Ayoob Kara, a deputy Israeli cabinet minister, used to double as an unofficial intermediary with the few of his fellow Arab citizens who have left to join Islamic State insurgents in Syria or Iraq. Negotiating discreetly through relatives and go-betweens, he would offer them reduced jail terms if they returned to Israel, cooperated with security services and helped deter other would-be Islamic State recruits by publicly disavowing the group. A half-dozen volunteers took the deal, Kara says. But with the number of Islamic State sympathizers in Israel growing from its initial trickle, and some accused of trying to set up armed cells within the country’s 18-percent Muslim minority, the deputy minister no longer sounds so accommodating. “I used to work hard to dissuade people from joining ISIS, but now I say that there’s no point,” he told Reuters in an interview, using an acronym for the insurgents. “If, by this point, when the dangers are abundantly clear to everyone, they still want to go, then they are beyond saving and it’s a one-way ticket for them. It’s literally a dead end.” Kara, a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was expressing a hardening of government policy against Islamic State, which,