Despite the intense media discourse surrounding the Ra’am party, which made it possible for the Lapid-Bennett coalition government to rule until it didn’t, there are few references to the charter of the Islamist movement in Israel, which is the foundation of Ra’am, religiously and politically.
According to Hakol Kayehudi, Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas in 2017 led the writing of the Islamic Movement’s Charter, a comprehensive and orderly document detailing the vision, objectives, strategy, and methods of operation of the Islamic movement, based on Islamic sources and the worldview of Abdullah Nimar Darwish, the founder of the Islamic movement in Israel.
By the way, Darwish was born in 1948, the year of the “Nakba,” and died on May 14, 2017, a day short of that year’s Nakba day. When you do research, weird stuff comes up.
The Israeli Islamist movement was founded in 1971, and in 1996 it split into two factions: the extremist northern faction and the more moderate southern faction. Here’s how the two differ:
The northern faction does not recognize the State of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and advocates replacing it with a Muslim state, but is willing to use it for immediate needs.
The southern faction also does not recognize the State of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and would rather have an Islamic state in its place, but is willing to participate in the government and influence decisions from the inside.
So, on paper, the extremist and moderate factions want the same things. However, the northern faction is unabashed about how much it hates Israel and the Jews and won’t let its members run to the Knesset or vote in the national elections, for which it has been punished by being banned. Meanwhile, the southern faction found a way to print money by encouraging its political party, Ra’am, to be in the Knesset and even in the coalition government.
How is it conceivable that the 73-page Islamic Movement Charter, which lists a fairly nightmarish agenda regarding the future of Israel, has been kept hidden from Israelis, asks Hakol Hayehudi. It turns out that Mansour Abbas is making an effort to hide the charter from the Jewish media in Israel, including its references to the Jewish state as racist and colonialist, and supporting the right of return for the hordes of five million people outside Israel and the liberated territories who call themselves “Palestinians.”
In an interview some two months ago, Mansour Abbas denied the existence of a ratified charter: “There is currently no officially published and approved paper called the Charter of the Islamic Movement,” he said. He then claimed that “when we started writing it, I was not yet a member of the Knesset, I didn’t even think about running for the Knesset. And then, when we started the process, I suggested to the members, let’s stop for a moment and let the process exhaust itself… and therefore there is no treaty.”
But Hakol Hayehudi insists there is such a charter, which was ratified in 2018 by the same convention that elected Abbas to lead Ra’am. And in his speech before that convention, Abbas repeated many times that the charter is the source of his authority. He continued to refer to the charter in his speeches in Arabic while denying its existence in his Hebrew-language messages.
In addition to the details we listed above, the charter opposes the IDF draft for Arabs, and demands the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. It declares that any appeal of the Arab citizens of Israel to the state is done by virtue of “our historical and natural right to Palestine since we are the owners of the land and the people of the land.”
Finally, the treaty offers Israel three options: either you will allow the Palestinians to establish a state in addition to the right of return for all refugees and displaced persons, or there will be a binational state here. And if not, it threatens, “Just as Allah brought you here as a multitude, so will you come to him, in tight chains.”
