Sovereign Israel

"The Temple Mount is open to everyone and if Hamas thinks that if it threatens me, it will deter me, let them understand that times have changed."

"No Israeli government that I'm a member of is going to bow to a despicable and murderous terror organization... and if Hamas thinks that I'll be deterred by its threats, it needs to accept that times have changed and that there's a government in Jerusalem."

"The Temple Mount is open to everyone."  

National Security Minister Ben Gvir, Israel

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (left) visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Jan. 3, 2023. Source: Facebook.

Israel has a newly-elected government. Yet another newly-elected government. Headed, once again by its most seasoned politician, a man who has withstood much in the greater interests of promoting Israel's security. This is the third government he will have led. A former military man, he knows that Israel must appear to its neighbours as an invincible, formidable adversary that will respond with the ferocity of existential imperative to their violent incursions in efforts to destroy the tiny geographic parcel representing a tiny proportion of its historical ancestral landmass.

Never again will Jews be trapped by a hostile world without a country, a slice of geography of their own, with their own effective, self-protective military and intelligence services to warn beforehand and to secure its presence against malign usurpation. An ancient people, an ancient land, an ancient culture and its religious devotion to a singular spiritual guide that inspired two other great religions that took from Judaism their guiding principles and values.

Both of which, Christianity and Islam, felt entitled to pick from the sacred scriptures of Judaism, what suited them from their perspectives and in the process spite the source, insisting theirs are the final words of the unifying divinity of humanity. Both institutions reverenced the monotheistic revelation of the Supreme Spirit, while denying the authentic originality of its introduction. And both institutions have traditionally persecuted the original source.

 

Jews refuse to remain a pathetic, friendless ethnic group imploring others to come to their defense, knowing from past experience there will be no saving response. Israel is the response of the global Jewish community to a world indifferent to the plight of Jews when the most barbaric extermination of human life was methodically undertaken to destroy Jewish life, culture, society, memory. A government best positioned to do just that is now viewed by the international community as 'right-wing', an epithet of rejection.

No other national government on the planet is held to the standards that Israel's is. In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the general consensus is that Israel although a legally constituted country returned to claim its ancestral geography, is itself illegal, because the land is contested by those calling themselves indigenous, and taking the identification of nomenclature along with attestations of originality attached to Judaism's ancient cultural, religious, political and socially significant sites.

An Israeli Minister, duly democratically elected, is held to have transgressed by setting foot on Judaism's most sacred site located in the ancient capital of Judean ancestry, within a legally constituted nation. Another religion, one that based itself on Judaism, claims virtual ownership rights to the site located in the Jewish capital. A capital that a group of migrated Arabs who settled from Egypt, Jordan and Syria to call themselves Palestinians, taking that designation too from the original Palestinian Jews as their own.

When Islam was brought to Bedouin Arabs in the 7th Century, its founder Mohammad's armies invaded the Arab Peninsula to force disparate populations of pagans to accept Islam. In the process, in Medina, he approached three Jewish tribes indigenous to the ancient city; the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa, and the Banu Qurayza. All three refused Mohammad's overtures to reject Judaism and adopt Islam. These indigenous Jewish tribes were punished with violent conflict that massacred their members and exiled others.

Now it is seen as outrageous that Jews, living in Israel, and Jews visiting from abroad, might wish to approach their own most sacred religious site, to pray there. They cannot. When Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan it allowed Jordan to oversee the contested site, the Temple Mount, where the (two iterations) Temple of Solomon once stood, and which Islam names the Noble Sanctuary. There, Muslims may pray, under the Jordan Waqf, but not Jews. It is a dictate of Islam and of the surrounding Muslim-Arab nations.

Arab Muslims in the Middle East, are affronted and infuriated that Jews might mount their most sacred site, the third-most-sacred site in Islam. And because a Jew on a mission to approach his own religion's original sacred site while stating the obvious, that in Israel which is twenty percent non-Jewish, with citizens who are Christian, Muslim, Druze, and other religions no one is constrained from free movement of religious devotion. Why then, should Jews be refused entry to their very own religious site in its own capital, in its own country?