Where is Israel heading? Where is the world heading?

Yet another Israeli attack, yet another killing machine operating with as disproportionate an aggression as possible, and once again civilians, innocent people, children "slaughtered" under the bombs raining down on them in Gaza, and once again the heedless or shameless silence of the world.

In Israel's latest three-day attacks on Gaza, 44 people, 15 of them children, lost their lives, and 360 people were wounded. There is no point in asking why Israel attacked this time. Israel no longer even needs to manufacture its own reasons for attacking. All the talk and analysis about "Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, plans, processes," which are constantly trampled in international discourse, is empty. For Israel all these processes have only one meaning: to pull the wool over world public opinion's eyes, to keep it occupied.

While keeping people occupied with words, it goes on doing as it sees fit, continuing to complete its own process of occupation up to the point it has itself decided. While continuing the peace talks on the one hand, on the other it continues to settle on Palestinian land Jews brought from the far corners of the world by persuading them with incentives and bribes, to narrow Palestinian land step by step, to expand the area of occupation.

Are the people it brings and settles under pressure, people driven out of the countries where they are? No. Are they compelled to live here? No. Then under what compulsion do they come and agree to settle here at the cost of driving out the people who are living here? What kind of incentive, what kind of motivation is this?

Once you arrive here, all the discourses of human rights, nationalism, racism, development, Enlightenment freeze. This is another world. Here you can forget everything you have heard in the name of all these: Welcome to the most bigoted Shari'a-ism of Zionism. Everything you heard up to this point was meant to convince the world to come here; now you may disperse.

Even from this vantage alone, one can see into what pit the world of all modernity, secularism, the West-centered Enlightenment has opened through its turning a blind eye to this project. And still there are those who talk about the virtues of this world compared with past times.

The events that led to the latest clashes occurred when a large number of fanatical Jewish settlers, under the pretext of the Jewish religious holiday Tisha B'Av, raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque escorted by the Israeli police, and the Palestinian people tried to oppose this. In fact, as will be recalled, in the month of Ramadan too, on the occasion of another Jewish holiday, fanatical Jewish groups again tried to force their way into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and clashes took place as a result. This interest of the Jews in Al-Aqsa is not temporary and not limited to a group of fanatical Jews. They carry out the raids escorted and protected by the police. When there is resistance, the Israeli police beat those who resist, and that is not enough: upon protests from Gaza, it rains bombs on it.

Whether we accept it or not, the matter is, for them, entirely theological, and it will not end until they have completely demolished Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuilt the so-called Solomon's Temple in its place. They have a belief that they are proceeding step by step toward that point, and this belief is a theology that the so-called international community today views with great understanding. Let some Muslims still fall for orientalist inducements and try to transcend, with historicist approaches, their own reasonable religion, open to everyone and as respectful as possible of the existence of other people and of their houses of worship. Today, under the patronage of modernism, they are bringing the most primitive conceptions of Shari'a and their history to the present day and imposing them on all humanity and on Muslims by force, by violence, by destroying, suppressing, massacring. While we are cut off from our own history through historicist delusions, we are rolling into the middle of their history.

What is the point of rebuilding a temple that was destroyed 2,500 years ago? What benefit will this bring to humanity? What benefit will it bring to the Jews? Other than bringing about their calamities both in this world and in the hereafter?

But this is precisely Zionism. Reversing the flow, the desire to return to the starting point at the cost of disrupting the peace and stability of the world and of all its people. A bigoted faith in the superstition that one can return to the starting point. Whereas such a road has been walked that it is not possible to return to the beginning.

If a similar endeavor came from another faith, there would be no reactionism left, no fundamentalism, no bigotry. But the desire of Judaism to send all humanity back to that imaginary starting point, to that "original," is met with great understanding, even with admiration. For them the ruling of secularism is not binding. Secularism, after all, is like a protective shield developed to emasculate all people against the Jews. A shield that performs its function as an indifference, an obliviousness, a silence planted in everyone while the Jews put these most radical, most fundamentalist, most bigoted Zionist plans into effect.

While everyone in the world is under the oversight of secularism, the ordinary Israeli citizen has vowed to fulfill a duty given to him by the Holy Book, the duty of rebuilding Solomon's Temple, by demolishing a house of worship, Al-Aqsa Mosque, that stands where that temple is today and where other people perform their worship. Among those who raided Al-Aqsa Mosque, Israeli Member of Parliament Itamar Ben-Gvir said in a post after the raid: "Today, on 9 August, I came to walk with my son David to the Temple Mount (Al-Aqsa Mosque), the holiest place for Jews, and to remind that sovereignty here is ours. Neither rockets nor threats can stop us."

This alone shows why Jerusalem should be under Muslim control and only Muslim control. In history it was only Muslims who provided in Jerusalem an environment of peace in which everyone could live together, because only for Muslims, regardless of who is of which belief, basic human rights deserve to be secure and to be respected.