Nadav Shragai: Isis Among Us
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=29837
About 50 Israeli Arabs have joined Islamic State in the past few years, but the number who support the radical group’s violent ideology is considerably bigger • Is the Islamic State monster gaining a foothold in Israel, too?
One day, Othman Abdul Kiyan disappeared from his home. His neighbors in the Negev Bedouin town of Hura said he had gone to Turkey for a vacation after successfully finishing his grueling medical training in Jordan.
But in May 2014, when Othman failed to show up for work as a resident at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, everyone was amazed to discover that Othman had given up his dream of medicine and joined Islamic State. The news was hard on his family; a few even went to the hotel room where he had stayed in Turkey. There they found a few of his personal items. Members of the hotel staff told them their son had rented a car and not returned. A few months later, his family received the news that Othman had been killed in the fighting in Syria.
Moussa Khalil Abu Kush from the Negev village of Arara also completed medical school in Jordan. Like Othman, he was exposed to jihadist ideology there and wrote Facebook posts supporting Islamic State. He was arrested by the Shin Bet security agency, expressed remorse, and was ordered to pay a fine and perform community service.
Khalil, a resident of east Jerusalem, disappeared from his home, too. His worried relatives told Israeli security forces that their son worked as an orderly at the Eitanim psychiatric hospital and had a membership to the fitness center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before he disappeared, Khalil told his family and his bosses that he was taking a few weeks off to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he actually bought a one-way ticket to Greece. From there he flew to Istanbul, and with the help of an Islamic State operative he reached the Syrian border and joined the organization. The mystery of his disappearance was solved only when and his comrades were arrested by the Shin Bet when they returned from Syria.
Mahran Bin Youssef Khaladi, 19, from Nazareth has a similar story. Like Khalil and Othman, he also flew to Turkey, which was nothing more than a stop on his way to Syria. When Khaladi arrived at the Islamic State command center in the Jarabulus region, he met three other Arab Israelis, all from the village of Yaffa in the Galilee. Khaladi took part in the fighting, was seriously wounded in an air strike by Shiite forces, recovered, and returned to Israel last January — only to be arrested immediately.
Unlike Khaladi, Khalil, and Othman, most of the members of the organization in which attorney Adnan Ala a-Din, a former public defender from Nazareth, was active did not manage to leave for Syria to join the Islamic State, but prepared themselves to do so. A-Din, who presented himself as a senior commander in the Islamic State, taught the members of the group being organized to slaughter sheep, among other things, “to get ready and to train the spirit.” Three teachers from Hura — Bashir, Akram, and Mahmoud Abu Al-Kiyan — also planned to head for Syria, but their advance work spreading ISIS ideas on social media exposed them and led to their arrest.
‘ISIS in legal guise’
Islamic State, the group that is terrorizing the West, is already here in Israel, too. It is supposedly small and marginalized, but no one really knows what is going on in the mind of a potential operative exposed to the doctrines the group steadily disseminates through social media and websites. What is well knows is that in recent years about 50 Arab Israelis have joined or tried to join the organization, which a week ago turned Paris, the city of lights, into a city of war.
Exponentially more Arab Israelis support the idea of Islamic State. The Shin Bet is keeping tabs on them — they use smart phones and computers to exchange filmed sermons, texts, and horrific images documenting group operatives slaughtering people. They spray pro-Islamic State graffiti and wave its flags or similar ones in the Old City of Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount, near the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth and in other communities populated by Arab Israelis.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir movement is the closest thing to Islamic State openly operating in Israel. Its members are especially prominent on the Temple Mount. The group holds demonstrations there that have been attended by thousands. Its ideology is Salafist and seeks to live by Sharia law, return to Islam as it was practiced in the early days of the faith and establish an Islamic caliphate. Unlike Islamic State, Hizb ut-Tahrir operatives do not espouse violence and thus far have restricted themselves to spreading their beliefs.
The idea of a Palestinian state is foreign to the group, and its members despise the Palestinian Authority.
For now, a senior security official says, “Hizb ut-Tahrir is ISIS in legal guise. Many of its members walk the line between their [own] movement and ISIS.”
In Israel, the movement is still legal. In many Western countries, such as Germany, it has already been outlawed.
Now a former official has supplied the first assessment of the number of Islamic State supporters in Israel. The number is almost nothing among Arab Israelis, but still enough to create serious headaches for those in charge of our security. Brig. Gen. (res) Nitzan Nuriel, who headed the Counterterrorism Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office from 2007-2012, puts at “a few thousand” the number of Arab Israelis “who were caught up in the spirit of [Islamic State]. … If we put it bluntly, these are people who get up in the morning and are thrilled to pieces at ISIS’s gains, and when ISIS fails, walk around with their heads down. In my opinion, these few thousand are asking themselves on a daily basis, ‘Can I as an individual help ISIS?’ The ‘brave’ among them do something about it. The others mull ideas over, but in this context, it’s a very short step from the idea to implementing it.”
