Continuing the Temple Mount revolution - by Nadav Shragai

...The ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount is milk spilled by Moshe Dayan after the Six-Day War – it's a crime against God, but it's unlikely to be rectified now. The sop of comfort that remains to Jews on the Temple Mount – free visits at their people's holiest site – is the bare minimum. Halevy and Erdan realized that the time was ripe and that they had to push for the historic change.

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
31 January '19..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/continue-the-temple-mount-revolution/



The quiet revolution on the Temple Mount, one of the most volatile places in the Middle East, has been taking place far from the spotlights for a few years. It was brought about gradually, with wisdom and determination, and was good for the Jews. Within a few years, the number of Jewish visitors increased sevenfold, from about 5,000 per year to over 35,000 per year in 2018. That is very few compared to the millions of Muslims and hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the Jewish people's holiest site each year, but it's a modest beginning to fixing the historic and religious wrong that kept Jews off the Mount. Previous governments, and especially Jerusalem police commanders, took care to perpetuate that wrong for almost 50 years.

The architect of the change in the police's attitude toward Jews visiting the Temple Mount was Jerusalem District Police Chief Yoram Halevy. The one who gave him political backing was Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan. Many of their predecessors saw Jews visiting the holy site as a nuisance and a danger, and curtailed those visits as much as possible. They stuck to their side of the status quo, which prevented Jews from praying on the Mount, and ignored the other part of it – that Jews were allowed to visit.

History called in Halevy and Erdan, both of whom received religious Zionist educations in Jerusalem, and had the courage to challenge the rigid thinking that saw any Jewish presence on the Temple Mount as a danger. Their predecessors saw any expansion of the rabbinical ruling that allow Jews to visit the Mount as a threat; Erdan and Halevy saw it as an opportunity. When Halevy said over a year ago that "the number of visitors to the Temple Mount is doubling," and even called on Jews to "come to the Temple Mount," he expressed a Zionist, sovereign worldview of a place where Zionism and Israeli sovereignty have been backtracking since the 1967 Six-Day War.


The change in outlook led to us having some hold on the Temple Mount – a practical one, not just slogans. The renewed Jewish presence at a place that was nearly free of Jews for almost 50 years, has far-reaching implications. Since 1967, the Muslims have been using the absence of Jews on the Mount as a basis for their claims that it belongs to them alone. Today, the factual basis for that claim has shrunk, and there is hope that it will continue to shrink – that Halevy and Erdan's successors will understand the importance of the change in policy and continue it.

Halevy was the first to give Jewish visitors the sense that they were neither foreign nor dangerous on the Mount. A liaison framework between the Israel Police and the Temple Mount organizations was set up. The police on the Temple Mount, who had made things difficult for Jewish visitors, started to welcome them and transformed visits from a nightmare to a reasonable experience. Not all of the restrictions have been lifted, but Jews are freer on the Mount now than they have been since the Six-Day War.

Erdan and Halevy also led the process of removing – and eventually outlawing entirely – members of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement from the Temple Mount, as well as the movement's auxiliaries: the Murabitun and the Murabitat, groups of Muslim "guards" who would harass Jews. They would try to block the path of Jewish visitors and subjected them to endless goading and provocations. Thousands would be bussed in from the Triangle area in northern Israel and the Galilee, and they were paid – each murabitun or murabitat activist earned thousands of shekels a month. A few, it eventually turned out, even planned terrorist acts that were designed to disrupt the routine of visits to the Temple Mount.

The officials who will succeed Halevy and Erdan must continue the revolution. The ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount is milk spilled by Moshe Dayan after the Six-Day War – it's a crime against God, but it's unlikely to be rectified now. The sop of comfort that remains to Jews on the Temple Mount – free visits at their people's holiest site – is the bare minimum. Halevy and Erdan realized that the time was ripe and that they had to push for the historic change.

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