Middle East Eye: How does Zionism fuel a religious war on Al-Aqsa Mosque?

by the British "Middle East Eye" website

reviewed the ongoing attempts to control Islamic sanctities, whether in Jerusalem, Hebron or Nablus, describing them as continuing in full swing, noting that the "valiant" Palestinian resistance continues against it as well.

The author of the article, Joseph Massad, professor of Arab political and cultural history at Columbia University, said that the Israelis were besieging their Arab leaders' supporters last month, whether the Jordanian government to pressure the Palestinian Authority to suppress any possible uprising in the current month of Ramadan, or the Egyptian government to warn Hamas From dealing with Israel as it oppresses the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the next two weeks may witness the failure of such schemes.

Massad stressed that Palestinian resistance and uprisings against Israeli settler colonialism began since the first arrival of Jewish colonists in the 1880s, adding that Israel can invite any Arab leaders it wants to help them suppress the Palestinian protest, but there is no reason to believe that the Palestinians will stop resistance as long as colonization Zionist settlers.

religious prohibition

Massad reviewed the Israeli attempts to control Palestinian holy sites, saying that after the Israelis occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli Defense Minister at the time, Moshe Dayan, decided to allow the Palestinian endowments, which turned into Jordanian ones, and which had always managed the Haram al-Sharif, or what the Jews call the “Temple Mount.” to continue managing it.

The chief Ashkenazi and Sephardic rabbis in Israel, along with hundreds of other rabbis, issued a halakhic ruling, that is, a Jewish legal ruling, preventing Jews from entering the area, as well as praying there, because of the “impurity” of all Jews after the demolition of the “Second Temple.”

Even fundamentalist rabbis, followers of the fanatic Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, many of whom became religious settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem after 1967, accepted the religious ban.

However, some non-religious extremist Zionist groups, especially those associated with the pre-state "Lehi" terrorist group, argued that the rabbis were wrong and that Jews should build a synagogue there.

In 1969, an Australian Christian extremist set fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and was arrested by the Israelis, claiming that he suffers from mental illness, and he was deported years later.

Shlomo Goren

However, it will be Shlomo Goren, the IDF rabbi - who will become the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel in 1973 - with the greatest influence on this issue.

Goren argued that Jews could visit and pray in the areas of the ancient temple that had been expanded at the end of the Second Temple period, and that this would not be a violation of halakhah (law).

He said there was evidence that the Jews built a permanent prayer site on the "mountain" until the 16th century, a claim that historians dispute.

In his zeal to allow Jews access to Islamic shrines, Goren claimed that the Western Wall (Al-Buraq Wall) was not a Jewish site of prayer until the 17th century due to Ottoman restrictions on Jewish worship elsewhere in the Haram al-Sharif area.

Access to Islamic shrines

In 1994 Goren wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that "we cannot claim rights to the Western Wall," and that Jews should be allowed to pray throughout the Temple Mount area.

Senior rabbis in Israel began in the eighties of the last century to find the idea partially acceptable, and its Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis suggested building a synagogue in the southeastern corner of the area, behind Al-Aqsa Mosque, that is, outside the Haram area, despite the insistence of a Sephardic rabbi that the synagogue should be higher than the mosque.

In fact, the Al-Buraq Wall itself, as well as the Haram al-Sharif, did not have central religious importance as a site of prayer for Jews before the advent of Zionism.

While Palestinian Jews were allowed to pray there in the Ottoman era, it was Zionist colonizers and extremists who began demanding the wall, which caused a number of violent confrontations with Palestinian Muslims in the 1920s, culminating in the violence of 1929 that swept the entire country. The Palestinians called the "Al-Buraq Revolution" in which more than 200 Jews and Palestinians were killed.

In 1986, 70 rabbis, called by Goren, issued a new injunction allowing Jews "to enter and pray in most of the area of ​​the Temple Mount," and that a synagogue could indeed be built there.

