Some harsh commentary, both within and outside of Israel, appeared yesterday, denouncing National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s 15-minute walk on the Temple Mount on Tuesday. David Horowitz, the editor-in-chief of the Times of Israel, roasted Ben Gvir as a “provocateur and a pyromaniac” who “has spent decades stirring trouble — from brandishing the hood ornament he stole off of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac in 1995 to brandishing his pistol during a confrontation with Arabs in East Jerusalem three months ago, with innumerable acts of rabble-rousing, dozens of indictments, and several convictions for incitement and racism-related offenses in the quarter-century in between.” Nonetheless, Ben Gvir’s latest provocation was enabled by Netanyahu who made him “a leading figure in the government of Israel, a member of its key decision-making security cabinet, and the minister with unprecedented power over the nation’s police force.” Netanyahu, Horowitz notes, could have told Ben Gvir not to go to the Temple Mount, but he failed to do so.
British journalist Peter Oborne, writing in Middle East Eye, argues that Ben Gvir’s provocation shows that Israel is trying to seize total control of the Al Aqsa Mosque by wrecking the status quo that provides that only Muslims are allowed to pray at Al Aqsa while Jews pray at the Western Wall. The mosque is managed by the Waqf, a joint Jordanian-Palestinian Islamic trust, while Israeli authorities control security. This arrangement, Orborne says, dates back to 1878 and was reaffirmed by Moshe Dayan after Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. It has been under attack, however, since at least Ariel Sharon’s “storming” of the courtyard of the mosque in 2000 with 1,000 Israeli police officers.
