[News] In its quest for religious war, Israel is uniting Arabs and Muslims around Palestine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeastmonitor.com
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230411-in-its-quest-for-religious-war-israel-is-uniting-arabs-and-muslims-around-palestine/>
In its quest for religious war, Israel is uniting Arabs and Muslims around
Palestine
Dr Ramzy Baroud - April 11, 2023
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

By ordering a brutal attack
<https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/4/5/israeli-forces-carry-out-violent-raid-at-al-aqsa-mosque>
against Palestinian worshippers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque on the 14th day of
the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
knew very well that the Palestinians would retaliate. Netanyahu's motive
should be obvious. He wanted to divert attention from the mass protests
that have rocked Israel since January
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/huge-crowds-protest-in-israel-over-rightwing-governments-judicial-reforms>
and divided Israeli society along ideological and political lines in ways
never witnessed <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64929563>
before.

Unwilling to relinquish his hard-earned decisive election victory and
entirely right-wing coalition government, while fearing that major
concessions to his political rivals could see his coalition dissolve,
Netanyahu set his sights on Al-Aqsa Mosque.

History has proven that Israeli attacks on Palestinian holy places are
guaranteed to provoke a Palestinian response. For Netanyahu and his extreme
far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, the price of
Palestinian retaliation was worth the political gains from uniting Israelis
of all political backgrounds behind them. Ben-Gvir, in particular, knew
that an attack on Al-Aqsa would reassure his far-right religious
constituency about his commitment to imposing full Israeli Jewish
sovereignty over Palestinian Muslim and Christian holy places in the
occupied city of Jerusalem.

What Netanyahu and his allies may have not anticipated, however, is the
intensity of the Palestinian response. Hundreds of rockets were fired
towards the north and south of Israel. These came not only from the
besieged Gaza Strip, but, even more strategically important, also from
South Lebanon.

Although some damage was reported
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65210045>, the rocket response
was a political game changer. This was the first time in years that
fighters in two Arab countries coordinated their retaliatory action against
Israel and hit back simultaneously.

It will be difficult for Netanyahu to claim any kind of victory after this,
unless he takes his country to a major war on two fronts; three, if we are
to consider the rise of armed resistance
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/08/boundaries-between-west-bank-factions-blur-as-resistance-to-israeli-occupation-grows>
in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.

However, even a major war could backfire. During Israel's attack against
Gaza in 2014, the occupation state struggled to sustain a single military
front as the war lasted 51 days, leading to an Israeli arms and ammunition
crisis. Were it not for the decision
<https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/07/u-s-has-sold-ammunition-to-israel-since-start-of-gaza-conflict>
of the Barack Obama administration to ship supplies of munitions to Israel
to refill its depleted arsenal, Israel could have found itself in
unprecedented difficulty.

The US, though, is no longer able to play the role of emergency weapons
supplier, at least for now, due to its own ammunition shortage resulting
<https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/politics/us-weapons-factories-ukraine-ammunition/index.html>
from the Ukraine war. Israel was thus careful to limit its response to the
Palestinian and Lebanese rockets. This episode shall prove decisive, as it
will empower Israel's regional enemies and, instead of boosting Netanyahu's
credibility within his own right-wing camp, it has the potential to
undermine it.

How could Israel's most experienced political leader commit such an obvious
strategic error? Aside from making the desperate decision to attack Al-Aqsa
— likely under pressure from Ben-Gvir and the equally extreme far-right
Bezalel Smotrich — Netanyahu is no different to other Israeli leaders in
miscalculating the significance of the spiritual component of the
Palestinian struggle, and how it ties to Arab and Muslim solidarity with
Palestine.

While what is happening in Palestine is not a religious war, some Israeli
officials and political parties are keen
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/senior-israeli-lawmaker-warns-religious-war-over-jerusalem-moves-2022-05-23/>
to have one. Although warnings
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/senior-israeli-lawmaker-warns-religious-war-over-jerusalem-moves-2022-05-23/>
against "religious wars" in Palestine — in fact, the entire region — have
been mostly linked to Israel's current "most right-wing government
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63942616> in history",
religious discourses have been the most dominant since the development of
Israel's founding ideology, Zionism, in the late 19th century.

