The Battle for Al-Aqsa
The new generations of Palestinians are fed up with the 67 years old
Israeli occupation, colonial state violence and ethnic cleansing,
settlers’ colonization, apartheid racism and discrimination,
checkpoint humiliations, wars, home demolitions, land confiscations,
imprisonments, international bias and injustice, abandonment by
their brethren Arabs, and oppressed by the Israeli proxy Palestinian
Authority
By Dr. Elias Akleh
October 20, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
Since the beginning of
this month (October) we have been witnessing on social media
horrific videos of vicious attacks by Israeli soldiers, extremist
religious settlers, and even seemingly Israeli civilians shouting
“Death to Arabs” while gunning down Palestinian children
demonstrators, insulting them and watching them in vigilante gleeful
mood bleeding to death.
Palestinian youth have
been demonstrating in the streets of every Palestinian town against
the religiously extremist Jewish settlers’ violations of the
sanctity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque; the third holiest Islamic site after
Al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and Al-Nabawi Mosque in Medina in Saudi
Arabia.
Religiously extremist
Jewish settlers have been increasingly storming Al-Aqsa Compound
under the protection of Israeli soldiers, where they perform their
religious dances. During these provocations the Israeli soldiers
routinely attack Al-Aqsa guards and Moslem prayers with stun
grenades, tear gas and with rubber coated steel bullets. In their
attempt to evacuate the mosque the Israeli soldiers break down doors
and windows. These violations had ignited what many are calling a
third Palestinian Intifada (uprising).
Zionists, another
name for ancient Pharisaic Talmudists, had been trying to gain
control of the Islamic Al-Aqsa Compound; what they call temple
mount, in an attempt to assert their religious myth of Solomon’s
temple; a myth that is imprinted on the Jewish collective psyche to
assert their ownership of the city as well as the whole Palestine.
Due to the fact that
the Compound is part of the Islamic Waqf (Trust), and due to fear of
any reprisal, the Zionists developed a long term graduated plan to
gain control of the Compound one piece at a time. First they
concentrated on the western wall of the Compound known to Moslems as
the Buraq Wall, where their prophet; Mohammad, tied his horse (Al-Buraq)
during his ascent to heaven. The wall is also known to Jews as the
Wailing Wall, claimed as part of their alleged temple. Due to the
Islamic religious tolerance and acceptance to the People of the
Book, Moslems allowed the Jews to visit the Wailing Wall to perform
their prayers.
In 1887 Baron
Rothschild attempted to purchase the Moroccan Quarter adjacent to
the Wall in a plan to demolish the whole quarter and to build a
plaza for the Jews to pray at the Wall. His offer was rejected.
Similar efforts to buy the Moroccan Quarter in 1895 by Rabbi Chaim
Hirschensohn and by the Zionist Palestine Land Development Company
were also rejected. In 1919, after the British took control of the
area, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann offered to buy the Quarter from
the British Military Governor of Jerusalem, Colonel Sir Ronald
Storrs. Similar to Rothschild’s plan, Weizmann intended to demolish
the whole Quarter. The offer was rejected. In 1926, an effort by the
American Jewish millionaire Nathan Straus to initially lease the
Quarter and later on to purchase it was also rejected by the
British.
After the declaration
of their intention to establish an Israeli state in Palestine,
Zionist Jewish immigration to the region intensified, raising
concern and fear among Palestinians. This fear intensified when the
Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin gave a speech demanding the
establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and Transjordan and
take control of the Temple Mount. Jews, then, marched to their Wall
and started erecting their religious symbols. Palestinians were
appalled by such actions and violent clashes between the two parties
took place.
Political conflict
intensified between the two sides each asserting their rights to
protect their religious sites. The conflict was escalated in August
1929 when hundreds of members of the Zionist Committee for the
Western Wall, under the leadership of members of extremist
Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, marched to the Wall shouting “the
wall is ours”. They raised the Israeli flag and sang the Jewish
anthem; Hatikvah. Such provocative act ignited Palestinian
demonstrations known as Al-Buraq Uprising. Violent clashes spread
between Jews and Palestinians in different towns and scores were
killed on both sides.
The British forces
interfered to stop the violence. The League of Nations established a
commission of enquiry (the Shaw Commission) of three non-British
lawyers and experts to investigate the issue. The Commission
submitted its findings early 1930 confirming that the Wall is part
of the Al-Aqsa Compound and belongs to the Islamic Waqf.
Between 1948 and 1967
Al-Quds (Jerusalem) with Al-Aqsa Compound including the Buraq Wall
was under the Jordanian rule. Immediately and three days after the
end of 1967 war Tivadar (Teddy) Kollek; a Hungarian Jew, who was the
mayor of West Jerusalem at the time, sent Israeli bulldozers to
completely demolish and erase the 774 years old Moroccan Quarter
with its 138 homes, two mosques and a school. It was completely
razed, and replaced with a huge plaza for the Jews to visit and pray
at the wall.
On the 21st
of August 1969 a crypto Australian Zionist Jew, Dennis Michael Rohan,
started a fire in Al-Aqsa Mosque that caused considerable damage.
When Palestinians rushed in to extinguish the fire they discovered
that the Israeli municipality had shut off the water supply, and
that the Israeli fire-engine which supposedly came to help, was
spraying gasoline rather water on the fire. Instead of being
sentenced Rohan was declared insane; a well-known maneuver by
Israeli courts to protect their criminals, and allegedly was
admitted to a mental hospital.
