Ziad Ibhais

The Zionist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, continues to implement the election statement that brought him to his position: imposing religious replacement in Al-Aqsa and changing its identity from an Islamic holy place to a Jewish holy place, passing through a stage of sharing that we are living in today.

Ben Gvir opened his duties on 1/5/2023 by storming Al-Aqsa Mosque as his first act in the position. Then he confirmed Zionist sovereignty over it and the Jewish prayers there as part of it in his storming on 5/21/2023 on the Hebrew anniversary of the occupation of Jerusalem and in the expanded joint government meeting. Which was held with the Temple groups in the western tunnel under Al-Aqsa on the same day, and then on 7/27/2023, and in the “Remembrance of the Destruction of the Temple” raid, which he personally led, he deliberately performed the biblical rituals and prayers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque, rebuking the occupation police who accompanied him and tried to dissuade him from performing the rituals. Publicly, he returned on June 5, 2024 to say, “On the Temple Mount, the Jews pray and receive blessings. They are in a place under [Zionist] control and sovereignty, which is Jerusalem,” as part of the political cover for one of the worst attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Hebrew anniversary of the occupation of Jerusalem.

Today, in the Knesset conference that was held to discuss the imposition of complete Zionist sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque, a conference that was scheduled for June 2, 2024 to prepare for the aggression on the Hebrew anniversary of the occupation of Jerusalem, but was postponed under many pressures until Wednesday, July 24, Ben Gvir culminated his upward journey with the expression He was frank about this political agenda and said: “I am the political level, and the political level allows Jews to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

What the religious Zionism to which Ben Gvir belongs, and the Temple groups that constitute the front of this movement for the aggression against Al-Aqsa, are looking for is to proceed with the moral establishment of the Temple, that is, imposing all the Biblical rituals in Al-Aqsa Mosque so that it becomes a temple in terms of practice and worship. Perhaps this constitutes an entry point to the material establishment. This interim plan to change the identity of the mosque came into effect in August 2019, after attempts to spatially divide Al-Aqsa suffered a major blow in the attack on Bab Al-Rahma at the beginning of that year, as it thwarted the attempt to destroy Bab Al-Rahma and what is adjacent to it in the eastern courtyard of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is The part that the Zionists were looking forward to annihilating and turning into a space designated for the Jews after two decades of successive facts being imposed on it, which prompted them to devise an alternative interim plan.

This moral establishment of the Temple by imposing Biblical rituals was the main title of the aggression against Al-Aqsa Mosque when the Al-Aqsa Flood broke out and the war that followed it, and it was the spearhead of the project for the complete liquidation of the Palestine issue, by ending the right of return and dropping any political form of political representation of Palestine as a people and a political issue, and resolving the fate of Jerusalem. Based on deciding the fate of the sacred; The logic of religious Zionism here is that if a decision is possible in Al-Aqsa Mosque, then it will certainly be possible in everything below it, given that the Holy Place is the most difficult point of decision.

What the Al-Aqsa Flood Battle was able to impose was to overturn the saying: that resolution at Al-Aqsa is impossible and therefore the whole project of resolution in Palestine is impossible, to practically transform the extremism of religious Zionism and its loud voice from a danger into 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 resolution in Al-Aqsa is impossible, is resolution possible in any other area?

This is what drives religious Zionism today to try to restore the vitality of the program of decisiveness in Al-Aqsa despite the war and its events, in an attempt to overcome the shock of October 7th, and to say that it is still capable of decisiveness despite everything that happened, thus continuing the approach of opposing the balance of power and raising the political ceiling. Away from the capabilities, thus opening once again a window to inflict new setbacks on the Zionist project from Al-Aqsa Gate, and thereby perpetuating with its own hands the role of Al-Aqsa Mosque as a hotbed of exhaustion for the Zionist capabilities. If the Zionist entity had rational people directing its policy, they would have taken the initiative to avoid decisiveness in the Holy Place and withdraw from this idea so that Al-Aqsa does not continue its role as a trigger for successive conflicts that dissipate the Zionist forces, at points that have now numbered ten over the past 28 years.

At the same time, Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his role in providing cover and exchanging roles with religious Zionism in Al-Aqsa, by giving the required anesthetic needles to the official Arab regime and to Jordan in particular by saying that the Zionist entity “still maintains the status quo” in Al-Aqsa Mosque.

While the status quo in Jerusalem in international law means preserving its sanctities as they were before June 5, 1967, including that Al-Aqsa Mosque, its management and architecture be a purely Islamic matter without interference; Netanyahu made it clear publicly during his understandings with the US Secretary of State on October 24, 2015, that the status quo, in his view, is a changing concept, which means that the status quo remains as it is at the moment it is talked about, so every change that is added to it becomes part of the “status quo” for that moment. When Netanyahu says that the Zionist entity is adhering to the status quo after the Jews prayed at Al-Aqsa, he means to say that the Jewish prayer there has become part of the current status quo, and thus he is practically completing what Ben Gvir started, while providing the required anesthesia at the official level.

In conclusion, Ben Jvir’s statements today are an official declaration of a policy that has been put to the fore five years ago, working to impose Biblical rituals in Al-Aqsa Mosque as a colonial tool to change its identity and impose religious replacement there, considering that the gateway to the project of decisiveness in all of occupied Palestine, and it is precisely the spark that From there we entered the flood of Al-Aqsa, which is the strategic line that must be built upon in the struggle to consolidate what the resistance had begun to impose and plan through successive confrontations: that Al-Aqsa is the address of the disappearance and dissipation of Zionist power, and not the address of resolution as those leading the Zionist project today imagine.