sheikh Raed Salah, former head of the northern branch of Israel's Islamic Movement, was convicted Nov. 24 of inciting terrorism and support for illegal organizations by the Haifa Magistrates Court. Salah had received a suspended sentence on a prior conviction and is therefore now expected to serve jail time.

According to Salah’s bill of indictment, Salah delivered a speech during the funerals of three terrorists from his city (Umm al-Fahm) who, in July 2017, murdered two border policemen in Jerusalem. Salah said: “At these moments [we need to stand together] as one house, as one family. We take leave of our martyrs and express the wish that they join the prophets, the righteous ones and the martyrs. At these moments, may we pray that God increases their value in the heavens in paradise. In the Garden of Eden above, God himself will honor them by drinking water together with the Prophet Muhammad.’’

In those days, when the tensions related to the Temple Mount were at their height, Salah was in the sights of Israel’s political and defense system. Otherwise, it is doubtful that he would have been arrested for what he said. Salah was the initiator and organizer of the Morabiton and Morabitat groups. These were established to remain on guard at the Al-Aksa Mosque against what Salah views as attempts to change the status quo (on praying times allotted to Jews and Muslims), in light of the fact that there has been a rise in the number of Jews who pray at the Temple Mount. The early signs of tensions in October 2015 were in fact the decisive factor that generated a wave of terror attacks. And it was this wave of attacks that ultimately led to the November 2015 Cabinet resolution to declare the northern branch of Israel's Islamic Movement as illegal. Since then, it was clear that Salah’s arrest would only be a matter of time.

But the bill of indictment did not only list Salah’s present praises for "martyrs," as serious as these statements were. The charges against him also included acts he committed in December 2015, when he spoke in Baqa al-Gharbiya and displayed a controversial racist Jewish religious book called “The King’s Torah” and claimed that it allowed Jews to spill the blood of Palestinian children. This 230-page book was written by two rabbis from the Yitzhar settlement, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. The book was supposed to present Jewish religious guidance regarding when is it permissible or even necessary to kill non-Jews. According to the book, in certain cases, the killing of children is justified since their presence helps facilitate the murder of Jews.