Al-Aqsa’s division between dream and illusion 

Ziad Ibhais

Member of the Knesset from the Likud Party, Amit Halevy, is preparing a draft law proposing the spatial division of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and proposing to allocate the space from the Shrine of the Rock to the end of the northern border of Al-Aqsa to the Jews, which means cutting about 70% from Al-Aqsa, which necessarily requires - according to the project - “ending the Jordanian role.” And the Endowments Houses in Al-Aqsa.

If we return to the starting points of this project, religious Zionism views Al-Aqsa Mosque as a replacement. It aspires to remove it from existence in its entirety and establish the Temple in its place. If the term “Temple Mount” is mentioned today, the mental process undertaken by everyone influenced by religious Zionist propaganda towards Al-Aqsa It is a mental replacement, as it removes the Al-Aqsa Mosque and imagines the structure with its walls standing on the same area, its southern portico in the place of the Al-Qibli Mosque, and the alleged “Holy of Holies” square-shaped building in the place of the Dome of the Rock. 

The central obstacle facing religious Zionism over the years of its rise has always been how to transform this mental replacement into a tangible reality, and how to bridge the gap between the Zionist imagination and the existing Islamic reality, and the answer for decades has been interimism. This phase is simply based on redefining the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque from a purely Islamic mosque to a holy place shared between Muslims and Jews, in preparation for ending all Islamic presence in it later.

The theoretical Zionist approach to dividing Al-Aqsa:

From a theoretical standpoint, this stage is based on a basic conceptual approach, which is the distinction between “Al-Aqsa Mosque” as being limited to the Qibli Mosque with the lead dome and thus limiting Islamic sanctity to it, and between the concept of “Al-Haram Al-Sharif”, which includes the rest of the walled space, as a different space from the mosque. In the religious concept and value, and thus pushing towards redefining this “Holy Mosque” as a “sacred complex that accommodates all religions,” and that the Islamic insistence on complete domination over it despite its vast area is “exclusion,” and that the Zionist demand is to obtain a portion of this space. The large wall, which is 144 thousand square metres, thus wears the guise of the replacement victim in the Holy Place, as it wore it in its occupation of the land of Palestine and in the annihilation and expulsion of its people.

This Zionist conceptual approach to dividing Al-Aqsa Mosque found its way into the American Deal of the Century presented by former President Donald Trump as a vision for liquidating the Palestine issue from the gate of Jerusalem, and into the “Abraham Accords,” which distinguished in its text between “Al-Aqsa Mosque” and “the other sanctities of Jerusalem that must remain.” “Open to peaceful worshipers of all religions,” it finds its way to some of the so-called intellectuals among the normalization elites, with their continuous attempt to redefine Al-Aqsa Mosque and its status, and to Western Arabic-speaking media outlets that have begun trying to change the name of Al-Aqsa Mosque to “Al-Aqsa Complex.”

Practical applications of the Taksim Al-Aqsa project:

From a practical standpoint, this phase has crystallized in three projects so far:

The first is the temporal division: which is based on taking advantage of the heavy presence of the occupation police at the gates of and inside Al-Aqsa Mosque to limit the entry of Muslims at specific times and impose the incursions of Zionist settlers. It began in 2003 with individual incursions, then in 2006 with collective incursions, and developed in 2008 to the announcement of Specific times for raiding at the time of Duha and after the noon prayer, and then gradually expanding them to five and a half hours a day after it was four at the beginning of its imposition. In 2012, religious Zionism revealed its limits on that division with the idea of complete or equal sharing, by preventing Muslims from entering the mosque during Jewish times, and distributing the times of the day and annual holidays equally between the two parties, which was what was thwarted by the Jerusalem Giver of 2015 and then the Giver of the Lions’ Gate of 2017.

