Sovereign Israel

"The Temple Mount is open to everyone and if Hamas thinks that if it threatens me, it will deter me, let them understand that times have changed."

"No Israeli government that I'm a member of is going to bow to a despicable and murderous terror organization... and if Hamas thinks that I'll be deterred by its threats, it needs to accept that times have changed and that there's a government in Jerusalem."

"The Temple Mount is open to everyone."  

National Security Minister Ben Gvir, Israel

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (left) visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Jan. 3, 2023. Source: Facebook.

Israel has a newly-elected government. Yet another newly-elected government. Headed, once again by its most seasoned politician, a man who has withstood much in the greater interests of promoting Israel's security. This is the third government he will have led. A former military man, he knows that Israel must appear to its neighbours as an invincible, formidable adversary that will respond with the ferocity of existential imperative to their violent incursions in efforts to destroy the tiny geographic parcel representing a tiny proportion of its historical ancestral landmass.

Never again will Jews be trapped by a hostile world without a country, a slice of geography of their own, with their own effective, self-protective military and intelligence services to warn beforehand and to secure its presence against malign usurpation. An ancient people, an ancient land, an ancient culture and its religious devotion to a singular spiritual guide that inspired two other great religions that took from Judaism their guiding principles and values.

Both of which, Christianity and Islam, felt entitled to pick from the sacred scriptures of Judaism, what suited them from their perspectives and in the process spite the source, insisting theirs are the final words of the unifying divinity of humanity. Both institutions reverenced the monotheistic revelation of the Supreme Spirit, while denying the authentic originality of its introduction. And both institutions have traditionally persecuted the original source.

 

Jews refuse to remain a pathetic, friendless ethnic group imploring others to come to their defense, knowing from past experience there will be no saving response. Israel is the response of the global Jewish community to a world indifferent to the plight of Jews when the most barbaric extermination of human life was methodically undertaken to destroy Jewish life, culture, society, memory. A government best positioned to do just that is now viewed by the international community as 'right-wing', an epithet of rejection.

No other national government on the planet is held to the standards that Israel's is. In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the general consensus is that Israel although a legally constituted country returned to claim its ancestral geography, is itself illegal, because the land is contested by those calling themselves indigenous, and taking the identification of nomenclature along with attestations of originality attached to Judaism's ancient cultural, religious, political and socially significant sites.

An Israeli Minister, duly democratically elected, is held to have transgressed by setting foot on Judaism's most sacred site located in the ancient capital of Judean ancestry, within a legally constituted nation. Another religion, one that based itself on Judaism, claims virtual ownership rights to the site located in the Jewish capital. A capital that a group of migrated Arabs who settled from Egypt, Jordan and Syria to call themselves Palestinians, taking that designation too from the original Palestinian Jews as their own.

When Islam was brought to Bedouin Arabs in the 7th Century, its founder Mohammad's armies invaded the Arab Peninsula to force disparate populations of pagans to accept Islam. In the process, in Medina, he approached three Jewish tribes indigenous to the ancient city; the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa, and the Banu Qurayza. All three refused Mohammad's overtures to reject Judaism and adopt Islam. These indigenous Jewish tribes were punished with violent conflict that massacred their members and exiled others.

Now it is seen as outrageous that Jews, living in Israel, and Jews visiting from abroad, might wish to approach their own most sacred religious site, to pray there. They cannot. When Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan it allowed Jordan to oversee the contested site, the Temple Mount, where the (two iterations) Temple of Solomon once stood, and which Islam names the Noble Sanctuary. There, Muslims may pray, under the Jordan Waqf, but not Jews. It is a dictate of Islam and of the surrounding Muslim-Arab nations.

Arab Muslims in the Middle East, are affronted and infuriated that Jews might mount their most sacred site, the third-most-sacred site in Islam. And because a Jew on a mission to approach his own religion's original sacred site while stating the obvious, that in Israel which is twenty percent non-Jewish, with citizens who are Christian, Muslim, Druze, and other religions no one is constrained from free movement of religious devotion. Why then, should Jews be refused entry to their very own religious site in its own capital, in its own country?

