On Oct. 29, in Jerusalem, a member of Islamic Jihad fired four shots into the chest of the American-born Rabbi Yehuda Glick, a prominent campaigner for Jews’ right to pray on what they call the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif). Glick had just given a speech to a conference called “Israel Returns to the Temple Mount.” As he was speaking, his mobile phone rang, whereupon he told his audience (“lightly,” in one account): “I always keep my mobile phone on, in case I get the message that permission has been granted to build the Temple and I have to run.” I admire his sense of humor, if that is what it is.
The program of one of the leading groups that aims to revise the rules governing the Haram al-Sharif, Temple Mount Faithful, goes well beyond the right to pray to an even more provocative call “to build the Third Holy Temple without our lifetime with no delay … and to bring to pass all of His end-time prophetic plans for Israel and the entire world.” Though by many accounts Rabbi Glick himself is a friendly fellow, no hater, and he couches his prayer demand as “civil rights for Jews,” Temple Mount Faithful’s talk is riddled with Manichaeism, paranoia, demonization, and incitement to the thrill of expulsion. According to Anshel Pfeffer of Haaretz, the group’s founder, Gershon Salomon, likes to say that “we are seeing the end of the Arab period in Eretz Yisrael.” Their ally, Likud hardliner MK Moshe Feiglin, declares: “Even saying that Jewish return to the Temple Mount provokes violence encourages Arab violence.” His campaign platform says: “We must expel the Moslem wakf [endowment] from the Temple Mount and restore exclusive Israeli sovereignty over this most holy site.”
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