Islamists, Pinhas Inbari explains, are deeply divided over the religious status of the al-Aqsa mosque and of Jerusalem in general. While the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an offshoot) sees Jerusalem as its symbolic religious center and the mosque as itself holy, Salafists like Islamic State and al-Qaeda suspect the holiness of any site outside of Mecca and Medina and have downplayed the importance of Jerusalem. Further differences divide Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and divide Palestinians among themselves:

One reason for the Muslim Brotherhood’s pronounced emphasis on the al-Aqsa issue is political. They want to unify all the Arab revolutions in all the separate Arab countries into one great revolution under the flag of saving al-Aqsa. . . . Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, for their part, regard this as a political danger and hence do not support the Palestinians’ struggle to entrench their status in Jerusalem; they see the emphasis on Jerusalem as working against them. . . .

In seeking to maintain its status in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority came up with the idea of “religious tourism” to the city. The aim is to flood it with Muslim tourists, who would strengthen its Muslim character and thereby counteract the [supposed] “Judaization” trend in the city. The Muslim Brotherhood harshly condemned this initiative, calling it “normalization.” In their view, inundating the city with tourists sharply contradicts the slogans about battle and warfare to liberate al-Aqsa, with which they hope to unite the whole world of Islam under their flag. . . .

The dominant force in the mosque compound is Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Islamic Liberation party). Deployed worldwide, Hizb ut-Tahrir has adopted the exclusive goal of promoting the idea of the Islamic caliphate and does not hide its intention to proclaim the caliphate from al-Aqsa. Thus, the movement clashes with the PLO on the one hand, as in the ousting of the senior Palestinian official, and with Hamas on the other, but first and foremost with Jordan [which currently has custodianship of the mosque].

Only Israel, Inbari concludes, can be counted on to keep a lid on the intra-Muslim conflicts, and is able to prevent Salafists from taking over and destroying al-Aqsa as they have other Muslim holy places in Syria and Iraq.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.