Sacrilege in Al-Aqsa Mosque

"We are working to restore calm, on the Temple Mount and across Israel."

"Alongside that, we are preparing for any scenario and the security forces are ready for any task [n responding to violent Palestinian confrontations and possible attacks]."

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett

 

The Abrahamic trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam focus on the ancient city of Jerusalem in their historical antecedents where Jews and Christians and Muslims venerate sites sacred to their religious traditions. This year, the traditional holy week holidays of Passover, Easter and Ramadan fall close to each other on the calendar. In the order of precedence, Passover celebrates an ancient memory of freedom from exile in Egypt, predating by millennia the much later celebration of a Jewish sage arising from the dead, and much later still, introspection on the Prophet's revelation of the Koran.

When Jordan took it upon itself to occupy the Old City of Jerusalem, it banished Jews from their ancient habitation, and, until the war of 1967 which freed Jerusalem entirely from its control, no Jews were permitted to access the most sacred site in Judaism. Israel has made every effort possible to accommodate the religious and cultural traditions of the faiths that erupted from the tradition of Judaism. Faiths which from antiquity to the present have never given full respectful due to their progenitor religion. 

In the peace accord signed between Israel and Jordan, it was agreed that Jordan would continue to have authority through its Waqf over the Islamic holy site--third in its pantheon of sacred places, after Mecca and Medina--while Israel would retain the responsibility of maintaining public order. Islam's Jerusalem holy site is the Noble Sanctuary, built directly over the ruins of the infinitely older two Temples of Solomon. Jordan's refusal to allow Jews entry to their most sacred site lives on in Palestinian rage over Israeli Jews accessing the site though they are forbidden to pray on the Temple Mount to appease Islam's sense of sole entitlement.

 

During Friday prayers, mosques throughout the world, including in Jerusalem often incite the faithful to acts of civic disruption, targeting Israel and Jews for violence. In Israel that takes the form of 'resistance' to the 'occupation' of Jews in the Jewish state that has not been averse to sharing its national state with people of other ethnic origins, cultures, traditions and religions. Israel is established on a small proportion of its original Judean heritage. Jews are held by Arab Muslims to be 'occupying' land sacred to Islam whose presence must be eradicated.

 

Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City Friday, April 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

This weekend, yet again, as on so many other occasions, violence erupted on the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary, where Palestinian men and women gathered at the Al Aqsa Mosque to protest Israel permitting Jews to be present on the Temple Mount for Passover. What other country in the world must pacify a minority population by disallowing the country's indigenous majority to pray in their most holy of sanctuaries? Only Israel, only Jews.

 

In Friday's rioting where Palestinian mobs threw rocks and incendiary devices at Israeli security forces, there to maintain order and peace for worshippers of two religions, two ethnic groups, two cultures, two traditions, 150 Palestinians sustained injuries as they clashed with Israel riot police attempting to restore order that would allow peaceful Israeli-Palestinian citizens to access the mosque and pray peacefully in celebration of Ramadan. Palestinian rioters sustained injuries incurred by rubber bullets, stun grenades and being beaten with police batons according to the Palestine Red Crescent.

 

This, at a time of particularly high alert following a number of deadly Arab street attacks on Jews throughout the country in the past two weeks. Israeli police described hundreds of Palestinians hurling firecrackers and rocks at their forces. And nor did they spare the Jewish prayer section of the Old City's Western Wall raining rocks down on the Jewish faithful, following morning Ramadan prayers. For a religion that celebrates itself as one of peace, it is beyond peculiar that Ramadan, a time of peaceful introspection, all too often results in violent riots perpetrated against Jews.

 

Hundreds of rioting Palestinians were detained. And the Foreign Ministry of the Palestinian Authority in reference to the violence that took place in the holy compound stated it "holds Israel fully and directly responsible for this crime and its consequences", when the crime was committed by Palestinians and Israel had no other option but to restore order while bringing the rioters under control as a 'consequence' of their violent actions. Strange how skewed perspectives can be. Yet a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisted that immediate intervention take place in the international community to "stop Israeli aggression against Al Aqsa Mosque and prevent things from going out of control".

 

Sacrilege in Al-Aqsa Mosque