Equality on the Temple Mount

Good news from Jerusalem. For weeks, groups of Jews have ascended the Temple Mount and prayed out loud and prostrated themselves. They are resisting what is colloquially known as the Temple Mount “status quo,” an informal arrangement between Israel and the Muslim Council administering the site that restricts Jewish prayer. Meanwhile, Muslim prayers at the Temple Mount’s al-Aqsa Mosque, the most famous mosque in the Holy Land, have gone on normally. And there has been peace.

One might’ve predicted otherwise: Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount this August was greeted with international outrage. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Ben-Gvir’s “blatant disregard for the historic status quo with respect to the holy sites in Jerusalem” and warned of “exacerbate[d] tensions.” The Saudis and others echoed Blinken. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted, without mentioning Ben-Gvir, that arrangements on the Temple Mount were unchanged.

The Temple Mount (“Haram al-Sharif” in Arabic; “Har HaBayit” in Hebrew) is the elevated quadrilateral in Jerusalem’s Old City where the ancient Israelite temples once sat, and where al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock sit now. Confusingly, the original, local usage of the phrase “status quo” concerned an arrangement for Christian holy sites, not Muslim or Jewish ones. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin ratified the decades-old “status quo” allowing Christians access to churches in Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Since gaining control of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967, Israel has preserved this arrangement, and it isn’t in dispute. 

What’s in dispute now is what Jews, and only Jews, may do on the Temple Mount. Muslim worship there is unrestricted. Tourism is unrestricted. But Muslims want Jewish worship to be restricted. For decades, the Israeli police have stopped Jews from praying in quorums or donning ritual phylacteries and shawls to pray alone (praying alone without garb was usually okay, so long as the worshipper didn’t bow or sway unreasonably).

This capricious arrangement deserves better opponents than the repulsive Ben-Gvir. Israel’s 1967 Law for the Protection of Holy Places guarantees “freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them.” The Temple Mount is sacred to Jews and the mosques on the Temple Mount are sacred to Muslims. Both should be permitted to pray, not clandestinely, but fully garbed, in groups, and out loud––in equality. 

Four consecutive governments––the Ottoman empire, the British mandatory government, Jordan, and Israel––have supervised restrictions against Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount and its surroundings. During the Ottoman period (1517–1917), Jewish access to the Temple Mount itself wasn’t disputed, because most Jewish legal authorities believed the Temple Mount’s sanctity prohibited Jews from ascending. But Jews wanted, and were usually allowed, to pray at the Western Wall, the only surviving portion of the Temple Mount’s retaining wall. Nevertheless, the Ottomans prohibited Jews from bringing benches, Torah scrolls, or dividing screens (traditional Jewish prayer is segregated by sex). Jews could sometimes bribe their way around these restrictions, as Yehoshua Porath explains in his history of early Palestinian Arab politics, and they weren’t strictly enforced at the end of Ottoman rule.

The British conquered Palestine in 1917. The Balfour Declaration of that year committed the British government to facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, and for several years Jews prayed at the Western Wall as they pleased. But during Passover in 1922, Arabs physically prevented Jews from bringing benches to the Western Wall. The British-sponsored Supreme Muslim Council, under Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, justified Arab violence on the grounds that Jewish prayers at the Western Wall expressed a “fond desire to take over al-Haram al-Sharif.” Thus began the long career of a Palestinian Arab charge that Jews sought to displace Muslims from the Temple Mount. The Council sent a delegation around the Middle East to advertise the Jewish threat to the mosques and raise money for renovations. Arabs responded with outraged philanthropy. A conflict local to Palestine was thus lucratively converted into a regional and religious conflict led by a vanguard of Palestinian Arabs.

The struggle turned mass-murderous in the summer of 1929. In 1928, the British authorities had removed a dividing screen used by Jews on Yom Kippur. That November, British Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery banned Jews from using ritual “appurtenances” prohibited in Ottoman times, though a week earlier Amery had told Parliament that the Jews “have no intention of asking for anything inconsistent with the inviolability of the Moslem Holy Places.” Encouraged by British limits on Jewish worship and instigated by Hajj Amin, Arab newspapers and organizations throughout 1929 accused Zionists of designs on Haram al-Sharif. The Friday after the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, in August, thousands of Muslims stormed the Western Wall Plaza, beating up an elderly Jew. On August 22, a series of speakers at the Temple Mount urged anti-Jewish violence. The riots began hours later in the Old City and spread throughout mandatory Palestine. By the time the British authorities managed to restore order several days later, 133 Jews had been murdered and several hundred more raped and injured.

