Will the far-right control Israel's official rabbinate?

Although Israel was founded in 1948 by a group considered generally secular and non-religious, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was keen at the time to recognize the Jewish Chief Rabbinate, which had existed since Ottoman times, as a religious reference for Western (Ashkenazi) and Sephardic (Sephardic) Jews.

Ben-Gurion considered that the existence of an official rabbinate of the state is an important issue to prove the religious identity of the state, although he was known to be a secular non-religious, and thus recognized the status quo of the Chief Rabbinate, and fixed the official form of the Chief Rabbinate to consist of two rabbis: one representing the Western Ashkenazi current, and the second representing the Eastern Sephardic current, so that the Chief Rabbi is elected once every 10 years, the last of which was in 2013, when Rabbi David Lau was elected for the Ashkenazi section, and Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef for the Sephardic section.

Although the majority of the Israeli population generally does not identify itself as religious, the influence of the Chief Rabbinate is evident in the social and daily life of the state, as the Chief Rabbinate decides the religious provisions regarding food certificates, working days and religious holidays that the Israeli government adheres to, the admission of converts to Judaism and other provisions.

The Israeli extreme right is no longer just dreamers, but an institution that aspires to implement a major project of a religious nature and has a specific vision that it wants to implement regardless of the obstacles.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of the role of the Chief Rabbinate of the occupying Power with regard to the city of Jerusalem and its holy places is its adherence to the traditional rule of Eastern and Western religious authorities throughout history by issuing fatwas prohibiting the entry of Jews into the walls of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, given the religious consideration of the absence of purity according to the religious vision of rabbinic authorities in the world.

Since the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the Chief Rabbinate of the state ruled that Jews should not enter the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, which played a major role in returning the keys to the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the Islamic endowments, with the exception of the Al-Maghariba Gate, (in addition to the fear of the global and Islamic reaction to any change in Al-Aqsa Mosque, of course). At that time, a dispute arose over the issue of entering the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque between the traditional religious current, represented by the state's official rabbinate, and the religious Zionist current, which represented the extreme right, which at that time consisted of a limited number of extremists, headed by Gershon Salmon, Rabbi Meir Kahane and others.

The secular Israeli government stood neutral in this dispute, primarily for political considerations and for fear that it would be counted on one of the two camps, albeit closer to the official rabbinical establishment. Therefore, the Israeli Minister of Defense at the time, Moshe Dayan, a secular and non-religious, worked to control the keys to the Mughrabi Gate and open it to Jews who wished to enter Al-Aqsa Mosque under the pretext of tourist visits, not prayers, while at the same time installing signs by order of the Chief Executive Rabbinate outside the Mughrabi Gate and the Chain Gate that clearly stated in Hebrew and English that entry to this area was forbidden by virtue of the Chief Rabbinate of the state.

Based on this reality, far-right groups, or the religious Zionist current previously represented by Gershon Salmon and Kahane, were formed and announced their departure from the fatwas of the Chief Rabbinate regarding the issue of entry to the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.

This current became more and more confined to West Bank settlers in the subsequent years, reaching the peak of its separation from the traditional official rabbinate in the nineties of the last century, when a number of rabbis of West Bank settlements met and formed a higher religious council called the "New Sanhedrin Council", to consider itself the religious reference for the religious Zionist movement, and begin to deal with the issue of holy places with fatwas completely different from the traditional official rabbinate's vision of the state.

Last year, they even removed the fatwa board banning entry to Al-Aqsa from the Bab al-Maghariba area, and the area remained empty of the painting until the Chief Rabbinate ordered the reinstallation of a new plaque in the place. At that time, it was noted that the Israeli police, a good number of whose members and leaders became followers of religious Zionism, reinstalled the sign, but placed it after the last checkpoint before entering the door, meaning that its presence was no longer a deterrent to settlers who wanted to enter Al-Aqsa Mosque.

