http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070071.html
The little that remains on the Temple Mount
By Nadav Shragai
For years, the Jerusalem District Police "benefited" from the fact that
few Jews visited the Temple Mount, sparing the police this "headache." But now
the situation is changing. The halakhic consensus that Jews are forbidden to
ascend the mount has been broken. More and more rabbis are permitting Jews to
visit, and more and more Jews are seeking to do so.
The police have not come to terms with this new situation. They are
confused and are confusing others, and have inverted the natural order of
things on the mount, which is both the world's most sensitive site and the
Jewish people's holiest site. Not much remains for Jews on the Temple Mount.
The Temple is gone. Prayer is forbidden there. The mount's antiquities have
been destroyed, and its mosques have become founts of religious and nationalist
incitement against the State of Israel.
The little the Israeli government has left to Jews on the mount, the
minimum possible, is the right to visit their holiest site without feeling that
they are being restricted and despised or doing someone an injustice. This
natural right is enshrined in the Law for the Preservation of the Holy Places,
which ostensibly permits freedom of access to members of all religions. But now
that the halakhic rulings are changing, and theory is turning into practice,
some people in the police - unofficially, of course - see this as tantamount to
a threat to public safety and are making it as hard as possible for Jews to
visit the mount, especially in groups.
The long lines at the mount's entrance, even though the site is open to
Jews only in the mornings (meaning during work hours) and is closed entirely on
Fridays and Saturdays, attest to Jews' growing interest in the site. But the
fact that someone is taking the trouble to organize and transport groups of
Jews to the mount - from Ma'alot, Netanya, Hadera and every corner of the
country - has distorted the police's judgment. The sight of thousands of Jews
on the mount - Jews with a Jewish/religious outlook, as opposed to a
secular/Israeli or touristic one - is unjustly perceived by the police as a
threat, as something that disturbs the peace on the mount, as a situation that
must be prevented.
This is particularly true regarding the ultra-Orthodox and religious
Zionist communities, which naturally have a national, religious, historic and
cultural interest in the mount. It is unacceptable for Jews to wait in line for
hours at the site's entrance, for the police to limit their entry to small
groups, for them to bar each new group from entering until the preceding one
has left, and for policemen and Waqf personnel to treat all Jews who look
religious as potential suspects, to search their belongings and assign them an
escort for as long as they remain on the mount.
Something very fundamental is wrong with the thought process of those
responsible for the mount at the Israel Police. The issue of freedom of access
to the Temple Mount - for everyone, and especially for Jews - is not an act of
grace. Jews' freedom of access to their holiest site cannot be just one
interest among many that the police must balance, or part of a carrot-and-stick
style of negotiations with the Waqf, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. This
freedom is axiomatic. That is what the government decided, and that is what the
law says. The police must internalize this and make it clear to all the
interested Muslim parties that such visits are natural for us, just as praying
in the mount's mosques is natural for them.
It seems doubtful that the welcome increase in the number of Jews seeking
to visit the mount really threatens public safety. But even if it did, the
police should crack down on those making the threats, not those being
threatened. If the Jerusalem police's field units do not understand this,
someone higher up needs to explain it to them.
Jewish provocateurs should be barred from the mount, and they are. But to
treat every one of the thousands of Jews who seek to ascend the mount as a
provocateur - and, even worse, to give them the feeling they are visiting our
holiest site by grace of a foreign government, after having already been
deprived of their natural right to pray there - defies common sense and attests
to a serious loss of direction.
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