On September 28, 2000
Ariel Sharon, then Israeli opposition leader with a Likud party
delegation forced their way into the Al-Aqsa Compound surrounded by
hundreds of fully armed Israeli riot police. Clashes erupted between
Moslem prayer and the police, who shot dead 7 Palestinians and
wounded 250. Sharon’s visit ignited Al-Aqsa Intifada (or the second
Palestinian Intifada) that was very violent.
Israel responded with
air strikes against Palestinian targets in West Bank and in Gaza
Strip, Israeli tanks forced their ways into all major towns
including Ramallah, Bethlehem, Al-Khalil (Hebron), Jenin, Nablus
causing havoc, destroying homes and government institutions. The
headquarters of Palestinian Authority in Ramallah was greatly
demolished and Arafat was virtually imprisoned in whatever left of
the quarter until his poisonous assassination in 2004. Israeli
soldiers perpetrated a massacre in Jenin refugee camp. Israeli tanks
rolled through Bethlehem and a military siege was imposed on the
Nativity Church were some Palestinian police and civilians took
refuge for few weeks. The attacks against Gaza Strip were very
intensive but ended with Israeli settlers’ withdrawal from 17
illegal settlements in August 2005. The Intifada ended in 2005 when
the newly “selected” Palestinian leader; Mahmoud Abbas met with
Israeli Prime Minister, then Ariel Sharon, in Sharm el-Sheikh Summit
of 2005. Violent clashes continued, though, throughout 2006.
The ugly face of
terrorist colonial Israel gets more exposure with every Israeli
aggression against Palestinians especially after Israel’s genocidal
attacks against Lebanon in 2006, the wars against besieged Gaza
Strip 2008/9, 2012 & 2014, and Israel’s piracy against international
Gaza Freedom Flotillas. Criticism of Israel has been on the rise,
not just internationally on the popular not the political levels,
but also internally from Israelis themselves including military
refusnics, NGOs, and notably by the new generations of Israeli
historians; Israeli historical revisionists, such as Ilan Pape,
Shlomo Sand, Uri Ram, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev among
others. Those historians shed serious doubts about Israel’s history
and thus legitimacy to the land to a point where Shlomo Sand
published his seminal book “The Invention of the Jewish People.”
The core of Zionism
is the religious myth of “Jews as God’s chosen people, and Palestine
as their God’s promised land.” One wonders not just how arrogantly
crazy the human mind who conceived this rubbish, but also how naïve
and stupid are the masses, who took this idiocy as their own
religion.
Brainwashing the Jews
with such an idiotic religion for the last two thousand years is no
longer enough for the Zionists to accomplish their Zionist project
of Greater Israel in the Middle East. They need tangible proof that
confirm and assert Jewish relationship to the land. This explains
Israel’s great interest in archeological excavations throughout
Palestine and mainly around and underneath Al-Aqsa Compound looking
for an evidence of their alleged Solomon temple.
For the last 48 years
an army of Israeli and Western archeologists and volunteers have
been digging around the Compound, and digging crisscrossing tunnels
under the Mosque threatening its collapse but had found only
Palestinian, ancient Egyptian, Roman, Persian and Islamic artifacts.
There is no shred of evidence of their alleged temple otherwise they
would have greatly boosted of such evidence. Yet to inforce the
brainwashing process they created within the tunnels some type of a
museum with a small three dimensional replica of their alleged
temple.
As a last and only
resort the Zionist leaders have is to forcibly take control of the
Al-Aqsa Compound, cause its collapse through some means of
earthquake and build their own temple. The best time to do this is
the present when Arab regimes are either neutralized like Iraq,
Egypt and North African states, busy fighting Zionist/American proxy
terrorist groups such as ISIS in Syria, and fighting each other such
as the so called Saudi/Arab coalition states attacking Yemen.
Since mid-September
(last month) religious extremist Israeli settlers were encouraged by
some Israeli MPs, and were released to force their way into the Al-Aqsa
Compound, under the protection of fully armed Israeli forces, to
perform their religious dances “reclaiming” their ownership to the
Compound. The intensity of the resulted Palestinian Intifada was
not expected.
The new generations
of Palestinians are fed up with the 67 years old Israeli occupation,
colonial state violence and ethnic cleansing, settlers’
colonization, apartheid racism and discrimination, checkpoint
humiliations, wars, home demolitions, land confiscations,
imprisonments, international bias and injustice, abandonment by
their brethren Arabs, and oppressed by the Israeli proxy Palestinian
Authority, who adopt the policies of non-effective non-violent
political struggle, the 20 years old futile peace negotiations, and
the extended had for peace while being totally ignored. They learned
from previous Intifada generations that active violent resistance is
the only method of gaining their freedom and their rights. So
hundreds of thousands of young men as well as women are taking to
the streets of every major Palestinian town in West Bank, in Gaza
Strip and in 1948 occupied Palestinian cities, in demonstrations,
facing with their bare hands well trained fully armed Israeli
soldiers and snipers.
These new Palestinian
generations understand very well that the battle for Al-Aqsa is the
battle for Al-Quds (Jerusalem), is the battle for whole Palestine,
and their battle for freedom. The price is precious blood.
Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a
Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was
first evicted from Haifa after the “Nakba” of 1948, then from Beit
Jala after the “Nakseh” of 1967. He lives now in the US, and
publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic . Via
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2015/10/the-battle-for-al-aqsa
See also -
The battle for Al-Aqsa: 'This is not about
prayer':
Palestinians fear imminent Israeli moves to alter the Muslims'
exclusive control of Al-Aqsa.
U.S. defense aid to Israel to rise over Iran
deal: A
current package worth $3 billion a year expires in 2017. A U.S.
official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said
negotiators were close to a new deal that would bring annual payouts
to $3.6 billion to $3.7 billion on average.