Temple Movement activists are trying to enter the Aqsa compound to slaughter goats and challenge the Muslim presence in the holy site. Palestinian worshippers remaining in the mosque during Ramadan are resisting.
Itamar Ben Gvir wants to normalize Jewish worship at the Al-Aqsa compound as a precursor to full Israeli control over the holy site, much like Baruch Goldstein’ massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque brought full Israeli control over that part of Hebron.
It is hardly farfetched to assume that the al-Aqsa compound might suffer the same fate — where a particularly violent set of events would facilitate further Israeli takeover.
Itamar Ben Gvir’s raid of the Al Aqsa compound has strained the Abraham Accords and made it harder for Arab states to justify continued normalization with Israel.
These increasingly provocative actions by Israel don’t merely raise serious concerns for the UAE and other Abraham Accords participants; it also raises worries anew in Egypt and, especially, Jordan. Both countries have maintained long term peace accords with Israel, against the wishes of the vast majority of their citizens.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish supremacist who serves as police minister in the new Jewish supremacist government of Israel, today made a provocative visit to the “Temple Mount” — the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem — that ought to alarm the world. Some Jewish Israeli extremists, including some in Ben-Gvir’s camp, actually want to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine. These extremist views are not typically represented in the western media.
Biased NY Times editors are sabotaging their own reporter — and hindering understanding of why Jerusalem’s Old City is a flash point.
Former ambassador David Friedman says that Judaism is Zionism. “So if you do not support the state of Israel you do not support Judaism, therefore you are antisemitic.”
Then Friedman seemed to echo Ben Shapiro’s call for building a synagogue on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in occupied Jerusalem, though he said the last time he did so, he’d “started a riot.” The two extremists spoke at an event kicked off by the Florida governor, who is considered a likely presidential candidate.
Israel’s leading governing party, Likud, is secular, but its leaders parrot biblical statements about the Jewish people’s supposed right to lands in Palestine as history, such as that Abraham bought land in Hebron. These religious nationalist claims underlie the government’s desire for annexation, though the U.S. press never talks about this zealotry.
It is quite typical for Israeli politicians to carry out confrontational measures against Palestinians shortly before general elections are due. Ramzy Baroud argues Netanyahu’s closure of a gate that leads to Al-Aqsa mosque was a move to appease extremists at the expense of Palestinians.
“Their ultimate goal is no conspiracy theory,” reports Mersiha Gadzo on the growing movement to destroy the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque, in order to build a Third Temple: “One of the leading Temple movement organizations is the Temple Institute, which has had a blueprint ready for the temple’s construction since 2011. In 2014 they crowdfunded over $100,000 on Indiegogo to prepare architectural plans for their Third Temple.”
A radical Jewish fundamentalist who has pushed Jewish access to the Islamic sites in the Old City was shot in Jerusalem yesterday and Israeli police swiftly killed a Palestinian accused of the crime, and the Noble Sanctuary was closed for the first time since 1967