This hidden conflict between the two religious authorities, the traditional official rabbinical authority and the settlers' authority and the religious Zionist current, has finally moved to a new level. Late 2023 will see the election of the Chief Rabbi of Ashkenazim and Sephardim in the state chief rabbinate, who will be elected at the end of the Hebrew year before mid-September.

For the first time, we may witness the rise of figures who tend in some of their ideas to adopt a tolerant pattern with some of the ideas of religious Zionism to the Rabbinate race, and this may be an entry point for the shift of opinion of the Chief Rabbinate in the coming period if one of these figures succeeds. In this regard, Rabbi Yehuda Hayek, a resident of the settlement of Katzrin in the occupied Golan Heights, is a candidate for the post of Chief Rabbi.

The rabbi recently received media support for his candidacy from extremist journalist Arnon Segal, a member of the board of directors of the Federation of Synagogue Organizations, although he did not deviate in principle from the current Chief Rabbinate's view that Jews should not enter the area of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. This support from Segal is due to Rabbi Hayek's call to discuss how to allow and how to slaughter animal offerings inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which the extremist temple groups consider the culmination of the rituals they try to carry out annually inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque and have failed to do so far.

In a book he recently published, Rabbi Hayek takes a neutral stance on the fatwa banning Jews from entering Al-Aqsa, declaring that he cannot say that the ban is completely forbidden or completely permitted, but rather comments on an important reason that he puts forward in his religious writings, which is the fear of the reaction of Muslims (whom he calls Ismailis) in Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the fear of disturbances inside this holy place that may lead to the occupation police being "forced" to enter the most sacred area in his view, which is the courtyard The honorable rock, which is forbidden by the texts of Jewish law, according to Rabbi Hayek.

What bases Rabbi Hayek's views and support for him from the radical temple groups, which are the spearhead of religious Zionism in Jerusalem, portends shifts that could affect the head of Israel's chief rabbinate. After the extremist religious Zionist current managed to control the most important joints of the Israeli government, with this nomination and support, it began to aspire to control the state's religious establishment, and the assumption of a rabbi who has been open to discussing the long-established fatwas of rabbis over many centuries regarding the subject of Al-Aqsa Mosque indicates the possibility of opening the way for the Chief Rabbinate of the occupying power to change its fatwa prohibiting the entry of Jews to Al-Aqsa Mosque in the future, and perhaps later adopt the fatwas of the rabbis of settlements.

This necessarily means that the moral strength of these extremist religious groups will double on the ground, for despite all the attempts of religious Zionism currently, the official fatwa of the state's traditional rabbinate is still considered a major obstacle to it that prevents it from increasing its power and mobilizing more supporters and sympathizers with its vision regarding the holy places. But the bias of an official institution the size of the Chief Rabbinate towards this trend necessarily means a radical change in the perception of about half of Israeli society about the nature of the conflict in Jerusalem and its religious dimensions.

Monitoring the modus operandi of this far-right movement in recent years indicates that it has matured to a large extent in its tools and mechanisms of implementation of its vision and its quest to tighten control over all decision-making tools and institutions in Israel.

After controlling central ministries in the Israeli government, this movement recently established a lobby within the Israeli Knesset called the "Jewish Freedom Lobby on the Temple Mount" to turn its vision into laws, and now it is reaching out to the most established institution in the religious currents in Israel of all orientations, the Chief Rabbinate, which is still considered today an extension of the traditional views of Jewish religious authorities throughout the ages.

We should not be surprised that these groups seek to control this major institution and change their views and orientations, as the traditional rabbinical establishment has already changed its vision regarding the establishment of Israel starting from the beginning of the last century after it had forbidden the establishment of a state for the Jews for hundreds of years, and nothing in fact can prevent changing its vision again regarding an issue of the size and seriousness of controlling Al-Aqsa Mosque according to the vision of the extreme right in Israel. The extremist Israeli is no longer just dreamers, but has become an institution that aspires to implement a large project of a religious nature and has a specific vision that it wants to implement regardless of obstacles, and this reminds us of the pioneers of the Zionist movement who had Israel just an idea, and the happy one who learned from history.