Ziad Ibhais

For years, the occupation has been pursuing a policy aimed at removing Al-Aqsa Mosque from existence and establishing the alleged temple in its place and over its entire area. On the way to this, it is working to undermine the Jordanian endowments, as it is the administration that represents the Islamic identity of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In contrast, official Jordan thought it could reconcile two parallel lines: responsibility for the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the escalation of the normalization line and the increasing dependence on the Zionist entity for gas, water, electricity, the environment, imports and exports, and even in employing Jordanians in the hotels of occupied Umm al-Rashrash. It was very clear that combining the two contradictory paths was impossible.

Today, with the religious Zionist government, this contradiction explodes; and preventing the Jordanian ambassador from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the first of this explosion, not the last.

It is logically and practically impossible to combine responsibility for a sacred object targeted for removal with normalization to the point of being mortgaged to the political entity that threatens it and employs all its capabilities to impose this threat.

The official Jordanian # had to choose between its responsibility for Al-Aqsa and its unwavering strategic line of linking Jordan’s fate to the Zionist entity in all areas. The choice it has chosen so far is to try to prevent Al-Aqsa from turning into an explosive element due to its growing relationship with the Zionists, and this is what we are all paying the price for in Al-Aqsa today. The dilemma is not in expelling the Jordanian ambassador from Al-Aqsa, as hundreds of worshipers were expelled before him, and the head of the Waqf Council, the body directly responsible for Al-Aqsa Mosque, was expelled before him, as were the deputy director of Al-Aqsa Mosque, the preacher of Al-Aqsa, and the head of the Supreme Islamic Authority before him, who are closer to Al-Aqsa than him, but the ambassador remained in his place and his Zionist counterpart also remained in his place. The strong relations with the Zionists were practically more valuable and important in practice than the Islamic presence in Al-Aqsa, and this disastrous result is nothing but a bitter harvest of the approach that preceded it and which is still ongoing.

For more than a decade, official Jordan has pursued a policy of bowing to every Zionist encroachment on Al-Aqsa, to the point that its authority to restore the mosque’s walls was usurped in January 2019, as well as the authority to reconstruct some of its landmarks; and it is no longer able to appoint any new guard in Al-Aqsa without Zionist approval; while at the same time, it was exaggerating the name of its role in Al-Aqsa, calling it “guardianship” after the agreement with the President of the Palestinian Authority in 2013… In practice, the role was declining while the name was growing and becoming more exaggerated, which is a contradiction that the masses saw and realized and gradually lost their confidence because of it, until this contradiction became a subject of jokes on social media.

In conclusion, we are today in extra time to make up for it; either official Jordan will abandon its attempt to reconcile contradictions and move towards a policy that benefits from the popular will and is strengthened by it, and stops the rising curve of normalization and dependence, or the official Arab cover will completely reveal Al-Aqsa.

In any case, the only bet is on the popular will and on # the bond and the resistance; but the exposure of the official cover and the dissolution of the administration responsible for Al-Aqsa - if it happens, God forbid - will put us all in front of serious challenges, and this is what the religious Zionist government seems to be moving towards.