Ben-Gvir's Visit to the Temple Mount

Itamar Ben-Gvir is Israel’s Minister of National Security. He is also a criminal, having been convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. (The organization in question was the far-right Kahanist political movement called Kach.) He is known to have had at one point hanging in his home a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the physician-terrorist who murdered twenty-nine worshipers and wounded another 125 in the mosque located on the site of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron on Purim in 1994, and who was subsequently beaten to death by the other worshipers. His views were deemed so extreme that he was actually not accepted for service in the IDF after completing high school owing to the violent extremism he espoused. For that, he is very well known in Israel. But he is also famous—or perhaps I should say infamous—for having stolen an ornament from Yitzchak Rabin’s car a few weeks before the latter was assassinated and then, while brandishing it aloft, saying to his followers that the next step after stealing the ornament should be murdering Rabin himself. Ben-Gvir finished law school, but was actually blocked from taking the bar exam by the Israel Bar Association because of his extremist views. (Who even knew the Bar Association could do such a thing? In the end, though, Ben-Gvir appealed and, after settling three different sets of criminal charges against him, was finally allowed to take the both the written and oral parts of the exam, both of which he passed and so became licensed to practice law.)

Today, Ben-Gvir’s party is the third largest in the Knesset, more than doubling its seats from one election to the next. And it was as leader of that party, called Otzmah Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), that he was offered the newly-created National Security Ministry that includes, among many other things, overseeing the Israel Border Police on the West Bank.

And it was this Ben-Gvir who led a small party of supporters to ascend to the top of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on January 3. There was no specific point to the visit other than to show that there are not and must not be any laws—much less laws imposed by foreign entities or governments—restricting the rights of Israelis to visit any part of their own country, which certainly includes Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city.

There are a thousand issues on which Ben-Gvir and I are on different sides. I have sympathy for the Palestinians, who have been betrayed so many times by their own leadership that even as keen a student of Middle Eastern politics as myself cannot remember how many chances to create an independent Palestinian entity have been missed by the Palestinians’ sclerotic and corrupt leadership. I believe that making Israel’s Arab citizens feel welcome in their own country is a positive, healthy goal towards which Jewish Israelis should strive. And I believe that the concept of using terrorism to fight terrorists is not only illogical but also misguided and, in my opinion, deeply counterproductive. Nobody becomes less violent by being treated violently.

But Ben-Gvir’s trip to the Temple Mount is in its own category and it is about that specific incident that I’d like to write this week. My feelings about the man’s brief excursion to a part of Jerusalem I myself have only seen from afar, mostly from looking across the valley that separates the Mount of Olives from the Temple Mount, are complex. I am sure that the point of the visit was to be provocative and confrontational, even incendiary. And that part repels me, as it should any person eager to promote peaceful relations between the various groups who call Jerusalem home. But the concept itself that a Jew should be forbidden to visit the holiest of all Jewish sites is also anathema to me. And the vitriolic response to Ben-Gvir’s visit—and particularly those that featured knee-jerk references to the importance of maintaining the status quo on the Temple Mount—those reactions repulsed me as well.

I should start by noting that it's not all that obvious that Jews should ascend the Temple Mount in the first place. I myself wrote the chapter about Israel in the Rabbinical Assembly’s landmark work, The Observant Life, in which I reviewed at length the various opinions regarding the halakhic permissibility of climbing up to the top of the mount given the relevant facts that all today are presumed to be in a state of impurity and that the precise location of the buildings and courtyards stop the Mount in ancient times can be only be presumed through scholarly conjecture today. (It seems clear also that the Temple Mount itself was distinctly smaller in ancient times. So there are a lot of details in play here. The relevant section in The Observant Life in on pp. 346–348.) And although Maimonides himself ruled that a Jew should avoid the entire Temple Mount area so as to be absolutely certain of not transgressing the law, there are many authorities today—both Conservative/Masorti and Orthodox—who find it permissible to climb to the top of the Temple Mount and merely to avoid entry into the Dome of the Rock and/or the central plaza to its south. The general halakhic sense of how things are has changed over the years. When I first visited the Old City in 1974, it was widely understood that religious Jews should not ascend to the top of the mountain. A large sign at the entrance to the path leading up to the Temple Mount says much clearly.

But things have changed dramatically over the years. And the further to the right one looks, the more widespread the belief that, not only is there nothing wrong with climbing to the top of the Temple Mount, but there is an important statement to be made—to the Jordanians (the self-appointed guardians of the mosques atop the Mount), to the Palestinians, to the United Nations, and to the rest of the world in doing so: that Jewish people do not need anyone’s permission to visit their own holy sites. And that that applies even, or perhaps especially, to sites in Israel over which foreign nations claim the authority of governance.

Ben-Gvir’s was brief, just about fifteen minutes in length  and it took place early in the morning. He didn’t attempt to recite his morning prayers. Nor was this his first visit to the Temple Mount, just his first visit as a cabinet minister. The responses were entirely predictable. The Jordanians were enraged. The Palestinians, ditto. But it fell to our American ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, to pin the tail on the real issue involved. “To be very clear,” the ambassador said very clearly, “we want to preserve the status quo and actions that prevent that are unacceptable.”  And this was echoed even more officially by U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, who said that our nation “oppose[s] any unilateral actions that undercut the historical status quo.”

For me personally, it’s that notion of the “status quo” that sticks in my craw. The Latin words denote “the existing state of affairs,” but the ambassador’s and the State Department spokesman’s use of the term leaves unaddressed the highly pertinent fact that Ben-Gvir’s visit specifically did not violate the status quo. Or at least not the status quo that has pertained since Israel wrested the Old City from Jordanian control in the Six Day War, at which time Moshe Dayan decided to permit Jews to visit the Temple Mount but not to pray there. (The idea was that having regular prayer services, or even for individuals to recite their prayers there, would be too provocative, but that their mere presence atop the Mount would be something the local Muslims would have to learn to live with.) And that is precisely where things have stood since 1967. So to say that Ben-Gvir violated the status quo is simply not true: the man ascended to the top of the Mount, walked around for a quarter hour, then left. This was pointed out to the State Department spokesman, who responded to a question about what the status quo actually is by saying it would have to be a matter of negotiation between “the parties themselves, including the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” George Orwell couldn’t have said it better: the status quo is not the situation that currently pertains, but rather whatever arrangement the interested parties are able to negotiate into being—which is precisely the opposite of what “status quo” means.

On the ground, the question of Israel’s right to exist translates into the right of Israelis to behave as citizens of their own state with all that entails—and certainly the right to behave as masters in their own home. And that certainly should involve the right of unrestricted access to their own holy sites, something Muslims and Christians in Israel take for granted. The notion that a liberal, non-fanatic, non-fundamentalist person such as myself cannot see what exactly Ben-Gvir did to provoke the outrage of the world says more about the world than about Ben-Gvir. Muslims in Jerusalem do and should have the right to worship where and when they please. But so should Jews. What the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—the same people who forbade any Jewish presence at all in the Old City of Jerusalem during the years they occupied it—should have to do with the governance of the Temple Mount should be…nothing at all.