Jerusalem Day that will be celebrated next week is a excellent opportunity to sharpen an important point related to the fact that in the eyes of the majority of the secular traditional public in Israel, the Temple Mount is a religious site to which they feel no connection. Climbing the mountain is sometimes considered an extreme act as a provocation and defiance against Muslims, and therefore there are those who accept with understanding extreme measures such as denying access of Jews to the holy place due to the threats of violence. In practice, the myth that the Temple Mount is a religious and extreme site grew mainly due to a lack of knowledge and understanding.
On the Temple Mount stood the Temple which served as the center of government of the State of Judah, the ancient sovereign Jewish state. Besides being a center for religious worship, the Temple also served as an ideological center, and even the legal center, where the judicial authority sat – the Sanhedrin, or by another name, the Great Court – which was a kind of today’s Supreme Court. The temple also served as a tourist and commercial center and was a center of pride and inspiration for the Jews.
One of the greatest poets in the history of the Jewish people, Uri Zvi Greenberg, defined the relationship to the Temple Mount in the most correct way. Atz, not a religious person, already in 1950 sent a New Year’s greeting to his friends and added: “The Year of Ascension to the Temple Mount.” Later he wrote: “He who rules the Temple Mount rules Jerusalem, he who rules Jerusalem, rules the whole country.
I myself do not come from a religious upbringing, and it seems really puzzling: what do I have to do with the Temple Mount? The answer is that the mountain is historically and nationally more important than any other place. More than the Kotel, whose importance lies in the fact that it served as an outer wall of the compound, and like it, by the way, all the other walls that are still standing today: the Eastern, Southern and Northern.
So why don’t we consider the mountain? Because we are afraid of the neighbors. Because hundreds of years after the temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled from their country, the Muslims built their own buildings on the ruins of our temple. When the Jews returned to their country as part of the Zionist movement and liberated the mountain in the Six Day War, they decided to give up control of it so as not to upset the Arab countries. This is despite the fact that when Jews visit the Temple Mount there is no desire to harm Muslims. It has a strengthening of the connection to the land of the ancestors and familiarity with the Jewish history and heritage and the people of the land.
In the current situation, Jews are only allowed to visit the mountain at limited times, and they are not allowed to hold any religious worship there. Over the years, the Palestinians and Jordanians realized from this that the mountain was not really important to the Jews, and used the opportunity to increase the importance of the place in the eyes of the Muslims and to declare themselves the sole owners of the place.
The Muslim world looks at our lack of care and interprets it as a lack of connection to the country as a whole. They interpret this as weakness and are sure that if we are not connected to what should be the most important place for us, then we are all temporary here and can easily be thrown into the sea. Every Hamas flag that flies there, like every restriction we place on ourselves in going up the mountain, opens a door for them to hope that we can be expelled from here, even if it takes years, because we don’t really believe that this is our land. This hope is the source of terrorism and it will not stop until they realize that it is false hope.
