Al-Aqsa is not a Palestinian property

The information flowing out of occupied Palestine is harmful to both mind and heart. What is happening in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, or the West Bank points to dark days ahead for the Palestinians, in every sense of the word.

Yesterday, Sunday, more than 117 settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, touring freely without anyone stopping them, and performing their rituals. Over the past week, more than 1,193 people stormed Al-Aqsa under heavy protection from occupation police. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also stormed Al-Aqsa on Monday, October 26, with dozens of settlers, amid an intensive deployment of occupation forces, and the intruders received explanations about the so-called Temple. On Tuesday, October 27, settlers performed prayers and Talmudic rituals in front of the Dome of the Rock, in the eastern area, including what is called the “epic prostration.” On Thursday, October 29, dozens of settlers stormed through the Moroccan Gate and performed public rituals.

This is the implementation of a time-sharing scheme, whose peak we will witness soon through changing the “Status Quo.” It has been customary for Al-Aqsa to be closed to non-Muslim intrusions on Fridays and Saturdays, but settler organizations and so-called Temple associations are escalating their legal and media demands to bring the file before occupation courts, to impose intrusions on Saturdays, reserving every Saturday exclusively for Israelis, and preventing Muslims from entering the Noble Sanctuary throughout that day. As usual, these schemes begin gradually and slowly, then escalate until they reach the targeted peak in the end, inside and outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Some will tell you we should focus on people rather than stone, meaning the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and those who hold this view are precisely the ones who tire of all kinds of such treatments, as they care neither about people nor stone.

Fine, if you want to focus on people, let’s go together to the Gaza Strip, where daily killing continues in the Strip, with 200,000 dilapidated tents on the eve of winter, spreading hunger, absence of health care, and estimates, from Western organizations, saying that 200,000 people may die due to lack of health care, most of them suffering chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. The story doesn’t stop at more than 70,000 martyrs, but extends to slow death from lack of treatment and food, and the psychological suffering and daily hardship.

Perhaps, faced with these shocking figures, someone will say the opposite: let’s go back to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, because it suffers from the reality of human numbers. Here, they are busy escaping their moral responsibility, and in both cases they don’t want to hear anything, neither about Al-Aqsa nor about people, and they sleep their long night, safe and reassured, with no guilt or conscience pursuing them.

In the story of occupation, everything is threatened, from people to stone, from the human being to the sacred site, and you can’t understand how these issues vanish from the nation of two billion: the Al-Aqsa file and the forgotten Gaza file, unless this nation considers the Al-Aqsa file a mere Palestinian property matter to be handled by its owners, forgetting that it is required of them all.

Al-Aqsa is not a Palestinian stone property for its owners to manage and solve their problem. It is on the necks of everyone. Al-Aqsa is a religious, spiritual, historical, and political value, and the occupation’s eye is on it, above its land and beneath it as well.