File photo shows Israeli security forces storming al-Aqsa Mosque - Courtesy Press TV
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
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.