On the Temple Mount, the Right for All to Pray Must Be Affirmed

Seth Mandel has just written about Jerusalem, the city the Muslims call Al-Quds and that they claim belongs to the Arabs and Muslims, for it is from Jerusalem, and the place known to the Western world as the Temple Mount, that Muhammad made his Night Journey (miraj), on his fabulous wingèd steed Al-Buraq, going up to the Seventh Heaven and back within 24 hours. The connection, then, of Muslims to Jerusalem is one based purely on religious belief. The connection of the Jews to Jerusalem does not require any religious belief. It is history, not fantasy, that connects the Jews to Jerusalem — a history that goes back some 3500 years. “The Jews Are Jerusalem’s Only Hope,” by Seth Mandel, Commentary, May 26, 2025:

Today, to mark Yom Yerushalayim—the day commemorating the reunification of Jerusalem under Jewish sovereignty—a group of Israelis did something provocative and controversial. They prayed.

The provocative part is where they prayed, of course: at the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount. Or, as Reuters called it, the “Al Aqsa mosque site.”

The group was led by Itamar Ben Gvir, a radical rightist and Knesset member who has been in a cold war with the Israeli state itself since his youth. Ben Gvir does and says a thousand genuinely controversial things a day. But I simply cannot muster outrage over this, and I increasingly find it difficult to understand anyone who can.

Praying at the Temple Mount violates the “status quo,” an unofficial set of rules governing the sharing of the holy sites. After Israel reestablished sovereignty over the entire city of Jerusalem, including its holy sites, in 1967, the state agreed to let Arab authorities continue to administer the Mount. In return, Jews could visit the area during restricted hours but they could not visibly pray.

This concession to the Arabs — prohibiting Jews from praying at their most sacred site, the Temple Mount — was made by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and it was a disastrous concession. There was no need to make it; in June 1967, the Arabs were still reeling from their defeat, and would have had to accept any arrangement the Israelis offered. Dayan apparently thought he could win favor with the local Arabs (they had not yet become the “Palestinian people”) by prohibiting Jewish prayer. And he limited the times Jews could visit the Temple Mount to four hours a day, five days a week. Neither of these concessions made a dent in Arab hostility to the Jewish presence, no matter how limited it had become. The Arabs still try to keep the Jews even from visiting the Temple Mount; the Israeli police are stationed on the Mount both to protect Jewish visitors from Arab attacks (including throwing rocks from the Mount onto Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall far below) and to enforce the “no-Jewish-prayer” regulation.

The mosque compound built atop the remnants of the Jewish Holy Temple represent the most famous and most prominent symbol of colonialism in the world today—the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem led to a persistent period of destruction and despoiling of Jewish holy sites….

The Arab Muslims swept out of Arabia in the seventh century, and soon conquered huge swaths of territory from the Atlantic in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east. In the west, their armies in Europe were stopped only in 732 A.D. by Charles Martel at Poitiers. In the east, the Arabs managed to add to their conquests the Sassanian empire of Persia. Later, Christian Byzantium would fall to other Muslims — the Osmanli and then Seljuk Turks, while non-Arab Muslims conquered Afghanistan and much of India. And among the Muslim Arabs’ earliest conquests was Roman Judea, or the Land of Israel, with its capital of Jerusalem. The tale about Muhammad’s journey to the Seventh Heaven was calculated to justify the Muslim hold on Jerusalem, and on the site most holy to the Jews, the Temple Mount.

When the Arabs controlled Jerusalem, there was only squalor: at the Western Wall, and on the Temple Mount, garbage was strewn everywhere and donkeys defecated. Now, under Israel’s beneficent administration, every part of the Old City is kept clean, as any tourist can testify. But there is still that terrible prohibition on Jews praying on the Temple Mount made by Moshe Dayan in a fit of foolishness. The government of Israel should now undo that damage. Instead of having Itamar Ben Gvir go to ostentatiously pray on the Temple Mount — and invite Arab violence — Israel’s Knesset should vote for new regulations covering the Temple Mount. Jews should be allowed to pray, just as Muslims have been doing, on the Temple Mount. This is something that should be easy to understand. Why should Muslims, but not Jews, be allowed to pray at what is the holiest site in Judaism, but only the third holiest site in Islam, after the two Noble Sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina? Furthermore, if Muslims are allowed to pray at all hours of the day, why should Jews be denied that right? Again, how can anyone demand that different rules — stricter limits — should be applied to Jews?

Let the heathen rage; let the UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres demand that Israel not “make such provocative moves and immediately, in the interests of peace with the Arabs, return to the previous arrangement, so no Jewish prayers are said near the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” But Israel won’t give in. Once it is clear that the Israeli police who used to be stationed on the Temple Mount to prevent Jews from praying are now there to ensure that Jews can safely pray, the Arabs will begrudgingly accommodate themselves to the new arrangement.

And there will be no need for Ben-Gvir to provoke, with prayer on the Temple Mount, the quick-to-anger Arabs.