David Weinberg is the managing fellow of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, who has recently published here his argument on why Israel should delay no longer but, in the face of the European countries that have decided to recognize a “state of Palestine” — which would likely have its capital in east Israel— reassert its rights to Jerusalem: “Re-liberating Jerusalem: Why Israel must assert sovereignty over its capital, now – opinion,” by David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, January 24, 2026:
Three news items of the past week serve as reminders that the security and sovereignty situations in Jerusalem require urgent government action.
The first is the passing of the heroic Jerusalem archaeologist Gabi Barkay, who led protests against Wakf’s destruction of Temple Mount antiquities and founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which for the past 20 years has sought to recover and research the ruined, residual antiquities, with important results. Barkay played a major role in pushing back against Palestinian ideological violence in Jerusalem and in reclaiming Jewish historical rights.
The second is the notable change in police policy on the Temple Mount, allowing Jewish/Israeli visitors to bring pages with prayer texts onto the Mount. This is one more blessed step forward toward full-scale and regular Jewish prayer at the site – the holiest place on Earth according to Jewish tradition – with all necessary accoutrements (Torah scrolls, prayer books, tallit and tefillin, and more) in a permanent location.
Aside from being essential from a religious perspective, this is long overdue pushback against the Islamic denialism of Jewish history in Zion and the Palestinian attempt to turn the Temple Mount into ground zero for warfare against Israel.
In 1967, after Israel came into possession of the Old City in Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a fateful decision to ban Jews from praying on the Temple Mount, either aloud or silently, and also forbade Jews from bringing any prayer book, tefillin, or other religious objects to the holiest site in Judaism. He did not want to further inflame the Arabs, who were already suffering from their crushing defeat in the Six-Day War. It was a terrible decision, for it prevented Jews from being able to pray at the holiest site in Judaism, and allowed the Arabs to believe that eventually they would again possess Jerusalem. Recently, the police have looked the other way when Jews have prayed on the Mount, but it is time to explicitly end Dayan’s folly, and to announce that Jews the same right to pray on the Temple Mount as the Muslims have always had. Furthermore, Jews should be allowed to visit the Mount for more than the four hours a day that they are now limited; again, like the Muslims, they should be allowed to visit and pray at any hour.
Third is the razing of the large UNRWA compound in Maalot Dafna (Sheikh Jarrah) in Jerusalem, the necessary and uber-justified result of new laws passed in the Knesset outlawing UNRWA operations in Israel.
This, too, is a long-overdue pushback against the Palestinian refugee-martyrdom narrative, perpetuated by UNRWA’s support for the so-called Palestinian “right of return,” and it is punishment for the involvement of UNRWA personnel and administrators in Hamas operations against Israel in Gaza….
UNRWA has been an enemy of Israel for its entire existence. In its schools, the textbooks are full of anti-Israel and antisemitic venom. From an early age, the students in UNRWA schools are raised in an atmosphere of Jew-hatred that unsurprisingly leads some of them, when grown, to become jihadists eager to murder the Jews. UNRWA has responded to its critics by promising to cleanse its textbooks of such hatred; it never has.
In addition, UNRWA knowingly permitted Hamas to use its school buildings in Gaza to store weapons and to hide its fighters. Hamas also used school buildings as places from which to launch rocket attacks on Israel, hoping that the IDF would refrain from responding by firing on a school building where children might have been located.
Palestinians have grabbed over 2,600 dunam (1 sq.m) of land and built over 30,000 illegal structures in and around Jerusalem. Over the past decade, 1,500 unauthorized buildings have gone up in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Shuafat and Kafr Akab alone, with some of them 15-20 stories tall, built without heeding engineering standards. (God help residents of these buildings if an earthquake hits Jerusalem.)
How many people in the outside world know about the Palestinians’ illegal seizure of land, and their building 30,000 structures on them? Very few. The international media have no desire to present the Palestinians as anything other than victims of the mad-dog Israeli settler-colonial state.
History instructs us: Jerusalem belongs to Israel. It has been the capital of the Jewish people for three millennia. There should be no flags flying on the Temple Mount other than the flag of Israel. It is outrageous that the flags of terror groups — the Islamic State (ISIS), Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad — should have until now been tolerated. Nor does the flag of another nation, Turkey, whose leader has declared Israel to be its enemy, have a right to be flown over sovereign Israeli territory. No banners calling for the annihilation of Jews and the Jewish state should be allowed. The Israeli police have to tear down such banners and flags whenever they appear on the Temple Mount.
When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, there was an outcry by the Arabs, who were sure that if they screamed loud enough at the UN, they could force Israel to undo the move. They were wrong, and now East Jerusalem is widely accepted as part of Israel. When Israel annexed the Golan Heights, won from Syria in the Six-Day War, again there was an Arab outcry, but again, the world got used to it, and now the Golan is even more firmly in Israeli hands because the Druze on the Golan, who were originally hostile to Israel, now see the Jewish state as the guarantor both of their security and that of their fellow Druze inside Syria whom al-Sharaa’s army has attacked.
