The Israeli government of Naftali Bennett is weakening further. The Arab Joint List (LAU), a small Islamic-conservative party led by Mansour Abbas, has announced that it “froze” its participation in the coalition, Sunday April 17 in the evening. She protests against the ongoing police repression in Al-Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam, the end of which no one can guess.
The gesture of defiance by these four parliamentarians (out of 120) does not threaten to immediately bring down the coalition, in power since June 2021. Parliament is suspended until May 8. This gives the LAU time to negotiate its return. However, this Arab party, the first to take part in power in the history of Israel, raises an unprecedented dilemma. If the rift persists, the opposition would have a majority of 64 seats, enough to dissolve parliament and call for the fifth election in three years.
Sunday evening, it was the members of the religious council overseeing the LAU who launched this warning shot. These dignitaries wish to show their followers that they retain influence. They were speaking as the Al-Aqsa mosque had been transformed into a veritable fort in the morning by a group of Palestinians who intended to defend the holy places against Jewish extremists.
Barricaded inside the building, they fired for several hours, at regular intervals, firecrackers against the Israeli police, who surrounded them. These projectiles produced small clouds of smoke, colored sparks around police officers who wanted to be imperturbable. Some pointed their guns at broken windows, waiting for one of the besieged to poke their heads out. But they weren’t attacking.
“We didn’t have time to pray”
If the police deployed in this way on the esplanade of the Mosques, it was to let tourists and Jewish worshipers pass through, visiting what is for them the Temple Mount, after the closure of the Easter weekend. In recent years, these activists have broken the prevailing status quo, which allows Jews to visit the mountain, but not to pray there. Escorted and protected by the police, they pray every day in normal times, and study for a long time near the Golden Gate. It is a challenge to the main Jewish religious authorities, who ban their highly inflammable devotions.
According to the police, the besieged Palestinians tried to block, at dawn, the passage of these visitors to the door of the Maghrebians, on which emerges a rickety wooden bridge which spans the Wailing Wall, a vestige of the second Temple. To allow them to come, she pushed back, sometimes violently, the Muslim faithful on the esplanade. It also temporarily prohibited those who were in the Old City from entering the holy places, through two main gates. She finally cut the loudspeakers of the mosque, after the besieged there launched an appeal to the faithful to join them.
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