Ziad Ibhais |

Since 2019, the occupation has been working to dedicate the Hebrew “Festival of Lights” as an occasion to declare its “sovereignty” over the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Within the framework of the successive elections coinciding with the preparations for announcing the Deal of the Century, the Zionist War Minister Naftali Bennett stormed it on 12-29-2019 and lit the “Menorah of Lights.” “In it, he pledged to turn the lighting of the menorah into an annual event. This escalation by Naftali Bennett came as part of his bidding against Netanyahu, who had stormed the Ibrahimi Mosque on the biblical “Throtch Day” in September 2019. Netanyahu responded to Bennett’s bidding by again storming the Ibrahimi Mosque in February 2020 as part of his next election campaign.

Naftali Bennett's pledge was fulfilled, in any case, on November 28, 2021, by Isaac Herzog, the head of the Zionist entity affiliated with what is considered the “centrist movement,” who, in cooperation with Bennett, arranged for the entity’s official celebration of this biblical holiday to take place in the Ibrahimi Mosque, and for the president to go. He personally lit the menorah in the Ibrahimi Mosque, pledging to light the “Menorah of Lights” there every year, while extremist temple groups aspire to transfer these rituals to the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque as soon as possible.

This year, it is expected that the ritual of lighting the menorah in the Ibrahimi Mosque will be repeated after sunset on Saturday 12/17 or on Sunday 12/18 if they choose to postpone the official celebration because the first day falls on a Saturday. The first duty today is to meet this intrusion with popular and public objection. So that the Zionists cannot dedicate the Ibrahimi Mosque as the site of the official celebration of this holiday without objection.

As for Al-Aqsa, this biblical holiday carries a different meaning as it recalls the alleged “inauguration of the Second Temple,” and thus brings to mind illusions of the “inauguration of the Third Temple” in the place of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the overall goal that the Zionist right, with its various components, is working to achieve.

The Feast of Lights is one of the holidays that was added to Judaism through historical experience, and it is not one of the authentic biblical holidays. It celebrates a miracle that later books claim occurred with the Hasmonean Judah, “Yehuda Maccabee,” after he defeated the Seleucids and re-established the alleged “Second Temple” after the “Maccabean Revolt.” He found that the “pure oil” bearing the seal of the “High Priest” was only sufficient to illuminate the temple for one day, but a “miracle” occurred and the same oil continued to illuminate the temple for eight consecutive days.

In commemoration of this alleged “miracle,” the Jews light a novena menorah on this holiday. They light a number of candles according to the number of nights of the holiday each night. On the eve of the holiday, they light one, and on the following night, two, and so on until the eighth day of the holiday, when the last candle, the eighth, is lit. The middle ninth is the “auxiliary candle” or “sparking candle” that is used to light the rest every night, and the nights of this Eid this year fall between 12-18-26-2022.

This holiday is accompanied by nightly dances, rejoicing, playing music, and remembering the ecstasy of the “Maccabean victory” over the enemy. The celebrations include cursing the enemies by describing them as “dogs.” Thus, this holiday acquires two complex dimensions: being a display of Jewish national superiority over the enemy, and its connection to Al-Aqsa Mosque, which the Zionist right is targeting today with its agenda. A religious replacement that seeks to remove it from existence and to establish the alleged third temple in its place and over its entire area. To this can be added a third dimension related to the cumulative nature of the emergence of the religious understanding of Judaism. The intersection of this holiday with Christian Christmas pushes Jews around the world and in Palestine to exaggerate its religious importance in order to dedicate it. The idea of a common Christian-Jewish heritage.

Since 2017, extremist temple groups have moved their celebrations of this Hebrew holiday from Al-Buraq Square to Al-Ghazali Square in front of the Lions’ Gate, and have started lighting the menorah adjacent to the Lions’ Gate every night, looking forward to a day soon when they will be able to impose the lighting of the menorah inside Al-Aqsa Mosque in any way. It has become widespread in its nightly dances and celebrations at all doors of the mosque at night, and its members also attempted in 2021 to light a compensatory model of the menorah inside Al-Aqsa, which is expected to be repeated and escalate this year.

This escalation in the aggression against Al-Aqsa this year could exceed all previous limits, benefiting from two important developments in its favor in the past months:

The first is the tactic that the temple groups developed last year by pre-empting every central raid by holding a meeting with the Zionist police leadership at various levels to demand an expansion of the area of aggression by the intruders during the raid. This resulted in greater embrace by the occupation police of them, and turning a blind eye to attacks that it officially declared it rejected, but it You cooperate implicitly in passing it on, like blowing the trumpet at Al-Aqsa and bringing the fruits of the throne to it.

The second is the agreement under which Itamar Ben Gvir will be appointed Minister of “National Security” with expanded powers, at the heart of which is his supervision of the rules for storming the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. He is an organic member of the extremist temple groups, and his wife led the preparatory meeting for the “Hebrew Lights” aggression with the occupation police. Yesterday, Wednesday 11-30-2022, that is, 18 days before the aggression, the temple groups’ announcements of its results indicate unprecedented pledges from the occupation police to increase the number of intruders and the duration of the intrusion and grant freedom of movement and performance of rituals to the intruders throughout the duration of their storming of Al-Aqsa.

in conclusion,

The aggression against Al-Aqsa is escalating and reaching unprecedented levels, with unprecedented official Zionist embrace and adoption, which makes every religious or moral holiday turn into a season of aggression and escalation, and what makes a comprehensive confrontation starting from Al-Aqsa inevitable, while some vain Arab Zionists are trying to They take this holiday as a gateway to normalization and joint celebration with forces that take it as a gateway to erasing our holiest sanctities, which is absurdity and undoubtedly bound to fail, a failure whose broad gateway will be Al-Aqsa.