The British government report on the 1929 massacres did not find credible evidence of Jewish threats against Muslim holy sites, though it lamented some “intemperate” newspaper articles and a peaceful march by Jewish youths shouting “the wall is ours!” the week prior. The report found that Arab violence originating near the Temple Mount was fundamentally caused by “racial animosity” against Jews. “The demands of Arab nationals” conflicted with a “national home for the Jews”––with Zionism as a whole, not any specific part of it, whether real or imagined.

From Israel’s independence in 1948 until 1967, Jerusalem’s Old City was occupied by Jordan, which expelled Jewish residents and prevented Jewish worship. Israel’s conquest of the Old City on June 7, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, was a euphoric moment for Jews, who could now freely pray at the Western Wall.

Not so on the Temple Mount. Shortly after Israel gained control of the Old City, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan determined that the Jordan-controlled Muslim Council would maintain administrative responsibilities for entry to the Temple Mount. Dayan’s general policy––to quote Shlomo Gazit, Dayan’s deputy for Israel’s newly acquired territories––was to allow “Muslims to conduct their affairs with as little interference as possible,” even if Jewish access was thereby restricted. When Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the IDF, ascended the Temple Mount to pray during the 1967 fast of Tisha B’Av, the Muslim Council was outraged. Dayan reprimanded Goren, and the Israeli police subsequently prevented Jews from praying conspicuously and in groups.

Like the 1929 riots, the two worst Palestinian terror wars in recent years have been marketed as defenses of al-Aqsa Mosque. In September 2000, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, mayor of Jerusalem, visited the Temple Mount (though not its mosques) with a security detail. The immediate Arab response was mild; the visit had been coordinated with Palestinian Authority security forces. But the following Friday, Arabs praying on the Temple Mount threw rocks at Jews at the Western Wall. Palestinian media then decried Sharon’s “desecration” of the mosques. Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat praised the resistance to Sharon’s “dangerous visit.” The next five years of terrorism killed a thousand Israelis and were dubbed the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” though Palestinian Authority officials later admitted to planning the violence before Sharon’s visit.

Hamas named its October 2023 incursion into southern Israel “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” hoping and failing to elicit general Muslim cooperation in its war against Israel. The self-evidently absurd name––how could massacring Jews near Gaza defend a mosque fifty miles away in Jerusalem?––reveals al-Aqsa’s safety to be a plastic excuse for Palestinian violence. The source of that violence hasn’t changed in a century. It isn’t borders, sovereignty over Jerusalem, or even Israel’s settlements and military presence in the West Bank, which came after several Arab-Israeli wars and years of pre-state fighting. The source of Palestinian violence is the belief that Jews can be evicted from the land. The conflict will end when the Palestinians either succeed or stop trying.

As for the Temple Mount, Muslim rights there do not compete with Jewish rights. Muslim exclusivism has simply been allowed to triumph over Jewish pluralism. Adherents of both religions can pray––are praying––peacefully under Israeli security protection.

It is a shame that the campaign against Jewish equality on the Temple Mount included Jews. Until very recently, Israeli courts were unwilling to let Jews pray there openly. Even when Jews won favorable rulings, Israel’s political leaders insisted nothing had changed. After Ben-Gvir’s recent visit, a black-white alliance of Haredim and Ashkenazi secularists mooted a bill banning Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount entirely. The latter hope to weaken the Netanyahu government. The former hope to impose on all Jews the traditional view that ascending to the Temple Mount is impermissible. But since Goren’s Temple Mount prayers after the Six Day War, two generations of Zionistic orthodox rabbis have argued compellingly (though perhaps not decisively) against the traditional view.

I’m sympathetic to the traditional view. I have never been up to the Temple Mount. But the Israeli state should be liberal about such matters, protecting those Jews who want to go up to do so in peace. It certainly should not extend for another minute the “historic” restriction of Jewish rights on the pretext of Muslim rage.

Cole S. Aronson writes from Jerusalem.

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Image by Nirvana Dwaik1, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.