This article is a preview from the Spring 2019 edition of New Humanist
Twice a week, rain or shine, restraining order or not, Israeli activist Tom Nisani travels to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a 37-acre complex dotted with date palms, cypress trees and holy icons. This is the most sacred site in Judaism and third most sacred site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. According to security officials, Nisani and his activist friends threaten all-out war. Nisani says he is exercising his right to religious freedom.
“There’s this idea that I’m more dangerous to the public than the Arabs around me,” scoffs Nisani, who is an organiser for a coalition of far-right, nationalist students campaigning for access to the site.
Known as the Temple Mount by Jews and as the Noble Sanctuary by Muslims, this is the most emotive flashpoint in Jerusalem’s Old City. Some Muslims see it as their exclusive dominion. A growing number of religious Jews argue they have a God-given right to worship here. The question of sovereignty over the ancient man-made platform has the potential to exacerbate conflict across Jerusalem, Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
For centuries, the Temple Mount has been revered by the three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – which all, one way or another, say it will be the place where God’s chosen people will experience redemption. According to Judaism, the “foundation stone” is the place where God created the world. Today the slab lies underneath an Islamic shrine, the gold-plated, mosaiced Dome of the Rock, constructed in the 6th century. It is close to the al-Aqsa Mosque, a central place in Islamic theology. Jews say this is where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac and where God gathered the dust that created Adam. The Hebrew Bible says it was the spot where King Solomon erected the First Temple and King Herod refurbished the Second Temple.
In recent decades, the Temple Mount has been a source of a grisly battle for sovereignty, a potent combination of religious sentiment and nationalist territorial struggle. The walled compound sits in the eastern part of Jerusalem’s Old City. Much of the current tension dates back to the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel captured Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. The site had previously been controlled by the Jordanian authorities, which prohibited both Jewish and Arab Israelis from entering.
After capturing the Old City, Israeli forces briefly hoisted an Israeli flag over the Temple Mount. But shortly after the war, the Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan formally yielded sovereignty to the Jordanian Waqf, an Islamic religious authority which has controlled the site since the 12th century. Aware of the Temple Mount’s potential to provoke a region-wide holy war, Israeli politicians were willing to re-establish Islamic dominance. In the same vein, they refrained from offering concrete answers to complex issues like duelling Israeli and Palestinian bids for Jerusalem as their capital. They agreed to a new status quo, incorporating a 19th-century agreement which forbade non-Muslim prayer on Temple Mount but allowed non-Muslims to visit at designated times. The Waqf managed the site, while Israeli authorities shared responsibility for security.
Israeli Temple Mount activists, a largely young and eclectic group of radical religious Jews who hope to recreate ritual practices at the site in anticipation of the coming of the Jewish messiah, argued that the land Israel conquered in 1967 should be followed by a return to “Greater Israel”, a biblical concept that includes these territories. It was a sharp defiance of Israel’s official political line, which classified the Palestinian lands as militarily occupied territory which could be leveraged in future negotiations. In the Old City, Israel declared the Western Wall, the retaining wall along Temple Mount, to be the national site of Jewish worship, hoping to circumvent the question of who actually owned the site itself. Jews were granted limited access. But those who wanted more began to push back.
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Although the status of Temple Mount is emotive, it remained for decades a fringe issue in Israeli politics. Today, activists once seen as extremists form part of the government, and as failed political negotiations over the conflict have deepened a sense that peace is impossible, radicalisation has blossomed.
Nisani runs a vast network of loosely organised, mostly young activists known on Facebook as “Students for the Temple Mount”. They want to tear down the Dome of the Rock to rebuild an ancient Jewish temple destroyed centuries ago. Some activists believe this would either spur or happen concurrently with an era of peace and the return of the messiah. Their stunts, which range from mumbling prayers to full religious rites atop the Mount, have placed them in a standoff with Israeli authorities for years.
In June 2017, Nisani performed the Jewish ritual of kiddushin, or consecration of marriage, with his wife Sara on the Temple Mount, in glaring defiance of laws that forbid non-Muslim prayer and religious ceremonies. Flanked by a rabbi and the three witnesses required to make the act official under Jewish law, Nisani posed in front of his friend’s smartphone camera. “With this ring, you are betrothed to me, by the law of Moses and Israel,” Nisani declared to Sara, staring unflinchingly at the camera, in a clip that later went viral in Israel. Instead of family and friends, the couple’s audience was dozens of guards employed to ensure that Jewish visitors refrain from disturbing public order. Sara flashes her ring to the camera before the video cuts out and the group is removed by the guards. Nisani was detained and, within a few days, received a letter banning him from the Temple Mount for six months.
