Since taking Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, Israel has always shown caution and restraint when it comes to the Temple Mount. In particular, prayer on the Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, has been barred to Jews. In recent weeks, Palestinian leaders have been spreading unfounded rumors of a threat to the status quo—a self-evidently false pretext for mounting numbers of terrorist attacks. Recently, Israeli security discovered stockpiles of bottles, stones, and Molotov cocktails in the al-Aqsa Mosque itself. Jerusalem is on the brink of a conflagration, writes David Horovitz:
Amid the awful current upsurge in terrorism and violence in Jerusalem—the shooting of Yehudah Glick, the spate of “suicide driver” attacks, the riots in East Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, the clashes on the Temple Mount itself—it has been profoundly dismaying to watch interview after TV interview with Palestinian bystanders in stone-strewn Arab neighborhoods, older men not involved in the violence, urging Israel just to stay away from al-Aqsa, not to pray at al-Aqsa, to do anything but encroach upon al-Aqsa. At the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism, it is clear, the Jews have no legitimacy whatsoever for many ordinary Palestinians.
Hamas, for whom Israel has no legitimacy at all, is doing everything it can to whip up passions around the falsely alleged dangers to al-Aqsa, inflating and exaggerating and misrepresenting every spark of friction in the hope of igniting the holy war it seeks in order to bring about Israel’s demise. So, too, provocateurs within Israel’s own Arab community—notably in the northern branch of the Islamic Movement. Some Arab Knesset members are also guilty of exaggerating and mischaracterizing the true dimensions of what has been playing out in and around the Temple Mount in recent weeks. The increasingly extremist Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been adding fuel to the fire.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-in-the-unholy-grip-of-religious-fervor/