By John Pickard
Benjamin Netanyahu has remained in office for years by empowering the far right of his coalitions, including religious fundamentalist parties. The outlook of Netanyahu – arrogant, military supremacist, with no strategies but endless wars and his own political survival – is a perfect fit for the religious zealots and bigots in and around his cabinet. These are people who see the necessity of asserting Jewish religious traditions at the expense of those of other faiths.
These same politicians, who warn the west against the encroachment of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, are themselves the authors par excellence of religious intolerance and oppression. They are the ‘Taliban’ of the Jewish faith: blind and ignorant, misogynistic men.
Zionism was originally a largely a secular, non-religious political nationalist movement, although there was an obvious historical association with Jerusalem. But nowadays, the stories from the Torah are being cynically used to boost that nationalism; its embrace of ultra-religious ideology and the rise of the religious neo-fascists is a relatively new development.
Goaded by the apocalyptic myths of the Hebrew bible – and they are mostly myths – these newly unleashed fanatics would be happy to see the Middle East plunged into a religious war, one which they are confident they would win.
The religious right are on the point of provoking a powerful reaction from Arab states in the area, by repeated incursions into the compound of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The area has great significance in Islamic tradition, but also has great significance in Judaic tradition.
Western wall revered today
The compound is on the site of what was the huge so-called ‘Second’ Temple, active around two thousand years ago, but utterly destroyed by the Romans after an unsuccessful revolt, in 70CE. What remains of the Temple – its lower foundation walls – are revered by Jews today as the Western Wall, and the area above it, where the Temple used to stand, is known to Jews as Temple Mount.
However, fourteen centuries ago, during the period of the rise of the first Arab empire, and at the time of the establishment of Islam, the area was put to a new use. Here, the Dome of the Rock was built at the end of the seventh century, by the Caliph Abd Al-Malik. It was Islam’s very first monumental place of worship, built to rival the great cathedrals of Byzantine Christianity.
This was at a time when early Islam had not clearly and decisively differentiated itself from Judaism or Christianity – it is a faith that shares many influences with both religions – and the Dome of the Rock was of a design meant to express the majesty and grandeur of the Caliphate.
Being first-ever major site of worship, the Dome of the Rock was not built in what became the style of later mosques, but it is still revered by Muslims as the third most holy site, after mosques built later in Mecca and Medina. Tradition has it that Mohammed ascended to heaven from the Dome of the Rock.
Al-Aqsa is a huge mosque and is filled regularly…when allowed
In more modern times, a large mosque was built nearby – the Al-Aqsa Mosque and this used to be the place where thousands of Palestinians would gather for Friday prayers. “Used to”…because the Israeli authorities are increasingly asserting their rights to decide how many and which Palestinians are allowed into the compound on Fridays and the entry to the mosque has become a flashpoint of conflict between the IDF and local Palestinian worshippers.
The Jordanian government has an axe to grind on this issue because it is ‘legally’ the custodian of the Al-Aqsa compound, from an Israeli-Jordanian treaty of 1994, not that the Israeli government takes much notice of that fact.
In modern times, Jews have been forbidden from entering the Al-Aqsa compound at all, much less worshipping there, but in recent years there have been repeated encroachments by ultra-religious Jewish groups, goaded by politicians from the far right. Last month more than 2,000 Israelis, many of them settlers – the same groups organising murderous pogroms against Arab villages – stormed the Al-Aqsa compound, alongside Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir. Here, they prayed and performed religious rituals.
There are those on the far religious right in Israel who would be happy to take over the Al-Aqsa compound altogether, in the hope of somehow restoring the area to its “former glory”. The essential thing for them is to ‘liberate’ the area – like the whole of ‘Greater’ Israel – from the yoke of the Muslims. It is the stuff of messianic politics, but it pervades an entire spectrum of Israeli right-wing politics, including many in the army and the state machine.
Ben Gvir – the same ‘security’ minister who gave out ten thousand assault rifles to Jewish settlers – made no bones about who had the whip hand in Jerusalem. “Everywhere”, he told Haaretz, “people understand that Israel is in charge. There is still more to do, and with God’s help, we will move forward”. The plan to forces changes to the protocols around the Al-Aqsa compound, we should add, are fully endorsed by Netanyahu and his cabinet.
Unsurprisingly, there is growing anger among Muslims, over what is seen as the repeated desecration of a holy Islamic site. There is also a fear that in the weeks approaching the general election in Israel – due in October – that the Israeli religious right would use the issue to provoke religious conflict in the hope of shoring up their position in the polls.
Jordanian government has reasons to worry
Last week, the Jordanian government convened a meeting of foreign ministers of Muslim countries to express their alarm at the developments in Jerusalem. “We warn that tampering with the status quo”, the Jordanian foreign minister, told the Guardian, ”could trigger a religious conflict that will reverberate beyond Palestine and Jordan into the whole Muslim world.”
Jordan has special reason to worry, because half of its population of twelve million are Palestinian, and what happens on the West Bank of the River Jordan will sooner or later have a major impact on what happens on the East Bank.
Jordan is a monarchy, but hardly a constitutional one – political activity is severely limited and opposition is actively suppressed by the authorities. There is a parliament, but its powers and activities are strictly curtailed. Nonetheless, opposition is growing, as a result of the genocidal destruction of Gaza and the Israeli depredations on the West Bank. To add insult to injury, Israel has reneged on a previous agreement to share the waters of the Jordan River with the result that there are shortages affecting Jordanian agriculture.
The “normalisation” of relations between the Jordanian monarchy and Israel, established now for decades, has come under considerable strain and the Jordanian monarchy is finding that repeated suppression cannot block opposition forever. The encroachment of Jewish worshippers onto a Muslim holy site in Jerusalem is only increasing support for new, radical Islamic parties in Jordan, the largest of which now has around quarter of the MPs in parliament.
Aggression and hubris pervades the whole Israeli state
Dima Tahboub, a member of parliament and spokesperson for Jordan’s Islamist Umma (‘Community’) party told the Guardian. “Anti-normalisation sentiment here has grown even larger than before due to the Zionist state’s plans of annexation of the West Bank, the denial of Jordan’s share in the water agreement and also the daily challenges to the custodianship at al-Aqsa mosque…Every day there is penetration by settlers into al-Aqsa mosque and at the same time, [Palestinian] Jerusalemites are prevented from entering the mosque.”
Whether or not the religious arsonists around Ben Gvir are successful in provoking a religious fire remains to be seen, but it is yet another indication of the aggression and hubris that pervades the whole Israeli state and establishment at the present time.
We might also add that the political establishment of the west – including most of the leadership of the Labour Party – are complicit in this process. They wring their hands over the pogroms conducted by armed Jewish settlers against Palestinian villages and they sigh over the ferocity and scale of the killings of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But they continue to arm Israel and trade with Israel as if it were a ‘normal’ country, living by ‘normal’ rules, and not a vicious theocracy bent on wiping out all traces of other faiths and traditions in ‘its own’ territory.
Feature picture shows the Dome of the Rock in the Al-Aqsa compound, from Wikimedia Commons, here. Inset picture of Ben Gvir, from Wikimedia Commons, here]
See more on the history of the Dome of the Rock and early Islam, in The Origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, here.
