Har Habyis: Chizuk from Al Jazeera!
You know the old joke about reading Der Stürmer to hear the good news, right?
All I see is Rabbi Shraga Kallus. So, I need to start believing the goyim!
Quoting Al Jazeera (bolding added):
Jordan has been the official custodian of Christian and Muslim holy places in Jerusalem since 1924. Following the Third Arab-Israeli War, when Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967, Israel accepted the continuation of this status quo agreement, which states that while non-Muslims are allowed to visit the Al-Aqsa compound, they cannot worship or pray inside.
The arrangement at the time was uncontroversial. For hundreds of years, Jewish religious authorities issued strict prohibitions on Jews visiting the compound, on the grounds that they could accidentally defile the purity of the site. Until relatively recently, these bans were accepted by the overwhelming majority of Israel’s Jewish public.
According to Mordechai Inbari, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, this started to change during the Oslo peace negotiations in the 1990s.
Fearing the Israeli government may at some point transfer sovereignty of Al-Aqsa over to the newly created Palestinian Authority, a committee of settler rabbis issued a ruling urging all rabbis who held the exceedingly fringe view that it was permissible for Jews to enter the Temple Mount to “ascend the Mount themselves, and to guide their congregants in ascending the Mount”.
Their reason for promoting a ruling that was supported by a very small minority was political: to encourage masses of Jews to enter Al-Aqsa to pray in order to establish facts on the ground that would make it harder for Palestinians to ever assume sovereignty over the site, Inbari tells Al Jazeera.
Since then, this movement, led by a small group of individuals from Israel’s so-called “national-religious” camp – who are often referred to as “Temple Mount activists” – has been enormously successful.
Over the years, there has been a meteoric increase in visits by Jews to the compound, with right-wing Jewish Israelis challenging the status quo with increasing resolve and frequency. Last year, these visits hit a record high, with about 50,000 religious Zionists visiting the holy compound.
Last year, a survey found that exactly half of Jewish Israeli respondents support allowing Jews to pray at the Al-Aqsa compound, or the Temple Mount, with most saying they support it because it would send a message about Israel’s control over the site, rather than for religious reasons.
During the last few years, Israeli police have begun allowing for daily prayers to be carried out in the compound, hinting at a dramatic change in the status quo. The police, who just a few years ago would have ejected any person suspected of praying or even possessing a Torah, now look on passively and provide protection to the worshippers if Palestinians, like the Murabitat, attempt to confront them.
An Israeli police spokesperson, however, denied any change in policy to Al Jazeera, stating that there have been “no changes to the status quo,” and that any non-Muslim who attempts to pray in the compound is “immediately detained”.
At the start of the year, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an outspoken supporter of Jews praying at Al-Aqsa, provocatively visited the compound days after being sworn in as Israel’s minister for national security, as part of the country’s newly formed government – considered the most right-wing in its history. It was one of the highest-profile visits by an Israeli official since then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon did so in 2000, which sparked the second Intifada.
But for the Temple Mount activists, this discursive strategy that has successfully garnered general support for Jewish prayer at Al-Aqsa is part of a larger plan to eventually demolish the Dome of the Rock and build a third temple in its place.
In a similar process that transformed Jewish worship at Al-Aqsa from a fringe religious position to one that is supported by half of Jewish Israelis, Temple Mount activists hope that as Jewish presence and worship become normalised at the holy site, the idea of building the third temple will likewise become acceptable to mainstream Israeli society in the future.
Amen to that!