By 1990, Rabbi Lubavicher Menachem Schneerson ordered his followers to hold ceremonies at the Temple Mount, meanwhile, the Temple Mount Faithful, founded in 1967 under the leadership of Gershon Salomon, was planning to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the “Third Temple” on the grounds of the Haram al-Sharif.

Salomon is an Israeli nationalist and was not religious at the time, although he appears to have become so by the mid-1990s, as evidenced by the growing nationalist religious literature of his movement and its financial ties to Christian fundamentalist groups.

The Palestinians demonstrated against the plans of the "believers in the Temple Mount." Israeli forces killed more than 20 Palestinian protesters and wounded more than 150. This led to the issuance of two United Nations resolutions condemning the Israeli government's use of force and its refusal to allow the Secretary-General of the United Nations to visit the Haram al-Sharif.

The writer says, "Suffice it to say that the massacre and the ensuing international outcry aborted Rabbi Schneerson's plans."

Oslo factor

And there was a more extremist Zionist group demanding the alleged Jewish "right" to occupy and pray in the Haram al-Sharif, the "Hai Vikayam" movement led by Yehuda Etzion, whose father was a member of the "Lehi" terrorist group.

Etzion spent 7 years in Israeli prisons for membership in a Jewish terrorist organization in the 1980s that sought to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

Etzion and his group insisted on praying on the Temple Mount, which forced the Israeli police to deport them, leading to increased support for the movement in Israel's colonial Jewish community, whether religious or secular.

Other groups making similar claims include "Yamin Israel", "Kach", "Khana Hai", "Temple Institute", "Temple Creation Movement", "Ateret Cohanim" and others.

Many of these groups were mobilized after the Oslo Accords for fear of giving the Palestinian Authority authority over the Temple Mount, especially after the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace accords requiring Israel to respect Jordan's "special role" at the Muslim shrines in Jerusalem.

Yesha rabbis

In February 1997 the Yesha Committee of Rabbis, a central component of the colonial and national-religious Zionist movement, passed a ruling allowing rabbis who believe Jews should pray on the Temple Mount to do so.

Meanwhile, several Supreme Court justices and politicians began calling on the government and the Chief Rabbinate to lift the ban on Jewish prayers on the Temple Mount, culminating in a visit by Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif in September 2000 with riot police Israeli.

This was followed by Palestinian protests, in which 4 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Sharon's visit ignited the second Palestinian intifada. The following week, Israel killed 70 Palestinians, and Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel after 5 months.

persistence of resistance

Before 2003, the Israeli government began allowing no more than 3 religious Jews to visit the compound at one time, but since then it has steadily increased this number to more than 50, and it does so without the approval of the Islamic Waqf authorities.

By 2009, after making racist remarks about Palestinians, the Israeli Minister of Internal Security, Yitzhak Aharonvich, of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, made another visit to the campus, and Zionist provocations and desecration continued. In September 2015, the Israeli government prevented Palestinians from entering the compound to allow Jews to go to pray there.

A Palestinian uprising broke out during which the Israeli police shot dozens of Palestinians.

While the Israeli government banned Knesset members from visiting the compound after the intifada, Benjamin Netanyahu lifted the ban in 2018.

In fact, the issue of allowing Jews to enter the Haram al-Sharif, let alone pray there, remains a major point of contention in Jewish religious circles in Israel, to the extent that Netanyahu struck a deal last year with a conservative rabbi and head of a political party to temporarily ban Jews from Entering the Temple Mount in exchange for joining his coalition government.

The continuous Palestinian resistance against Israeli colonialism in the past few weeks, whether in Israel or in the West Bank and Gaza, reached its climax, with Israel killing Palestinians throughout the West Bank, especially in Jenin.

While the Palestinians realize that settler colonialism has targeted and continues to target the entire land of the Palestinians, the continuous attempts to control the holy sites of Palestinian Muslims, whether in Jerusalem, Hebron, or the shrine of Yusef Al-Dweik (a local saint in Nablus) or what fanatical Zionists claim is the "Joseph's Tomb". Biblical, continuing in full swing.