In a historic first, Israel has blocked the appointment of multiple judges (qadis) to the nation’s Sharia courts, citing evidence of links with the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, an Islamist organization linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal counterterrorism, security, and intelligence agency, sent the committee selecting the judges a security assessment of the candidates before the vote on their appointment, leading to the exclusion of several candidates, the IsraJ news outlet reported on July 30.
Democratic countries are digging their own graves, and Israel is no exception.
The selection committee includes representatives from the Sharia courts, the Bar Association, and members of Knesset Ahmad Tibi, Mansour Abbas, and Yinon Azoulay. While Tibi and Abbas are Muslims, Azoulay is an ultra-Orthodox Jew.
Until now, security screenings by the Shin Bet were conducted on judges after their selection, especially in cases where they would handle classified information about the candidates.
However, Orit Strock, minister of Settlements and National Missions and Dudi Amsalem, regional cooperation minister, both of whom are members of the selection committee, ordered a verification to ascertain if certain candidates had ties to terrorist organizations. The committee decided to exclude several candidates after Shin Bet’s detailed report linking the potential appointees to the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement.
IsraJ reported that several red flags surfaced during the candidates’ interviews. Strock revealed that she had discovered problematic social media posts from a candidate, who later withdrew her candidacy. Another candidate was rejected after listing Hussein al-Tartouri, a former minister in the Hamas government led by Ismail Haniyeh in 2007, as his supporter.
Israel Outlaws Separatist Islamist Organization
“The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement denies Israel’s right to exist, calls for replacing the State of Israel with an Islamic caliphate and does not recognize governmental institutions,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes.
In 2015, Israel outlawed the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, headed by Sheikh Raad Salah, declaring that the group “denies Israel’s right to exist, calls for replacing the State of Israel with an Islamic caliphate and does not recognize governmental institutions.”
Israel’s Security Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, noted that the organization had led a “mendacious campaign of incitement” claiming that the Al Aqsa Mosque is in danger and falsely accusing Israel of planning to harm Al Aqsa and violate the status quo.
It warned that the Northern Branch is a sister movement of Hamas, a “separatist-racist” movement within radical Islam, and part of the global Muslim Brotherhood.
Michael Milshtein from Reichman University’s Institute for Policy and Strategy warned that Salah adheres to the doctrine of the “oppositional society” (al-Mujtama al-`Issami), encouraging Arab Muslims to separate themselves from the ruling establishment and Jewish society, while objecting to integration into official capacities. He also noted that the Northern Branch is also politically and economically supported by Turkey and Qatar.
“We have never allowed ourselves to knead the blood of children into the bread of the meal breaking the fast of the blessed month of Ramadan,” Salah remarked in one of his many antisemitic statements. “Whoever needs more explanation should ask what happened to some of the children in Europe, whose blood was mixed into the dough of the sacred bread (matza).”
In November 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was working to complete the ban on what remains of the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel, warning that it is “an organization that threatens stability throughout the Middle East and beyond.”
Israeli Expert on Islamism Explains Sharia’s Challenge to the Jewish State
“Democratic countries are digging their own graves, and Israel is no exception. Despite the false and propagandistic narrative that circulates throughout the world, Israel strives to preserve itself as a democratic country where there is room for all minorities. In my view, this is a mistake,” Yana Grinshpun, senior lecturer at the Sorbonne University and author of The Making of Contemporary Propaganda Discourse: How and Why Does It Work?, told Focus on Western Islamism.
The multi-legal system of family law in Israel formally acknowledges fourteen religious groups, including Jews, Muslims, Druze, Baha’i, and ten Christian denominations. Every recognized faith group has its own state-authorized courts and enforceable religious statutes. The judges are appointed and paid for by the State of Israel, integrated into the Israeli judicial system, and subject to the supervision of higher courts.
When Israel was established in 1948, Sharia courts came under the Ministry of Religious Affairs until they were transferred to the purview of the Ministry of Justice in 2001.
“Many people are indeed surprised to discover that Sharia courts exist in Israel. Yet this is neither a recent concession to Islam nor a parallel judicial system. These courts are the legacy of Ottoman law, maintained under the British Mandate and preserved by Israel in 1948 as part of the ‘status quo’ regarding religious matters,” Grinshpun, a researcher for the Transatlantic Institute for the Study of Contemporary Ideologies (TISCI), explained.
“However, at a time when Arab-Muslim terrorism is affecting the entire world, and when, according to military experts, the next October 7-style attack is more likely to come not from Gaza but from Judea and Samaria, with the support of radicalized Muslims inside Israel, granting such authority to Muslim courts may prove to be a dangerous concession from a security perspective,” Grinshpun, a French-Israeli academic, emphasized.
The expert on Islamist terrorism explained that the move to exclude judges linked to radical groups came “after Israel discovered, since 2023, the extent to which some Arab citizens holding Israeli passports had passed information to Hamas, supported October 7 on social networks, and, in certain cases, provided active support to Hamas.”
“Researchers can only be astonished by such imprudence and by the apparent lack of understanding of how networks connected to the Muslim Brotherhood operate (especially in Israel), which represents one of the movement’s central targets for destruction,” she added.
Sharia Courts Beneficial to Israel
Defenders of Israel’s Sharia court system note that the country is home to roughly 1.7 million Muslims and that these courts fill a practical and political role that cannot easily be replaced. They handle only personal-status matters—marriage, divorce, inheritance—under Islamic law, operate inside the state’s legal framework, and remain fully subordinate to the Supreme Court, which can review their rulings on procedural or legal grounds. In sum, the Sharia courts are subject to the sovereign review of a non-Muslim state, as the ban on Muslim Brotherhood members serving on the bench demonstrates.
A. J. Nolte, Regent University professor and director of its Institute for Israel Studies told FWI, “Israel has no civil courts for personal status law for anyone, including Jews. So politically, the Shari’a courts are necessary because getting rid of them would create a civil court system that immediately alienates the ultra-orthodox monopoly on Jewish civil law. So the biggest defenders of preserving Shari’a courts are going to be ultra-orthodox Jews.” Secular nationalists might try to exploit the issue as a wedge against Orthodox control of Jewish family law, but A.J. stresses that the debate is driven more by Israel’s internal culture war than by Islamism.
Nolte draws a sharp distinction between this limited, depoliticized use of Sharia for family matters and “Shari’a supremacism,” in which Islamist movements seek to make Islamic law the primary source of all legislation. The latter is not occurring in Israel. A family-law system confined to personal status, he argues, “isn’t a threat to the Jewish nature of the state (and if you ask orthodox Jews in Israel, in fact, it’s helping preserve it politically).”
He concludes: “I think Israel is absolutely doing the right thing by banning Muslim Brotherhood judges from their courts. Keep those with hostile ideologies from holding public trust in Israel’s Muslim community. But there are some very good reasons for Israel, specifically, not to tackle unraveling Ottoman religious regulations right now.”
