DRONES DROP TEAR GAS ON WORSHIPPERS
A first! The Israeli government used drones to drop tear gas on worshippers in and around the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan service the weekend of April 15th.
Israel’s foreign ministry attempted to spin the police raid on al-Aqsa as an effort to protect freedom of worship from “violent rioters desecrating the site and endangering the public,” but scores of videos show instead Israeli police entering the mosque with not only tear gas, stun grenades and rubber coated bullets but also purposely smashing the mosque’s stain glass windows. Palestinians rightly fear that without international condemnation of such actions, and without holding the Israeli government accountable, Israel will continue to seize every opportunity at their disposal to carry out similar provocations at the al-Aqsa Mosque.
For years Israeli governments have denied Muslims’ claims that Israel is aiming to turn the Temple Mount into a place of worship sacred to Jews only, to remove the Muslims from it or to divide the site. There is historical precedent for the upending of the status quo of a major Muslim holy site. After an American-born Jewish settler massacred 29 worshippers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, Israeli forces partitioned the holy site and shuttered the formerly bustling adjacent Old City, essentially handing over the Old City of Hebron to Jewish settlers, many of whom are American, and destroying Palestinian livelihood.
The Temple Mount is in a part of Jerusalem that Israel annexed in 1967. To date, only the Trump administration has acknowledged Israeli’s sovereignty over the site. Even if annexation were to be acknowledged by the world body, arrangements on the Temple Mount are subject to Israel’s promise to Jordan, as written in their 1994 peace treaty, as well as to later agreements designed to cool down this burning-hot religious issue which in the recent past has erupted with the frequency of wildfires.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan decided that the administration of the Temple Mount would remain in the hands of the Jordanian religious trust, the Wafq. In 2014, then Prime Minister Netanyahu ratified the so-called Kerry Agreements, including Israel’s recognition of Jordan’s special role in safeguarding the holy sites at the compound, and promised to continue to implement the principle that Muslims can pray on the Mount, while non-Muslims can visit, but not pray. However, Trump’s “deal of the century” plan included an important contradiction that stipulated “people of every faith should be permitted to pray on the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif, in a manner that is fully respectful to their religion.”
The attempts by Israeli setterts who call themselves the Temple Mount “faithful” to breach the Mount, and their dream of not only praying on the Mount but also rebuilding their Temple there, a project that of necessity would require the demolition of the mosque, demonstrates the sovereignty issue as the main pretext for the current crisis. The “faithful” see themselves as a spearhead that can force their government to take over control of the Mount just as they succeeded in doing when they annexed the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, and in establishing settlement satellites that have created a parallel state, a state of the settlers, that has shaped the face of Israel today. For them, without the Temple Mount, Israel cannot be a purely Jewish state. For them, even if a religious war erupts, and even if Israel’s relations with its old and new Arab friends are severed, or if sanctions are imposed on Israel and the entire Muslim world condemns Israel for allowing this to happen, absolute control of the Temple Mount would be worth the price.
Israel shrugs off repeated police raids on al Aqsa as Islamic paranoia but for Muslims when messianic leaders are part of the Israeli Knesset a war the al Aqsa/Temple Mount is possible. According to Zvi Bar’el, in his opinion piece in Haaretz, the seizure of Palestinian property around the mosque compound and Israeli construction around the holy site makes for a realistic prediction that a war over the holy site is only a question of time.
Cathy Sultan’s book Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides is available on Amazon.