Nuriel reveals that “the security establishment usually knows about the ones who leave Israel only after the fact. They leave on various pretexts, and there’s no prohibition on leaving Israel. They can be barred from returning or arrested when they arrive. These people feed off the atmosphere, both from [social media] networks and from incitement in the mosques and other places.”
What causes these young people to join ISIS?
“It’s a combination of ideology and a show of ‘the good life,’ because what is ISIS actually saying — including to Arab Israelis? On one hand, it sells them the dream of an Islamic nation that is coming into being, and on the other it sells them a slogan — ‘Come on, we’re having fun,’ or in other words, you can have as many women as you want, you can rape. That combination — ‘idealism’ and ‘the good life’ — is so simple that it’s a problem. Devout Muslims are being tempted by it not only in Europe, but also in Israel.”
Grabbing the tiger by its tail
Professor Boaz Ganor, founder and general director of the International Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, points out that Israel is in a much better position than European countries when it comes to Islamic State operating within its borders, or the group’s potential to attract more members.
“Our abilities to thwart [attacks] are much better because our intelligence [apparatus] is very seasoned in these areas,” Ganor says.
“There could always be a trickle that slips under the radar, but up until now, there hasn’t been.”
Ganor is more disturbed by Islamic State joining forces with the groups that operate on Israel’s borders in Sinai and on the Golan Heights. The professor has strong warnings about the challenges it presents to the kingdom of Jordan: “There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Syrian refugees in Jordan today, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Jordan. It’s very probable that ISIS personnel have already infiltrated the refugees, that there are already sleeper cells and organizational potential for the Islamic State.
“While it’s true that many have been eulogizing the stability of the Jordanian government for decades and the regime still hasn’t fallen, it is a nation with serious ethnic divides. It’s easy for an organization like ISIS to take advantage of them if it wants to. ISIS already has its foot in the door in Jordan. The more effective the fight against it becomes, like in Syria, the more ISIS might turn its efforts to Jordan, that that’s not good, and even dangerous, for Israel.”
Likewise, Ganor is worried by Islamic State activity in Gaza: “Hamas is grasping the tiger by the tail there with ISIS, just as [PLO founder Yasser] Arafat did two decades ago with Hamas itself. Back then, Arafat deluded himself about his ability to quell the flames, but Hamas flung him off, at least in Gaza. I believe that if Hamas in Gaza keeps fooling itself that it can keep hold of the tiger and keep things in check, in another decade or even less it could find itself challenged [like Arafat was] by the Islamic State.”
Relatively few public expressions of support for the group — mostly flags and signs — have been noted in the Shuafat refugee camp north of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and the Old City in the past few years. An Islamic State flag was also raised over a mosque in Umm el-Fahm. Dozens of flags were found in a dump near Nazareth and at a soccer pitch in Daliyat al-Carmel. In October last year, graffiti reading “Islamic State” was discovered at a memorial to the Druze soldiers who have fallen in Israel’s wars.
Sources in the Shin Bet say that “most of the [Arab Israelis] leaving for Syria have a Salafist-jihadist background. Some are students who while studying in Jordan or Europe were exposed to the jihadist ideology and contacts in the international jihad groups operating in Syria.”
Experts from the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center say that “the phenomenon of Arab Israelis leaving for Syria and Iraq and joining ISIS and other organizations is limited, and thus far no established, directed organization by ISIS operatives has been identified.”
However, the center’s experts emphasize that “the phenomenon is in the process of expanding and features potential security dangers.”
This week, it was reported that seven Islamic State supporters from Jaljulia had been arrested, and that one of them had even crossed the Syrian border using a paraglider.
Fashion and frustration
Rafi Green, head of the jihad and terrorism threat monitor at the Middle East Media Research Institute, says, “The issue of Palestine doesn’t occupy a big place in Islamic State’s worldview. Unlike many Arab and Islamic movements and organizations, which put the liberation of Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al-Aqsa mosque and the war on Israel at the top of their agendas — at least in words — Islamic State sees those goals as something for the long term. The top item on its agenda is those who are seen as internal enemies of Islam, Shiites and secular regimes. The way they see it, occupying Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Mecca takes priority over liberating Jerusalem.”
According to Green, “The very idea of a Palestinian state is completely anathema to the religious and ideological tenets of Islamic State, whose vision is based on establishing a caliphate that is not subject to the limitations of modern geopolitics and under which there is no room for visions of separate states.”
Green qualifies that by saying that “Islamic State isn’t ignoring the Palestinian issue. It recognizes its importance to the Arab and Islamic world and uses it — like other regimes, organizations, and movements — as a PR tool and a method of enlisting supporters.”
