The Temple Mount's Simple Truth

My more veteran readers know that I have been active on behalf of Jewish rights to and on and in the Temple Mount (here I am on Chanukah two years ago). Up top in my logo you can see my being removed by police in July 1971.

This article, then, was a welcome one. Extracts from Nadav Shragai's article today:

The little that remains on the Temple Mount

...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...

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...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 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.

...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...The issue of freedom of access to the Temple Mount - for everyone, and especially for Jews - is not an act of grace...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.

...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.