Let the Jews pray openly at the Temple Mount, and let them bring with them their prayer books, tefillin and tallit, and other religious paraphernalia. Let them no longer be limited to four hours a day to visit the Temple Mount, but allowed to do so during all the hours of the day, just as Muslims have been doing without interruption. Let the Israelis prevent the display of any flags save that of Israel on the Temple Mount. Let any Muslim preacher on the Temple Mount who denounces Jews for “judaizing Jerusalem” or for “storming Muslim sites” be banned from the Mount, and possibly jailed for inciting violence. The world will in the end accept this new dispensation, as it has accepted the annexation of east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
somehistory says
A lot of bad decisions have been made. King David would be dismayed….perhaps angry….if he had known what would happen in the years and centuries after his death.
The guy who said no Jews should pray nor have written materials where they had prayed for centuries, was, imo, an idiot.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
That man was Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan. He was no idiot. But in his decisions about the Temple Mount he was…disappointing.
somehistory says
I stick with my opinion
Wellington says
With respect, somehistory, I must agree with Hugh Fitzgerald about Moshe Dayan. He was no idiot but he was still wrong. And what is most disturbing about all this is that a person can be a truly great person, a superlative human being, but still make bad decisions.
As another example, Ronald Reagan, whom I consider one of America’s ten greatest Presidents (and anyone not placing him in the top 15 is not rooted in the truth but in a warped agenda) was terribly wrong about providing a limited amount of weaponry to the mullahs in Iran as a gesture of goodwill, and which led to the entire Iran/Contra mess that Democrats aplenty tried to take advantage of for rank political reasons. But this major error by Reagan does not make him into an idiot or anything like this. Rather, and in keeping with the best of ancient Greek tragedies, it makes him into a flawed but still great figure—as with Dayan and so many others, for instance Trump comes to mind.
Hope you and family are doing well. As always, we may have a disagreement here and there but we’re on the same page most of the time. I like that.
somehistory says
Thank you, Wellington.
I appreciate that you respect, although you disagree with, my opinion.
Opinions can change.
However, when they had what they were fighting for, to turn over so much to the scum who wanted them all dead, was beyond arrogance on his part.
He decided for all Jews….not just for himself….that they could no longer pray where he said they could not. He had to know of what the enemy was capable, what they sought, what they would do in the future, perhaps after he was dead and gone when it would no longer matter to him.
He gave the power over that most important area to the enemy. It was not his decision to make for all Jews because he feared more violence.
And look at the violence which has come to Israel.
For that, I say he was an idiot. If that term is wrong, then at the very least, he was way too arrogant.
Thank you, again. It also pleases me that most of the time, we are in full agreement. I don’t know anyone who agrees with everything I think or say.
carpediadem says
Great generals don’t always understand peacetime needs.
Dayan was not religious and seemed to prioritise appeasing Muslims rather than asserting Jewish possession of its own holy sites
Unfortunately some Israelis still think like this.
gravenimage says
Agreed, Hugh.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Good exchange
I do agree w/ Hugh and Wellington that Moshe Dayan was no idiot, but I do agree w/ somehistory as well that he made a decision about Temple Mount that affected all Jews: it wasn’t his personal fiefdom to barter away, and also, at the time, all Arab countries were hostile to Israel – it wasn’t just the “Palestinians”. On this point, I agree w/ Debbie Schlussel when she once faulted Israel for not demolishing that entire thing in 1967, when they had nothing to lose by doing it. Obviously, it would be impossible today, w/ Israel trying to sell the idea that it’s the best country in the region for muslims
On Reagan arming the mullahs in Iran, in all fairness to him, that decision didn’t originate at his desk. It originated in Israel. At the time, Menachem Begin was concerned about the military support that Iraq was getting – both directly from the Soviets (Saddam was one of their top customers) and indirectly from the US (via Egypt, which was trying to get back into the good graces of the Arab League, which had expelled it for signing the Camp David Accords and which was solidly behind Iraq, w/ the exceptions of Syria and Libya). He perceived, probably accurately, that if Iraq ended up winning that war, it would emerge as the Arab superpower of the region, even safer than Egypt. Jordan was a buffer zone b/w Israel and Iraq, so unlike in the case of Egypt, Jordan or Syria, there was no way Israel could occupy Iraqi territory that would be contiguous w/ their own territory
That is why Israel, under the radar, supported and supplied Iran during that war, to enable them to retain hold of Khuzestan. Not b’cos they wanted Ayatollah Khomenei to win, but b’cos they wanted that war to end in a stalemate, which it did. It turned out to be a good longterm decision for Israel as well: at the time, Iranians, regardless of what they throught about Khomenei or islam, still rallied behind the flag to repel Iraqi aggression, which Saddam had cast as the battle of al-Qadisiyyah (the 7th century battle in which the Arabs trounced the Persians and followed it up by quickly overrunning Iran)
