The Temple Mount Affair: What Has Changed?

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, jcpa.org

Image from, with caption: Dome of the Rock - shrine located on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel

Excerpt:

At the root of the latest flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians/Islamic world is the difference in how the issue is defined. From Israel’s standpoint, the problem revealed in the July 14, 2017, terror attack on the Temple Mount in which two Israeli policemen were murdered by three terrorists from Umm al-Fahm is first and foremost a security problem. One of the ways to address it is to improve security at the location, and metal detectors and security cameras were naturally chosen as means that would contribute to that goal. The talk about the security issue sounded reasonable to Western and, especially, American ears; this is how the whole world deals with problems of this kind at airports and even (as Israeli public diplomacy emphasized) at Islamic and Christian holy places in the Arab world.

The catch is that in the Palestinian and Muslim discourse the central issue is the need to combat what they believe to be guiding the Israeli policy, namely, the Jewish (or Zionist or settler) effort to take over the holy compound that includes the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and to destroy the mosque and the Dome of the Rock so as to turn the Temple Mount into a place of Jewish prayer. Hence, the Palestinians and the Muslims did not see the installation of the metal detectors as a measure to improve security, but instead, as an obvious way to prepare the groundwork for changing the status quo and thereby advancing the objective that they ascribe to the Jews. ...