WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Israeli Amb. Alan Baker had an article this week rightly calling for Arab-Jewish agreement on a new Temple Mount “status quo” recognizing Jewish prayer rights. We Diaspora Jews need to support as furthering that aim the actions of Israeli Jews ascending and praying there. Precedents include non-violent actions against the injustices of Jim Crow and of the anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade.
Uncle Sol Wants You: We Diaspora Jews Must Back Israeli Jews Ascending and Worshiping on His Temple’s Mount
Israeli diplomat Alan Baker had an Israel Hayom article Monday, 5/8/23, A New Status Quo for Temple Mount, carried on Israpundit Tuesday, in which he decried the existing “status quo” on the Temple Mount, with its old Ottoman roots, as an anachronistic non-recognition of Jews’ “right of worship at the very epicenter of the Jewish faith, within the same compound on the Temple Mount, parallel to exercise of the same right by Muslims.”
Baker called on “all concerned” – whom he identified as “Israel, together with a responsible Palestinian leadership, and with the support of rational Arab states and the international community” and “the respective religious leaderships” – to devise
“a logical and respectful remodeling of the antiquated status quo, to be based on present-day international values and standards of fairness, equity, equality, and mutual respect, while protecting basic religious sensitivities and procedures.”
Alevai, but if American Blacks had rested exclusively on such a diplomatic approach to confronting Jim Crow, they’d still be riding in the back of the bus. But for Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews’ sailing of overloaded refugee ships into the teeth of the anti-Jewish post-WW II British Palestine blockade, when would the survivors have escaped Europe and reached home?
Amb. Baker correctly calls Jerusalem’s Temple Mount “the very epicenter of the Jewish faith.” Its existence today is more physically real than faith-based institutional memory of religious edifices destroyed without trace millennia ago. Biblical Archeology Review Editor Hershel Shanks wrote that archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer “makes quite a good case” (Foreword to Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, p. 8-9) not only that the exact location of Solomon’s First Temple’s 500 square cubit Mount can be pointed out in stonework visible today on the Mount, but that he has pointed to “the exact spot,” still visible on the Foundation Stone in the Dome of the Rock, “where the Ark of the Covenant rested” in the First Temple’s Holy of Holies. (Ibid.) I commend to you Ritmeyer’s Secrets book, and if you’re up for it, his full version, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Not everybody, of course, sees Jewish equity in Baker’s “very epicenter of the Jewish faith.” The United Nations, for one, despicably declared in UNSC 2334 that not just the Temple Mount but the entirety of historic Jerusalem is “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967”:
“’that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace ….
“’that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem . . . .
“’that it [UNSC] will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations. . . .’” [emphasis added, a little]
My hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, under a May 24, 2021, headline “Mosque Visits Resume,” reported 250 Jews having ascended the Temple Mount plaza as “a group of 250 Jews visited the [Al-Aqsa] mosque, the third holiest site in Islam,” thereby endorsing, as an American big city’s [alas, sole] newspaper, the maximalist Muslim contention that the entirety of the Temple Mount, not just the mosque building at the Mount’s southern end, constitutes that Muslim “third holiest site.” So what do you think the Inq’s readers understood by “250 Jews visited the mosque”? Do you think they understood that they’d ascended an open air plaza, or that these Jews had intruded into a different religion’s “third holiest site”?
Intrepid Israeli Jews do ascend the Jews’ Temple Mount and in a manner not disruptful to others’ presence seek to pray there. In his article referenced above, Amb. Baker quoted a 1984 judgment by Israel’s Supreme Court that “every Jew has the right to enter the Temple Mount, to pray there, and to have communion with his Maker.” But the Court added, however, that in the face of “near certainty that injury may be caused to the public interest,” those rights may be limited.
American Blacks, and their White including Jewish supporters, faced danger of personal injury and death in confronting Jim Crow. Crew and passengers were injured and died in interceptions by the British navy of Aliyah Bet ships. Yet their courageous conduct contributed effectively, indeed indispensably, to achieving the justice that was achieved.
It is incumbent upon us Diaspora Jews, all of us, to do at least two things – to assert our people’s historically and legally just claim to historic Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount with its extant evidence of Herod’s and even Solomon’s Temples, down to what may well be the still visible place carved on the Rock in what had been the Holy of Holies for the Ark of the Covenant, and to defend and endorse the right and actions of Jews who ascend the Mount to pray there.