Paradoxically, despite the historical fact that Zionism has been situated
within a religious context, the founders of the movement were mostly
atheists
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-01-21/ty-article/.premium/how-israel-went-from-atheist-zionism-to-jewish-state/0000017f-e918-dc91-a17f-fd9d87a00000>.
They used religion as a political tool to unify Jews globally around their
new ideology and to romanticise in the minds of their followers what is
essentially a violent, settler-colonial movement.

Nevertheless, over the years, the centre of power within the Zionist
movement has shifted from liberal Zionism to Zionist Revisionism, and then
in the past twenty years or so, to religious Zionism
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/22/what-role-will-religious-zionism-have-next-israeli-government-explainer>.
For Israel's current generation of Zionist leaders, religion is not a
political tool, but an objective. This is precisely why, as Palestinian men
and women were being attacked so ferociously inside the holiest of all
mosques in the country, Israeli Jews were attempting to enter the Muslim
shrine to sacrifice animals
<https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-settlers-call-animal-sacrifices-al-aqsa>
as part of the Passover tradition. Although not many of them have succeeded
in doing so, events suggest that a new kind of conflict is taking shape.

Historically, Israel has targeted Muslim and Christian sites to acquire
political capital. Late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did just that
when he conducted <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/29/israel> a
provocative "visit" to the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa with hundreds of
soldiers in September 2000, and when the Israeli military completely
destroyed
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20140910-the-ancient-mosques-of-gaza-in-ruins-how-israels-war-endangered-palestines-cultural-heritage/>
or seriously damaged 203 mosques during its so-called "Operation Protective
Edge" against Gaza in 2014.

Christian sites have also been attacked
<https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/02/04/in-jerusalem-attacks-on-christians-are-on-the-rise_6014400_4.html>
and confiscated
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-holy-sepulchre-shuttered-bill-allowing-seizure-of-church-lands-shelved/>.
Israel's targeting of Palestinian Christians has led community leaders such
as Archbishop Atallah Hanna to warn
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/archbishop-atallah-hanna-says-jerusalem-is-facing-unprecedented-conspiracy/>
about "an unprecedented conspiracy against the Christian existence" in the
Holy Land.

The attack on Palestinian religious symbols isn't limited to the Occupied
Palestinian Territories; it is ongoing across historic Palestine, including
today's Israel. The 13th-century architectural marvel, Al-Ahmar Mosque in
Safad, for example, was turned
<https://stepfeed.com/israel-turned-this-13th-century-palestinian-mosque-into-a-nightclub-0644>
by the Israeli authorities into a nightclub. A study published
<https://www.dailysabah.com/world/mid-east/israel-turns-mosques-into-jewish-synagogues-bars-restaurants-study-shows>
by the High Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens in Israel revealed in
July 2020 that scores of mosques have been turned into synagogues, barns,
bars or restaurants by the occupation state.

Israel's targeting of the Arab and Muslim identity of Palestine is now
being accelerated under Netanyahu's leadership, but this strategy is a
double-edged sword as we have seen in recent days. In the video
<https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zdT0-21vu2o> that went viral of Israeli
soldiers beating up Muslim worshippers in Al-Aqsa, the distressing pleas of
a Palestinian woman groaning in pain were heard as she cried "Oh Allah, Oh
Allah" repeatedly. Palestinian mainstream and social media have published
comments that the response by Palestinian resistance groups was
specifically in answer to the pleas of the unidentified woman. This is the
power of spirituality; it has the kind of logic that Netanyahu and his
allies cannot possibly understand.

On 3 April, Jordan's King Abdullah stressed
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230403-jordan-king-abdullah-muslims-have-duty-to-protect-islamic-christian-holy-sites-from-israel-persecution/>
rightfully that, "It is the duty of every Muslim to deter Israeli
escalations against Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem." In its
quest for religious war, Israel is uniting Arabs and Muslims around
Palestine.

When this happens, instead of isolating and browbeating Palestinians, it is
Israel that will find itself even more isolated. Palestinians do not see
themselves as fighting a religious war, but protecting their religious
symbols stands at the core of their fight for freedom, justice and equality.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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