It’s worth noting that at the time, even Reza Pahlavi, who had been a pilot in the Iranian air force, offered his services to Iran to fight Iraq, but was rebuffed. Today, Iranians who are demonstrating in the streets are very appreciative of Israel, given that they also remember, among other things, that Israel stood w/ their country against Iraq. What Ollie North did was illegal, given that he seemed to run his own foreign policy, but from a bigger picture standpoint, he – and Israel – supporting Iran in that war turned out to be a good decision
Back to this – it’s high time Israel at least completely lifts the ban on Jews praying there, even if they are loathe to demolish that mosque
gravenimage says
+1
William L Garrison, Jr. says
Rather than faulting just Gen. Moshe Dayan for limiting Israeli control of the Temple Mount, do not forget the earlier “Weizmann-Faisal Agreement” of Jan. 3, 1919, stated: “His Royal Highness the Emir FAISAL, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of HEJAZ, AND Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization… in the development of the Arab State and Palestine …. have agreed upon the following articles ….: Article VI: “The Mohammedan Holy Places shall be under Mohammedan control.” https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-weizmann-faisal-agreement-january-1919
carpediadem says
Thank you for this, I was not aware of it.
William L Garrison, Jr. says
Furthermore, on 27 June 1967 the Knesset enacted the “Protection of Holy Places Law”, which stipulated (in part): “1. The Holy Places shall be protected from desecration and any other violation and from anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings with regard to those places.” https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/israel-protection-of-holy-places-law-1967 For clarification, following that vote, Israeli Prime Minister said on 27 June 1967: “It is our intention to entrust the internal administration and arrangements of the Holy Places to the religious leaders of the Communities to which they respectively belong; the task of carrying out all necessary procedures is in the hands of the Minister of Religious Affairs.” https://www.gov.il/en/pages/14-protection-of-holy-places-law
Wellington says
Israel after the Six-Day War should have annexed the so-called West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Golan Heights (yes, I know that in theory the GH have been annexed but more should have been done pronto) and Gaza as well. This should have been followed by expulsion of a great many people just as the Czechs and Poles did after WWII.
Moreover, and all things considered, I would argue that after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 Israel should have kept the Sinai and thus the Camp David Accords of 1978 were an error for both Israel and Western Civilization in general (fitting since Jimmy Carter was the orchestrator of this, just as he was of undermining the Shah of Iran the very next year, neither of which were good for the West in general but then Carter was a doofus just as Obama and Biden were).
So, it’s more than just Jerusalem. It should have been much more. Anyone disagreeing with me, then I would ask this question: Do you think the way things are has been better? I posit the contention that my scenario would have definitely been better—for Israel, for America, for all the West and for the best of what is sound, decent and self-preserving of the better part of humanity.
James Lincoln says
No disagreement from me, Wellington.
If I may add something, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s “Disengagement Plan” from Gaza – completed in 2005 – turned out to be a complete disaster.
Hamas was soon voted in (2006) by the so-called “Palestinians” which directly led to the start of the Hamas-Israeli War October 7, 2023.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I also actually think that the Camp David Accords were a mistake. I know Anwar Sadat is celebrated by Israelis (I recall reading his praises by Steven Covey), but as it turned out, he could be – and was – assassinated, and once that happened, his successor Mubarak slowly but surely reversed his policies to a happy medium b/w the policies of Nasser and the policies of Sadat. The curricula in Egypt is still pretty anti-Semitic, and what’s as bad, if not worse – the Sinai went on to become a hotbed for Jihadists
Not only do I agree w/ you that Israel should have annexed Judea, Samaria and Gaza – they should have annexed Sinai as well, and expelled all their muslim denizens into Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Had Israel’s southwestern border been the Suez Canal, every regime in Egypt – including Morsi’s – would have been a lot more leery of being at the receiving end of an Israeli attack, just like Ahmad al-Shara’a is in Damascus, which is perilously close to the Golan Heights
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I completely agree w/ this. Since it’s too late for Israel to demolish the mosques in question, this is the next best thing they can do. Over time, the world just accepts things as a fait accompli, just like they’ve accepted the Russian annexation of the Crimea
John1 says
When a country or countries attack another country or countries to acquire more territory, and then are defeated, the winner is entitled to take land from the aggressors who lost. If the Arabs had won any of their three wars to destroy Israel would they give back the territory? Hell no.
OLD GUY says
Not only Hell No, but anyone with half a brain would know you are 100% correct. Islam only conquers until it gets its ass kicked and then it cries like a bitch.