The recent firing of rubber bullets by Israeli police at worshippers in the Masjid Al-Aqsa is not merely the public health measure it purports to be, but is also part of the tussle between the Palestinians of the West Bank and the settlers of the Zionist entity over the two-state solution. The Zionist entity is not only insisting on setting up new settlements, but on retaining roads between those settlements, so that what would be left to the Arabs of the West Bank would be multiple pieces of land cut off from one another. It is already bad enough to have a state consisting of two pieces of land, as the West Bank and Gaza.
However, a two-state solution is far into the future. The immediate issue is the day-to-day administration of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967. Perhaps the prize conquest during the Six-Day War was East Jerusalem.
Jews, even those who reject religious belief and regard their Jewishness as a purely ethnic identity, claim a homeland in Palestine on the basis of Biblical claims. Those Biblical claims make the Masjid Al-Aqsa the holiest place in Judaism, the site of the First and Second Temples, and of the Third Temple, which Jews have vowed to build whenever they ruled Jerusalem again.
It was a sort of attempt, by a visiting Australian, to burn down the Masjid Al-Aqsa, which prompted the founding of the OIC in 1969. He wished to facilitate the Second Coming of Christ, which is supposed to take place in the Third Temple. However, there were two attempts by Jews, of Orthodox sects, to demolish Al-Aqsa. Two members of the Gush Emunim Underground plotted its destruction. Then the Temple Mount Faithful, in 1990, attempted to lay a foundation-stone, for the Third Temple, and 22 Palestinians were killed, on 8 September 1990.
A visit to Al-Aqsa by then Leader of Opposition Ariel Sharon on 28 September 2000, provoked protests which ultimately led to the five-year Al-Aqsa intifada. Since 1967, Israeli law enforcers had not gone into the mosque itself. That restraint disappeared in 2004, and was not observed this time either.
There is a strange pattern, of it being treated as an Arab problem rather than a Muslim one. Arabs are mostly Muslim, and many of them have acquaintance, even closer (Jordan’s King Abdullah has a Palestinian wife), with Palestinian refugees. A lot of Palestinians also found employment in the Gulf when oil wealth began to pour in there. However, Muslims all over the world have not just an attachment to the cause of fellow Muslims, but also to that of Al-Aqsa, which is the first Qibla, the direction to which the Holy Prophet (PBUH) led his Companions in prayer al through his Meccan years, and the beginning of his Madinan period, until he switched towards the Kaaba in Makkah. It is a historical anomaly that the Khadimul Harmain (once the title of the Osmanli Caliph, now of the Saudi King) does not presently rule all the Harams.
Along with Makkah and Madina, Al-Aqsa is a haram, a sanctuary. No mosque is a sanctuary from arrest. However, the three harams are inviolate. Anyone can worship there, secure from both the wrath of the state, and private revenge. More than anything else, it provides Islam’s link to the other Abrahmic religions. Until 1967, it was part of the Hajj.
However, since 1967, it has not been part of the Hajj package, for most Muslim countries do not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and their citizens cannot go there. It is not the first time since iits being built that Al-Aqsa has been under non-Muslim occupaton. The first episode was in 1098, when the First Crusade took Jerusalem.