And how is its activity perceived among the Arabs of Israel? Fadi Mansour, a social activist from Tira who manages a website for news and popular content called el-Tira, stresses that the matter is a marginal one.
“ISIS desecrates the name of Islam. There is no such thing in Islam as killing innocent people. The number of our young people who are drawn into that because of the nonsense they are fed on the Internet and on social media isn’t high,” Mansour says.
Mansour is critical of what he calls the “too lenient punishment” Israeli courts mete out to people who joined the group.
“They sit in prison for a year or two and then get released. Even if they express remorse — and many have — it’s not enough of a deterrent. I don’t want to wake up one morning to sights like Paris,” he says.
Is the Arab public in Israel as repulsed by the terrorist attacks Palestinians commit against Jews as it is by the attacks Islamic State carries out? Are the shock and fury the same in the case of Yaakov and Netanel Litman, who were murdered last Friday mere hours before the Paris bloodbath?
Mansour admits that “there is a distinction. While the Arab public in Israel does not support terrorist attacks against Jews — there are other ways to express the struggle against occupation, to oppression and discrimination — when it comes to emotions, there’s no doubt that some of our sector accepts terrorist attacks as part of the Palestinian story with more admiration and understanding than the attacks by ISIS, which are often nauseating and are portrayed as killing for the sake of killing. As far as I’m concerned, morally, they are obviously all unacceptable.”
Are you aware of stories about young people who joined, tried to join, or admire ISIS?
Mansour: I know of one who is still on the Turkish-Syrian border and trying to bring Arab Israelis into the group. His parents were already questioned. I personally have taken a stand against this phenomenon and condemned it. I was threatened, but I’m not upset about it. It didn’t put me off.”
Mahmoud Aasi, mayor of the town of Kafr Bara, speaks in a similar vein. Aasi says that “ISIS sullies and stains the name of Islam. From time to time I hear about cases like these. I heard about a guy from Jaljulia and one from Taybe who joined ISIS. The sights and the content these young people are exposed to on social media are frightening. They see people’s heads being cut off and terrible zealotry against women. It’s presented to them as an appropriate response to the monster of occupation and evil or against permissiveness. A few, and still too many, fall into that trap, unfortunately.
“Mostly, we’re talking about young people with personal frustrations, usually people who didn’t find a place in society, who carry all sorts of personal or family problems or problems with their surroundings, and then it’s like they’re in a position where they have nothing to lose.”
How Hezbollah comes into play
Ganor has found that Islamic State, like Coca Cola in a much different context, has cracked the youth code: “They present themselves as the real thing, and the process is that for one reason or another the older organization, the mother organization [al-Qaida] is seen as too moderate, as inauthentic or not extreme enough, so some people set up another organization. That’s the fashion of terrorism.”
Ganor says that “ISIS, in many ways, is the new fashion, so to a certain degree it’s the popular organization in all the young Islamist sectors throughout the world and, marginally, among young Arab Israelis. For most of them, it still hasn’t crossed the line from being willing to actually going and doing anything.”
Nuriel observes that the phenomenon, dangerous in itself, has lately created two other dangers.
“One is the fear that the world will get confused, that in light of the fact that ISIS attacked Hezbollah and the fact that [Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah condemned the Paris attack and is even fighting ISIS head on; the world might think that Hezbollah has changed its ways and become a global charity group,” he says.
“Israel must explain to the world that Nasrallah is acting out of organizational and personal interests, not on behalf of the West. If [the West] thinks otherwise, it’s very dangerous.”
The second danger relates to the issue of Turkey. Nuriel thinks that the world is already mixed up on Turkey: “If they check the facts of what Turkey is doing and what it’s not doing in the war on ISIS, they will discover that [Turkey] is mostly impeding the global effort and not really supporting it or facilitating it.”
Nuriel points to Eilat as a target eyed by Islamic State in Sinai and suggests putting more attention into preventing shootings or dangerous surprise infiltrations past Israel’s southernmost city.
Either way, in the meantime, Islamic State has launched a campaign encouraging Palestinians to execute lone-wolf terrorist attacks. Clips produced and published by various parts of the organization send messages of unqualified support for “Mujahideen Bait al-Maqdis”(Jerusalem, a symbolic reference to all of Palestine) and spurs them on to continue killing and slaughtering Jews as individual operatives using “any means at hand — stabbing, [car] ramming, car bombs, rock throwing, pipe bombs, poisoning, and more.”
The clips include sharp criticism of Palestinian organizations who make what Islamic State calls a pretense of protecting Islam, first and foremost Hamas. According to the group, Fatah has become an agent of the Jews, while Hamas has become the errand boy of the Shiites (Iran) and the Alawites (the Syrian regime). Islamic State promises that “soldiers of the Islamic caliphate will one day reach Jerusalem and liberate Al-Aqsa mosque, even though today they are busy in Syria and Iraq.”
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