OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)
The Israeli National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced on Wednesday that he will change the “de facto situation” at the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and allow Jews to pray there. Ben-Gvir said during a conference on the return of Israel to the Temple Mount (Al-Aqsa Mosque) held in the Israeli Knesset, “I was at the Haram (Al-Aqsa Mosque) last week. We prayed there, and I, as the political level (in Israel), the political level allows Jews to pray in the Haram.”
A declaration of religious war on Islam
Dr. Abdullah Ma’ruf, a professor of Jerusalem studies, saw in his initial reading of these statements that “Itamar Ben-Gvir is declaring his coup against the ruling of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel and everything, and is declaring a change in the de facto situation at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Ma’ruf said, “This madman is thereby declaring a religious war on Islam and all Muslims.”
A recipe for shedding blood
The Islamic Jihad movement, in its turn, condemned the statements of Ben-Gvir, in which he called for intensifying the storming of the courtyards of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and considering it a Jewish synagogue for prayer at all times.
Islamic Jihad warned that Ben-Gvir’s statements are a recipe for shedding blood through desecrating the sanctities, through which he seeks to create an environment for a process of ethnic cleansing that he has well prepared for by arming the settlers.
Islamic Jihad held the “Israeli entity with all its apparatuses, sponsors and supporters fully responsible for the behavior of the entity’s government, foremost of which is this criminal (Ben-Gvir) and his statements.”
The moral foundation of the Temple
The researcher specializing in Jerusalem affairs, Ziad Abhis, said that Ben-Gvir continues to implement the election manifesto that brought him to his position: “imposing religious replacement in Al-Aqsa and changing its identity from an Islamic holy site to a Jewish one, passing through a stage of division that we are living through today.”
Abhis underlined that Ben-Gvir crowned his trajectory by the explicit expression of this political agenda, saying, “I am the political level, and the political level allows Jews to pray in the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Abhis stressed that what the religious Zionism to which Ben-Gvir belongs, and the Temple groups that form the front of this current for the aggression against Al-Aqsa, is seeking to proceed with the moral foundation of the Temple, that is, to fully impose the Talmudic rituals in the Al-Aqsa Mosque to make it a temple in terms of practice and worship, perhaps this would form an entry point for its material foundation, and this phased plan to change the identity of the Mosque entered into implementation in August 2019, after the attempts to spatially divide Al-Aqsa were severely struck in Bab Al-Rahma uprising at the beginning of that year, as it foiled the attempt to nibble away at the Bab Al-Rahma and its surroundings in the eastern courtyard of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the part that the Zionists were aspiring to turn into an area designated for Jews after two decades of imposing successive facts on the ground, prompting them to invent an alternative phased plan.
The researcher pointed out that this moral establishment of the structure by imposing Talmudic rituals was the main title of the aggression against the Al-Aqsa Mosque when the Al-Aqsa flood and the subsequent war erupted, and it was the spearhead of the project of the complete liquidation of the Palestinian cause, by ending the right of return and dropping any form of political representation of Palestine as a people and a political issue, and resolving the fate of Jerusalem based on resolving the fate of the sacred shrine; for the logic of religious Zionism here is that if the resolution is possible in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it will certainly be possible in everything below it, on the basis that the sacred shrine is the most difficult point of resolution.
Abhis said that what the Al-Aqsa flood battle was able to impose is to overturn the proposition: that the resolution in Al-Aqsa is impossible and therefore the entire project of resolution in Palestine is impossible, to practically transform the extremism of religious Zionism and its loud voice from a danger to a complex of impossibility, and to transform this loud voice into a complex that shakes the confidence of the Zionist project in its future on the land of Palestine: if the resolution in Al-Aqsa is impossible, is the resolution possible in any other space?
The researcher specialized in Jerusalem affairs concluded by saying, “In summary, Ben-Gvir’s statements today are an official declaration of a policy that has been in the forefront for five years, working to impose Talmudic rituals in the Al-Aqsa Mosque as a colonial tool to change its identity and impose religious substitution in it, considering it as the gateway to the project of resolving the Palestine issue. Al-Aqsa Flood should thus serve as the strategic line that must be built upon in the conflict to enshrine what the resistance had begun to impose and delineate through successive confrontations: that Al-Aqsa is the title of the demise and the dissipation of the Zionist dream.”
The resistance will respond
The leader in the Hamas Movement, Abdul Hakim Hanini, affirmed that the operations carried out by the Al-Qassam Brigades in the Tulkarem governorate in the northern West Bank were “the best response to the occupation’s crimes against the people of the Gaza Strip and the settlers’ attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”
Hanini explained in a press statement, “The resistance operations in the West Bank are a natural response to the aggression of the occupation army and its crimes against the elderly, children and women in Gaza, and what it is doing in the cities and camps of the West Bank.”
He stressed that the resistance will respond to the aggressor Ben-Gvir’s attacks on Al-Aqsa, and the call he made for performing Talmudic rituals in the Mosque.
Ben Gvir’s delusions will not change the truth
For his part, the deputy head of the Islamic Movement in the 1948 occupied Palestine, Sheikh Kamal Al-Khatib, in response to the statements of Ben-Gvir, regarding allowing Jews to pray throughout the Al-Aqsa Mosque, said, “If it is Ben-Gvir or Netanyahu, or those who preceded them in these positions since eternity and until the Day of Judgment, the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque is a pure mosque for Muslims and Muslims alone, and no one else has the right, even the weight of a single grain of sand in it.”
Al-Khatib added in press statements, “Ben-Gvir’s words and his delusions will not change this fact or these convictions, but it seems that Ben-Gvir’s feeling of arrogance of office made him go far in his illusions and dreams. The Al-Aqsa Mosque will never be a temple or a synagogue, and the days to come will show us who is the only rightful owner of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
He concluded by calling on the Palestinian people never to abandon the holy Islamic site and to maintain intensified presence in it, adding that defending the Al-Aqsa Mosque is a blessing and an honor bestowed on them by Allah “so do not waste it”.
