Maybe it was just the product of the ongoing civil war between the different political parties on the Israeli right. Or maybe it was just time that an Israeli prime minister said something that, in a saner world, wouldn’t be considered controversial. But whatever motivated Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to speak of Israeli security forces and police acting to maintain order on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount after Arab disturbances while also “maintaining freedom of worship for Jews” at the sacred site, it was a first and, in the eyes of many in his own country’s foreign policy and security establishment, something that could be a dangerous mistake that will lead to violence.
Bennett’s statement, made on Tisha B’Av—the day on the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples that existed on the Mount—was an eye-opener for a number of reasons. But it came in the context of what appears to be a shift in policy by the new government in that, for the first time since the city was unified in 1967, it is acknowledging that Jews are being allowed to pray at the holiest place in Judaism.
After an illegal Jordanian occupation that lasted from 1948 to 1967, Israel took control of the Temple Mount when it unified Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. Israeli rule meant that for the first time in its modern history, there was complete freedom of worship at all the holy places in Jerusalem. Prior to 1948, the British—and before them, the Turks—had maintained a status quo that established Jews as second-class citizens with respect to prayer at many holy places. During the Jordanian occupation, Jews were forbidden to pray at the Western Wall, let alone the Temple Mount.
But the one exception to that rule after June 1967 was on the Temple Mount where Jews were, in theory, allowed to visit, but forbidden to pray. Then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan decided, in a gesture intended to help keep the peace, to allow the Muslim Waqf to maintain control over the Temple Mount. Those Jews who did visit were often harassed by Arabs, including police, who were vigilant against any behavior that might be construed as prayer.
That was a policy that was not challenged by any Israeli government, including those led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the coalition that has succeeded him is still to some extent claiming, as Netanyahu’s governments always did, that there has been no change in the status quo.
The ban on prayer was maintained because Israeli governments feared that Palestinian Arab leaders would use any gesture towards acknowledging the Mount’s holiness to Jews, as well as to the Muslims who worshiped at the mosques there, to justify violence. Since the beginning of the conflict a century ago, leaders such as Haj Amin el-Husseini, the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas have attempted to gin up violence and hate by claiming that the Jews are planning to blow up the mosques.
Palestinians have consistently treated any acknowledgment of Jewish rights to the Mount as an intolerable insult to all of Islam—an unreasonable stand that has nevertheless been supported by the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. Even the supposedly “moderate” Abbas hasn’t hesitated to play that card, vowing that the “filthy feet” of Jews would not be allowed to defile Jerusalem’s holy places during the so-called “stabbing intifada” in 2015 and 2016.
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