One Thursday morning in December 2018, Nisani – then under another, separate ban from the site – chatted with me at the entrance. He left me with his friend Michael Miller, a native of New York, who guides hour-long tours of the holy site, and works with a tangled web of satellite Temple Mount activist groups. Like Nisani, he is known by the Israeli guards, who, like old friends, call him “Miller”, but frequently remind him to hurry up and refrain from any blatantly religious actions during his tour. Like all non-Muslims, Miller is only granted entrance during limited times from Sunday to Thursday.
Miller laughs the guards off while just about following their directions. Among the rules is that non-Muslim books, such as prayer books, are not allowed on the Temple Mount Plaza. Miller left his materials and maps at the airport-like security screening at the entrance. But during the tour, he whips out maps on his cell phone, showing a group of tourists “what was here, what is here, and what should be here”.
While many accuse Miller and his cohort of aggravating the conflict, he blames what he sees as Israel’s “fearful” lenience towards violence by Palestinians. (Between 1 January and 6 November 2017, according to Human Rights Watch, Palestinians killed at least 15 Israelis and injured 129 others, while Israeli security forces killed 62 Palestinians and injured 3,494 Palestinians in the region. In 2018, the bloodshed continued.) Miller claims that Israel’s political ambiguity – at the Temple Mount, where non-Muslim prayer is forbidden but impossible to fully police; or in the West Bank, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially supports the creation of a Palestinian state, while allowing the expansion of detrimental Jewish settlements there – stems from insecurity. “We were in the diaspora for 2,000 years, and there are Jews who still haven’t, mentally, left Egypt,” says Miller, referring to the biblical story of Exodus, when the Jews left slavery in Egypt for freedom in Israel. “After 2,000 years of inquisitions, pogroms, Auschwitzes, we want no more of that. We want to come home.” This view, although highly contentious, illustrates how history and identity are intertwined and invoked for political means. Situated firmly on the far right of Israeli politics and counting both religious and secular Israelis among their members, the Temple Mount activists are betting that their ideology will win out.
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For many years, observant Jews did not visit the Temple Mount. In the late 1980s, according to Ofer Zalzberg of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-monitoring NGO, Zionist yeshivas – religious schools – began to take an attitude that “we are studying the Torah in the land of Israel. It’s something we can, and should, experience.” The new approach brought a fervour for the reenactment of biblical scenes at religious sites throughout Israel. Gradually, more Jewish visitors came to the Temple Mount.
In recent years, activists have pointed to “proof” to back their assertion that now is the time to fulfil their religious birthright and “rebuild”. The Jerusalem-based Temple Institute recently announced the birth of a “red heifer”, an animal given mystical significance in Jewish scripture. The miraculous cow was supposedly used for ritual sacrifices in the First and Second Jewish Temples that once stood on the Mount. According to apocalyptic prophecy, the ashes of a modern “red heifer” could be used, once again, for purification rituals. Along with the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Israel, this eccentric-sounding rite counts among the pre-requisites for rebuilding a Jewish temple on the Mount. Last March, hundreds of activists slaughtered two lambs at the southern wall outside the Temple Mount for Passover, another reenactment of biblical scenes that technically circumvented the ban on Jewish religious practices at the site. Left-wing Israeli groups protested, saying the lack of preventative action amounted to state endorsement of the Jewish extremist movement.
Palestinians, meanwhile, see Jewish Temple Mount activists and their direct and indirect support from high-ranking Israeli government members as part of a long-term plot to undermine Muslim authority over the site. In September, the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told his cabinet he was in consultation with the Jordanians to bring the matter to the International Criminal Court. Palestinian politicians have expressed concern that Israel could use incremental changes to limit Muslim access to the Dome of the Rock. In a 2015 poll, 51 per cent of Palestinians said they believed Israel wanted to destroy the Dome of the Rock in order to build a Jewish temple.
