Meir Y. Soloveichik
Commentary Magazine, June 2020
All this reveals that the questions of Jewish presence on, and the right to pray at, the Temple Mount are bound up with the very issue of Israel’s right to exist itself.
On May 6, 2022, Israel’s Independence Day, the Temple Mount was opened to Jews for the first time in 11 days. Jewish visitors, calmly and proudly walking into the sacred space, were hurried through the site by police. Their efforts to sing the national anthem and hoist the Israeli flag were quickly curtailed by Israeli police. The patriotism and reverence on display inspired the pride and respect of many.
But to one minister of the current government, Jews such as these are a menace. In an interview several days earlier, the Labour Party’s Diaspora minister, Nacham Shai, blamed the tensions at the site on one group, and it was not Hamas. No, it was the Jews of Israel, in his view, who had the gall to seek to visit Judaism’s holiest site; even worse, in his view, was that some had violated the “status quo,” according to which Jews can visit, but not pray, at Judaism’s holiest site. “There are a lot more Jews who are going up to the Temple Mount. There are some that stop on the way and pray, which was forbidden,” Shai said in an interview. He added: “There is a certain escalation, a certain deterioration. Also, with the status quo. They opened the Mount and let more and more Jews go there. The price that we will pay later, all of us, will be huge.”
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