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Jerusalem, the holy city sacred to the three Abrahamic and monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, threatens to re-ignite.
Israeli settlers and their extremist allies have been provoking tensions throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, with an incitement campaign inside Arab East Jerusalem. ahead of new evictions of Palestinian families. They have also been causing trouble in religious places such as the al-Aqsa Mosque.
Israel risks its security. These far-right provocations provided the perfect excuse for Hamas, the Islamist political-military group that controls the Gaza Strip, launch hundreds of rockets at Israel, provoking dozens of airstrikes in response, with the risk of rekindling the 2009, 2012 and 2014 Gaza wars.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in a religious shrine in the heart of Jerusalem, known to Muslims as the Haram ash-Sharif, or noble shrine, and to the Jews as the Temple Mount. It also houses the Dome of the Rock, from which, according to Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad made a journey to heaven, and the Western Wall, sacred to the Jews as a surviving structure of the Second Temple and its Blessed Sacrament, started by Herod the Great. and destroyed by the Romans in 70 BC.
Israel seized East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, gradually annexing and colonizing its Arab neighborhoods. But successive governments tend to maintain the religious status quo on the 36-acre site, treating it with care due to a counterintestinal bomb. The Hashemite royal family of Jordan, by tradition and treaty, is the custodian of the Muslim and Christian holy sites of Jerusalem.
Getting rid of the rival traditions of deeply emotional holiness in the holy city, which have clashed for millennia, one always risks igniting a clash of political-religious identity fueled by rockets. But that is what is happening. Israeli riot police stormed the Al-Aqsa compound on Monday and attacked protesters who threw stones with rubber bullets and stun grenades, spraying tear gas and rotting “water.” About 600 Palestinians, including the faithful inside the mosque, have been wounded in clashes in Jerusalem since Friday.
In the weeks leading up to this eruption, passions boiled over before an Israeli Supreme Court ruling on the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a middle-class area of East Arab Jerusalem.
Most of the world does not recognize the annexation of Israel to East Jerusalem. This is the latest impetus for a four-decade-long campaign by Israeli settlers to clean up areas of the old city and around Palestinian families who have lived there for generations. Aside from evictions, they are being evicted by a panoply of zoning and residence laws, building restrictions and the construction of Palestinian land.
But now there is a political vacuum. It was Benjamin Netanyahu, the first five-term president prosecuted for corruption unable to form a government despite the embrace of religion and the far right. Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the increasingly irrelevant and corrupt Palestinian Authority, which has quasi-municipal powers over 40% of the occupied West Bank, has postponed again what would have been the first election since 2006, which Hamas won. Extremists make riots.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish power party and ally of Netanyahu, tweeted that “it is time to liberate the Temple Mount and Jerusalem and show them who owns the house once and for all. all”.
Ben-Gvir’s behavior is reminiscent of that of Ariel Sharon, the late prime minister and champion of the settlers, accompanied by Haram ash-Sharif to Temple Mount in September 2000 by hundreds of Israeli riot police. This illuminated the trail of dust towards a second Palestinian insurgency, known as the al-Aqsa intifada.
This week the riot police at the Holy Shrine are crossing a dangerous line. Apparently, a conflict over land takes on threatening religious overtones that favor the collision of irreducible identities in a region with no shortage of fanatics.
Former President Donald Trump encouraged the Israeli right in Jerusalem moving the U.S. embassy there. And Netanyahu, in an attempt to stay in power, has courted openly racist anti-Arab groups determined to take control of Haram ash-Sharif.
Shaking concerns in the holy city weakens Israel’s credentials. As a strategy to expand the occupation and install more settlers, it excludes the possibility of a Palestinian state and forces. Palestinians fight for equal rights within a Greater Israel, which undermined Israel’s legitimacy in world opinion.
It also jeopardizes Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors, as well as with Muslims around the world. There have been protests since Turkey in Jordan, as well as in Arab cities and towns in Israel. Relations with Jordan are at the bottom. Jordan, along with Egypt, was part of the first wave of “normalization” with Israel, through their respective 1994 and 1979 peace treaties.
But the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, pioneers of last year’s calls Abraham’s agreements with Israel, they are now strong in protest in events in the city of the Abrahamic faiths. In Jerusalem, Israel risks its second wave of distension with the Arabs.
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