Zalzberg says that the conflict has accelerated as more Palestinians have reacted by publicly asserting exclusive ownership of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Temple Mount plaza, which has been followed by more Jews ascending the hill and declaring their intention to rebuild a temple there.
In the past decades, Israeli security forces have killed hundreds of young Palestinian protestors in clashes atop the esplanade. In recent years, hundreds of Palestinians have taken selfies in front of, or written Facebook posts vowing to “protect”, the al-Aqsa Mosque. “I loved life, to make people smile. But what life is this when our women and young men are killed unjustly, and our al-Aqsa is facing desecration,” Omar al-Abed, 19, wrote on Facebook hours before fatally stabbing three Israeli people in their home in a West Bank settlement in July 2018.
“The more the Palestinians have emphasised the centrality of al-Aqsa, the more the religious Zionists have done the same with the Temple Mount,” says Zalzberg. “It’s become a kind of zero-sum game.”
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Part of the reason the Temple Mount activists were once relegated to the political fringes is that ascending the Mount was long forbidden by mainstream rabbis. Much of Orthodox Judaism still maintains that Jews cannot enter the Temple Mount because of the Holy of Holies, the enclosure located somewhere on the plaza where only the High Priest is allowed to tread. The fear is that because the blueprint of the ancient Temple Mount is still unknown, Jews could unknowingly step on the site and commit sacrilege. Beyond the religious debates, most Israelis viewed it as an unnecessary political provocation in an already volatile place.
But the trickle of dissenters has grown over the past decade into the tens of thousands. Despite being seen as extremists, the Temple Mount activists built up a grassroots following. Now they are gaining unprecedented mainstream political power. One key figure has been Yehuda Glick, an American-Israeli rabbi who was among the first Temple Mount activists to join Israel’s ruling Likud party.
Glick, a prominent figure in the activist coalition that Nisani belongs to, first started “ascending” the Temple Mount in 1989 and became an activist in 2006. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued with no end in sight, Glick attracted religious as well as secular Israelis who saw the site as a symbol of resistance against government policy they saw as yielding to Muslim-Arab authorities, both at the Temple Mount and in the broader conflict.
In 2014, after a conference advocating increased Jewish access to the site, Glick survived an assassination attempt by a Palestinian gunman. In response, Israeli police shot the assailant and the government made the rare move of shutting down the Temple Mount completely. Abbas called it a “declaration of war”.
Glick and his far-right followers often depict themselves as pioneers of an “authentic” Israeli counter-culture, made legitimate by their own personal sacrifices. Many see themselves as unsupported and betrayed by the Israeli government. But the government has devoted unprecedented resources to supporting Temple Mount advocacy groups. Netanyahu’s razor-thin ruling majority was held together by members of the Temple Mount movement and he has given a mainstream platform to once-fringe ideas like changing the status quo there. The Jerusalem-based Temple Institute is funded by American billionaire Henry Swieca and subsidised by the Israeli government. In 2015, the government banned the Muslim “guardians” of the Temple Mount who regularly confronted, chased and spat on Jewish visitors. It was a turning point. In recent years, the number of Jewish visitors has spiked.
Netanyahu, who officially endorses the status quo, has never condemned the Temple Mount movement, which Glick interprets as tacit approval. “The prime minister is very satisfied that the numbers are growing, he’s said that many times to me,” Glick says. “But because he feels a greater responsibility . . . he wishes the public activity was more under the radar.”
During Hanukkah, a group of activists unveiled a £30,000, 4.5 ton brick and wooden altar that they announced as ready for installation at the Third Temple. Jerusalem authorities forbade the group from burning a sacrifice at the altar, so instead they slaughtered a sheep several days earlier and burned only one of its front legs at the ceremony.
As such small-scale efforts to unilaterally shift the site’s status quo continue largely unabated, experts warn of the dangers. “Though the current level of violence at the site is low, tensions at the Temple Mount are actually rising,” said Zalzberg. He added that Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders must share control of the site, and allow both Muslims and Jews greater access.
The Temple Mount’s increasing influence on Israel’s wider discourse gives Glick hope that the status quo will soon end. Israelis awaiting the coming of the Jewish messiah assert that this could lead to a war of apocalyptic proportions. For Glick, this would be a welcome change. “We’re seeing a revolution in front of our eyes,” he says.
