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Democrats are more concerned about domestic terrorism, while Republicans worry more about international terror.

By JNS

Both domestic and international terrorism ranked low on a list of things that concern Americans in a recent Pew Research Center report. But more Americans said domestic (34%) and international (30%) terrorism are a very big problem today than believed that unemployment (24%) was a great concern.

Democrats and those who lean Left were likelier than Republicans and those who lean Right to be concerned about domestic terror (41% to 25%), while those numbers flipped, more or less, when it comes to international terrorism, with 36% of Republicans saying it’s a very big problem, compared to just 23% of Democrats.

Overall, respondents found other issues much more concerning, including inflation (65%), healthcare affordability (64%), the ability for parties to work together across the aisle (62%), drug addiction (61%), gun violence (60%) and violent crime (59%).

Some of those concerns also divided along partisan lines, with more Democrats than Republicans expressing grave concern about healthcare costs (73% to 54%) and gun violence (81% to 38%), while Republicans were more concerned than Democrats about inflation (77% to 52%), drug addiction (64% to 56%) and violent crime (64% to 52%).

Republicans also worried much more about the federal budget deficit (72% to 39%), state of moral values (69% to 39%) and illegal immigration (70% to 25%), while Democrats were much more concerned about climate change (64% to 14%) and racism (55% to 14%).

The post Pew: Americans worry more about international terror than unemployment appeared first on World Israel News.

Fellow neo-Nazis discovered he was Jewish and brutally attacked him.

By World Israel News Staff

A covert Jewish member and former leader of the American Front neo-Nazi group claimed in an interview published Thursday that white supremacists today are more often supporters of President Joe Biden than of his predecessor Donald Trump, despite conventional belief to the contrary.

“I would say a lot of what the world knows about white supremacists nowadays is smoke and mirrors. They’re far more pro-Biden than pro-Trump – Trump was too pro-Israel,” John Daly told the UK’s Jewish News outlet.

Daly, who led the American Front, a Nazi skinhead group active in North Florida during the 1990s, survived a brutal assault after his Jewish heritage was discovered by his fellow group members.

His story was portrayed in the documentary “Escape From Room 18”, which has been broadcast globally and is available on Amazon Prime and YouTube’s Real Stories channel.

Daly joined the group at the age of 15, initially part of an anti-racist subgroup of skinheads that was later infiltrated by the American Front, which he called the “most sinister neo Nazi gangs of the time.” The group’s coercive tactics led by Richard Myers, leader of the Aryan Youth Force, made Daly feel he had no choice but to stay. Daly’s attempt to protect his family led him to a near-death experience after a severe attack by his group members left him with a brain bleed.

After enduring three surgeries and ongoing treatment, Daly testified in court against the group, resulting in long prison terms for multiple leaders of Neo-Nazi groups across the United States. His testimony also marked the end of the American Front and several other major racist networks. He didn’t leave Florida until the court proceedings were concluded, expressing his belief that fleeing would encourage further attacks on Jews.

Daly explains his reluctance to seek help from Jewish organizations or the police during his time in the group, citing the absence of readily available information and the fear of closeted supporters in his community and the police force. He also acknowledged the surprising support for Nazism he encountered from adults in his local park.

In a discussion about current white nationalism and antisemitism in the U.S., Daly mentions the disparity between media portrayals and his understanding of white supremacist groups, which are more than not from the progressive end of the political spectrum.

“There’s a stream of Nazis called ‘The Accelerationists’ who just want to see the world burn,” he told the Jewish News.

“They’re like ‘”We’re gonna take what’s already bad in society, amplify it to the point that there’s enough riots going on that hopefully other white people will say ‘this is bad, the only way to get safety is to join the Nazis’. That’s a very powerful group in America right now.”

According to Daly, antisemitism is fueled by a need to blame others for personal failures, a quest for power, and manipulation of inherent human anger.

“Hate is hate and the end goal remains: to genocide Jews,” he said.

He also criticizes the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement for its antisemitic caricatures and its impact on the safety of Jewish students on college campuses.

