RUTHFULLY YOURS

Attempts to ban Jews from worship at their holiest site have become normalized and yet would be unimaginable anywhere else.

The Temple Mount has continued to be a political flashpoint in the Israeli–Arab conflict. During the most recent Ramadan, Palestinian Arabs rioted continuously throughout the month, stockpiling rocks and fireworks at the sacred site. The rioters alleged that the violence was “defensive” in response to Israel possibly altering the “status quo” of operations at the Temple Mount.

But what is the actual arrangement at the Temple Mount?

Since Israel liberated Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation in the Six-Day War, the Temple Mount has remained formally under Israeli sovereignty. However, in an effort to cool tensions in the Muslim world, Israel has permitted the day-to-day administration of the Temple to be overseen by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, a Jordanian institution that exercises guardianship over various holy sites. To this point, Article 9 of the 1994 Israel–Jordan Peace Treaty stipulates that both parties agreed to “provide freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance.”

While this arrangement appears reasonably conciliatory, it has developed an inescapable element of absurdity: The current status quo is that Jews are permitted to visit the Temple Mount, but they are not allowed to pray at the Temple Mount, which remains the holiest site in Judaism. Only Muslims are permitted to pray at the site. This may be normal in illiberal Muslim regimes such as Saudi Arabia, but in Israel, this is the only place where a religious group is banned from worship at their holy site — and it happens to be the Jews.

Police at the site stop any physical manifestation of Jewish prayer. Last year, the police banned a Jewish man from visiting the site for 15 days after he was seen whispering Jewish prayers, a ban that the man eventually challenged in court.

The magistrate court judge determined that because the prayer was quiet, it did not pose a genuine security risk that such prayer is alleged to cause. However, a district court judge reversed the holding out of concern that any tacit support of Jewish prayer might spark Arab violence, the rationale being that quiet prayer is still overt if noticed.

The recent decision by the Jerusalem District Court reaffirms that fear of violence from Palestinians drives the suppression of basic Jewish expression. Various times in the past decade — almost every year, in fact — masked Palestinians have appeared at the Mount armed with Molotov cocktails, homemade explosives, and rocks to harass Jewish worshippers.

Hence, the prohibition of Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount is justified as a “public security measure.” We are supposed to believe that the mere sight of a Jew praying will provoke such uncontrollable rage in Palestinian Arabs that it will leave them no choice but to riot. In short, the sound of a Jewish prayer is considered incitement in the 21st century. This is the ultimate heckler’s veto.

Unsurprisingly, the violence is valorized by the Palestinian government. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has stated in no uncertain terms that, “The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours . . . and they have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.” Meanwhile, the Islamic Waqf continues to engage in twisted justifications of violence against Jews, asserting that the ruling from the magistrate court served as a “clear provocation” for Muslims globally.

The tone from the Jordanian government has been similar, if not more incendiary, with Prime Minister al-Khasawneh declaring, “I salute every Palestinian and all the employees of the Jordanian Islamic Wakf, who proudly stand like minarets, hurling their stones in a volley of clay at the Zionist sympathizers defiling the Al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of the Israeli occupation government.”

Similarly, the international public’s response has been either to push the Israeli courts to punish Jewish prayer, as the Biden administration did shortly after the magistrate court’s softer ruling, or to demonize Israeli security forces for attempting to quell the violence by framing stories as Israeli police “storming” the Mount.

The idea that a Western country — at the behest of authoritarian regimes — bans a religious group from worship at its holiest site is outrageous. Yet the denial of Jewish religious rights is perhaps the one offense the international community does not accuse Israel of.

In an age when religious persecution is supposedly a priority of the international human-rights community, the stunning blind spot of the Temple Mount can be explained only by the common thread that runs through the European-dominated international legal community — a compulsion to vindicate antisemitism within the Arab world by any means necessary, including via an inversion of the truth.

For those who allegedly care deeply about religious freedom, the prohibition on Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount should shock you. The absurdity of the mental gymnastics committed by every party, from the Biden administration to the Islamic Waqf, cannot be overstated. The notion that Jewish prayer must be silenced in order to keep violent rioters at bay is absurd. It is high time the international community acknowledges the absurdity of referring to prayer as “provocation.” For no other religion would such euphemisms be reserved.