Afrasianet - Dr. Abdullah Maarouf - With the entry into force of the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and the reality of the great Israeli failure there, which the Israeli media and analysts have been talking about since the nineteenth of this month, and the resignation of Itamar Ben Gvir and members of the government from the Jewish Power party and the clear split between him and his ally Smotrich, the Israeli Minister of Finance and the leader of the "Religious Zionism" movement, and then the resignation of the army commander and the commander of the southern region, news continues to follow an unexpected setback for the extreme right in Israel, especially the Zionist movement. Religious.
The Israeli retreat in Gaza did not begin with the actual adoption of the ceasefire deal, but rather signs of defections began to appear in the war camp in Israel before that with the revelation of the failures of the Israeli war on Gaza and the emergence of the terrible failure suffered by the Israeli army there until it no longer has any clear goals in the war except destruction for the sake of destruction, and killing for the sake of killing, so the statement of Moshe Feiglin, leader of the extremist "identity" party, was realized when he said during his storming of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque at the end of August / Last August: (We are moving from failure to failure on the southern and northern fronts).
These setbacks in the religious Zionist movement seem to have caused strong repercussions on its unity, after it was close to holding all the threads of government in Israel during the fifteen months of the war on Gaza.
While the first resigned from the government and withdrew from the coalition in protest against the ceasefire agreement, the second remained until the moment of writing these lines with the threat of withdrawal and the overthrow of the government if the war does not resume, rejecting all Ben Gvir's appeals to withdraw with him from the government.
While many analysts have tended to believe that the source of this rejection is due to reasons related to the principle of the right-wing survival in power, I believe that the matter does not exceed Smotrich's electoral interest this time, as recent opinion polls in Israel gave Ben Gvir nine seats in the Knesset, while Smotrich's party did not succeed in crossing the electoral threshold to enter the Knesset in the first place, thus seeing him for the first time forced to cling to Netanyahu to remain in the political arena despite his repeated threats to overthrow the government.
This explains the enthusiasm of Ben Gvir to leave the government of Netanyahu, who hopes that he and his party will be ordained as the leader of the right in Israel to succeed Netanyahu and the Likud in the future, which reveals to you the magnitude of the populism that the right-wing public in Israel is currently leaning towards, which is now panting behind the populists and antics of Ben Gvir in exchange for his distance from the planning and intelligence of Smotrich!
As such, the pro-Ben Gvir section of the religious Zionist movement must try to compensate for these setbacks in its strongest file, which is the issue of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque – which Ben Gvir considers his competence – in contrast to Smotrich's specialization in settlement in the West Bank! It is clear that the movement in this direction is still moving at a steady pace that has not been affected by what is happening in the region, and may even increase in the coming period to compensate for the shortage that has occurred in the Gaza file.
At the height of the internal conflict during the ceasefire exercises and negotiations in Gaza, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper published a news two weeks ago about the deposit of a handwritten scroll of Torah in a Jewish religious school in the settlement of Modi'in Illit in the West Bank (west of Ramallah) amid a large celebration.
The idea of a single scroll of Torah is a tradition in synagogues, where these copies are usually written by hand, take years to process and cost large sums, so the project of writing a roll of Torah is important in the Jewish religious tradition.
This scroll was donated by Rabbi Yisrael Elbaom, the father of Shimon Elbaum, who is the director general of the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs, which is headed by Minister Meir Poroch, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Torah Judaism party, and who, ironically, does not storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque or enter it and adheres to the fatwas of the Chief Rabbinate of the occupying power that prohibits Jews from entering the mosque.
However, he presented this scroll to be ready to be brought into the Al-Aqsa Mosque when the time was right. But the right time for the temple extremist groups and religious Zionism is now: Rabbi Samson Elbaum, who is from the same family as Elbaum, who calls himself "Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Temple Mount," clearly stated during the deposit ceremony of this scroll in the settlement of Modi'in Illit that the next step is to build a synagogue inside the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.
For the temple groups, which are an important part of religious Zionism, the step of building a synagogue inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the strategic goal at this stage, and they see the political figure representing these aspirations as former minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, not Smotrich, who is committed to the position of the Chief Rabbinate so far.
Therefore, it is not excluded that these groups will work in the near future to try to sabotage any rapprochement between Netanyahu and Smotrich in favor of Ben Gvir, despite the political bribe that Netanyahu offered Smotrich by announcing his military operation (the iron wall) in Jenin in the northern West Bank.
This means that Israel's internal division has reached the heart of religious Zionism and may soon widen. Because, given the polls in Israel, Smotrich seems convinced that he needs Netanyahu more at the moment than Ben-Gvir does.
We also do not rule out that Ben Gvir's supporters in the religious Zionist movement will try to escalate in Jerusalem and the holy places in the coming period, in an effort to raise his popularity among the right-wing in Israel, and on the other hand, Smotrich sees the military operation in the West Bank as a cordon that he needs to survive an expected failure if the next elections are held to secure his entry into the Knesset, and to be an asset to the settlers of the West Bank, who constitute in their entirety the backbone of the religious Zionist movement, especially the wing of the extremist temple groups.
The result of all this is that the focus in the post-ceasefire phase in Gaza will be, as we expected, on Jerusalem and the West Bank, in an unfair rivalry between Smotrich and Ben Gvir. The former has already begun work in the West Bank, which makes it imperative for both the Palestinians of the West Bank and Jerusalem to take action against these two sides, so that each side does not single out a section of the Palestinian people.
Every minute that passes waiting for what Netanyahu and Smotrich will do in the West Bank on the one hand, or Ben Gvir and his supporters in Jerusalem on the other, is the title of a real catastrophe through which the occupation wants to compensate for its resounding failure in Gaza and restore the dignity of its army that was wasted by Gaza's destroyed homes and the legendary steadfastness of its people.
If the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Jerusalem delay action, the way will be open to complete this competition between the wings of religious Zionism at the expense of the West Bank territory little by little from north to south.
Action has already begun now in Jenin, at the expense of our most important holy sites in this battle, the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. US President Donald Trump sees no problem with either of these parties, he considers the entire stream of religious Zionism to be his ally, and he does not care whether Smotrich or Ben Gvir wins. This entails the Palestinian people bearing the primary responsibility to defend their land and holy sites themselves, and not to expect support from anyone, especially the administration of the new American president.