Politics and Government
The growing influence of fundamentalist Islam has been noted by several scholars.
In 1999, 500 residents were hurt in riots protesting government expropriation of lands. In September 2000, rioting at the onset of the Second Intifada left three dead and over 100 wounded. Since the 1990s, the municipality has been run by the Northern Islamic Movement. Ex-mayor Sheikh Raed Salah was arrested in 2003 on charges of raising millions of dollars for Hamas. He was freed after two years in prison. Sheikh Hashem Abd al-Rahman was elected mayor in 2007, and replaced in November 2008 by Khaled Aghbariyya.
In a survey of Umm al-Fahm residents conducted by and published in the Israeli-Arab weekly Kul Al-Arab in July 2000, 83% of respondents opposed the idea of transferring their city to Palestinian jurisdiction.
Read more about this topic: Umm Al-Fahm
Famous quotes containing the words politics and/or government:
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)