For a week now, young Palestinians have been reenacting the battle of Fort Alamo in the Al-Aqsa mosque, in the heart of Islam’s third holiest site, the esplanade of the Mosques. Every night, they barricade themselves there to confront the Israeli police before dawn. Friday, April 15, the images of these forces entering the mosque, aligning these young people on the carpets, went around the planet. They have not entered it since, but they have injured more than 200 Palestinians in a week on the esplanade, including the elderly and journalists, arousing an indignation which does not weaken in the Muslim world.
The United Arab Emirates, which normalized its relations with Israel in 2020, struck the first blow of the penknife since the Abraham Accords of 2020, by summoning the Israeli ambassador. Jordan, guardian of the holy places, strongly condemns these police operations. The United States dispatched an envoy from the State Department to call for the ” de-escalation “, in unison with the United Nations. Now the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, 86, finds himself once again drawn from his isolation for the purposes of diplomatic dialogue.
In this week when the Jewish and Christian Easter coincides, for the first time since 1991, with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Israeli government is fragile. Deprived of his majority in Parliament at the beginning of April, he must react with confidence to a series of terrorist attacks, carried out in Israeli cities by isolated Palestinians, which left 14 dead between March 22 and April 7.
The besieged Al-Aqsa volunteers provoke the police. Videos show them throwing stones towards the Wailing Wall, a vestige of the second Temple, below the esplanade of the Mosques. They seek confrontation. The military correspondents of the Israeli press consider them exploited by Hamas.
Breaking the “status quo”
Israel, for its part, claims to ensure freedom of worship, including for Muslims. But the Al-Aqsa compound is a political place. It is the core of the Palestinian identity. Normally, its lavish gardens are the last public space where Palestinians in the Holy City can congregate, almost outside Israel’s grasp. The Jewish state cannot decide what form the resistance to its occupation of the territories takes, which it has maintained since 1967, when the government of Naftali Bennett no longer considers itself obliged to offer the slightest prospect of ending it.
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