The second is the spatial division: The first disclosure of it was in 2004 in the final draft of the Jerusalem Structural Plan 2020, which claimed that what is sacred in Islam is only the Al-Qibli Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, while the rest of the Al-Aqsa area was considered a “historical space crowded with visitors,” so it tried to deny its religious sacred character. In preparation for placing it at the disposal of the occupation municipality. By 2008, it was clear that the occupation was placing the southwestern side of Al-Aqsa Square, located between the Mughrabi Gate and the Qibli Mosque, under the microscope of division, which was thwarted by the institutional bond and the flag terraces project, which took the Pine Terrace as its headquarters, so the intruders quickly passed through this square. Attention was focused on the eastern side of Al-Aqsa between 2013 and 2019, which was what the gift of the Gate of Mercy in 2019 was waiting for, and it ended with the restoration of the Gate of Mercy to its origin as an integral part of Al-Aqsa. 

The third is the moral establishment of the Temple: It proceeds in two parallel lines. The first is the transfer of all the biblical rituals that take place in sweeping the world to Al-Aqsa Mosque as an alleged Jewish religious center, and the second is the revival of what the Torah claims are rituals specific to the Temple, such as the white-robed class of priests, the animal and plant sacrifices, and lying down on the ground. The face in Al-Aqsa Mosque to achieve the idea of “epic prostration,” with an emphasis on storming Al-Aqsa when Jewish or national Zionist holidays intersect with Islamic holidays, which led to the epics of the storming of Al-Adha in 2019, then the Battle of Saif Al-Quds on the 28th of Ramadan in the summer of 2021, and finally the Battle of Al-Itikaf in 2023.

The will to divide versus the will of Rabat and resistance:

Religious Zionism expressed its interim vision for religious replacement in Al-Aqsa in three draft laws in the Knesset, none of which have been discussed or approved until now: the first in 2012 with a project to completely share Al-Aqsa Mosque with 9 hours a day for Muslims and the same for Jews, and sharing annual holidays, then in 2013 the proposal was renewed. The same project, and the Knesset speakers prevented it from being discussed both times.

Today, in 2023, the draft law on the spatial division of Al-Aqsa comes, making the current draft the third draft law on the division of Al-Aqsa and the first that deals with its spatial division. In addition to this, there were successive discussions on the issue of ending the Jordanian role in Al-Aqsa, discussing ways to end the Islamic Endowments’ mandate over the mosque, and forming a lobby specialized in strengthening the Jewish presence there over four parliamentary sessions from 2016 until today.

Perhaps the most important thing to note here is that these draft laws remained surrounded by a deterrence complex that prevented their circulation and progress in trying to approve them, and that the rise of the Zionist ceilings towards Al-Aqsa Mosque contradicts the path of implementing these ceilings on the ground. Returning to the aforementioned interim partition paths shows that each of them collided. Through the will of Rabat and the resistance several times, it was unable to advance towards its end, as in the temporal division, or it was dissipated despite the Zionist clinging to it, such as the spatial division, or it turned into an almost annual source of exhaustion for the occupation, as in the project of the moral foundation of the Temple.

It is therefore important here, as we proceed to confront the division of Al-Aqsa, that we start from two main premises:

First: This project does not build on previous successes as much as it is a reflection of an ideological perception that dictates progress in its ceilings in a manner separate from the balance of power, and that we must not allow our concern for Al-Aqsa to backfire on us as a psychological burden that generates an unrealistic defeat. It is true that the occupier advanced in its aggression against Al-Aqsa but was forced To retreat every time he tried to take his aggression into the decisive space.

the second: The nature of the religious replacement in Al-Aqsa as one of the issues of the internal Zionist contradiction, as opposed to it being a lever that mobilizes the resistance forces and the popular Palestinian, Arab and Islamic forces, allows us to fight a victorious battle for it, a battle we fight from the position of our popular consensus and from the position of the internal Zionist contradiction, the limitations of international cover, and the impossibility of regional coverage. From the Arab printers for such a project.

In short, we must fight this battle starting from the question of how to impose retreats on the occupier, and how to build on previous retreats. There is no question whether the partition project will succeed or not; This increase in ceilings that contradict reality and capabilities turns over time into a real burden on the Zionist project that we must exploit well.