After years of reluctance, David M. Weinberg decided to visit the Temple Mount. He explains what he learned:

First, that there is plenty of room: loads of undeveloped and even desolate sections of land on the vast Temple Mount plaza where a Jewish house of prayer could be built without interfering in any way with Muslim shrines and prayer practices.

Nobody needs to feel threatened by a modest presence of Jewish petitioners tucked away in a distant corner of the holy mount. Unless, of course, your opposition to Jewish prayer and visitation on the Temple Mount stems from the wholesale denial of indigenous Jewish rights in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel—which alas has become almost-mainstream Palestinian discourse.

As Weinberg goes on to explain, the Israeli police and the waqf—the Jordanian-controlled trust that administers the Muslim holy sites—enforce a hierarchical system dictating which groups have access to the Temple Mount. This regime allots the most rights to Muslim worshippers, and fewer rights, in descending order, to: non-Jewish tourists, Jewish tour groups that are not visibly religious, and finally, it accords fewest rights to religious Jews.

Given the hostility of the waqf, I suppose that there is some law-and-order logic to this discriminatory treatment of Jews and Israelis, for the moment. I certainly have no complaints against the Israel police for doing the best they can at this supersensitive site.

But from Israel’s leaders, I have higher expectations and elevated demands. It’s time for them to negotiate significant improvements in the way the Temple Mount is administered, and Jewish-Israeli rights are accommodated there, based on principles of peace, tolerance, and religious freedom—for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.