“The BDS movement uses the exact same caricatures the Nazis used before the Holocaust. We should be as vocal about Islamic antisemitism as white nationalist supremacist antisemitism. There was a survey done of the top 100 universities in the US for Jewish students. Out of those that had BDS (the Palestinian movement that promotes boycotts of Israel) located on campus, 99 percent of Jewish students said they felt unsafe there. Whereas at universities that didn’t have BDS 16 percent didn’t feel safe. That says it all, really.”

Despite the threats from his past, Daly currently resides in Ashkelon, Israel, where he feels the threat of rocket attacks from nearby Gaza is more imminent. In 2014, Daly visited Auschwitz with a former skinhead friend, Kevin, featured in the documentary.

“It was pretty powerful walking through the gates of Auschwitz with someone who has a swastika on their shoulder. He wouldn’t let me hold anything, not even my backpack. He said, ‘no Jew will work in this camp ever again’,” he told the outlet.

The post Ex neo-Nazi leader: White supremacists are far more pro-Biden than pro-Trump appeared first on World Israel News.

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A new documentary called Israelism tells the story of young American Jews coming to question the narrative they were taught about “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Still from Israelism. (Israelism.com)

Abe Foxman was the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 1987 to 2015. A few years after his retirement, he agreed to be interviewed for Eric Axelman and Sam Eilertsen’s movie Israelism. Documentaries can take a long time and it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that Foxman heard from the filmmakers that it was done. They sent him a link and he started to watch. By his own account, he only got through about ten minutes.

I can understand why he found it so upsetting. During his decades at the head of the ADL, Foxman was one of the leading proponents of the idea that caring about Jewish people means supporting the state of Israel and that anyone who condemns Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians must be an antisemite. Israelism takes apart that narrative, brick by brick, until nothing is left.

Simone’s Story

The movie tells the story of two young American Jews who were raised in institutions where strong support for Israel was taken as a given. One of them, Simone Zimmerman, went to a Jewish day school where 10 percent of the graduating class ended up “making aliyah” — moving to Israel — and joining the Israeli army.

After spending her K-12 education in private Jewish schools, Zimmerman went to college at University of California, Berkeley. In one of the key scenes of the documentary, she recounts being told that the student government was considering an “anti-Israel” motion — to honor the call from Palestinian civil society for BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions) targeting Israel in response to human rights abuses.

Simone and her friends rushed to the meeting with preprepared talking points about “double standards” and how they felt attacked. But in the aftermath of the confrontation, Simone was increasingly bothered. The Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speakers had made claims about how Palestinians were treated that she found shocking and disturbing. They used the word “apartheid.” Surely that was wrong!

Simone wanted to know how to respond to these allegations — not how to dismiss them or take offense at them or ask why Israel was being singled out, but how to refute them. And no one seemed to have the answers she was looking for. During her next trip to Israel, she crossed into the Palestinian territories to find out for herself.

Eitan’s Story

Another young American Jew profiled in the movie, referred to only by his first name, Eitan, went to similar schools and received the same messages as Simone. In one of the most memorable lines in the movie, a Jewish educator named Jacqui says, “Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel, and that’s who I am.”

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Eitan was taught, and in a world still all too full of antisemitism, the existence of a Jewish state is a precious accomplishment that needs to be supported and defended. He took that message seriously enough that, when he graduated from high school, he joined the Israeli army. He was sent to the occupied West Bank, where he became an enforcer of a system that is very literally a form of apartheid.

Israeli settlers have all the same rights as Israelis living on the other side of the invisible “green line” separating what’s sometimes called “Israel proper” from the territories conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. They’re governed by Israeli civilian law. They vote in Israeli elections. Palestinians living in the same cities are governed by Israeli military law. They have no voting rights and few real civil liberties. A Palestinian mistreated by soldiers at a checkpoint, for example, has little hope of meaningful legal recourse.

At one point, Eitan recalls a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian man who was in his custody being taken away by other soldiers and beaten on the ground while Eitan’s commanding officer stood by without intervening. The military police officer who was supposed to take charge next stood nearby, smoking a cigarette and watching. Eitan was wracked with guilt. This man was his responsibility. Should he have tried to do something? What could he realistically do while people who outranked him were doing nothing?

Over the course of many sleepless nights thinking about it, the simple point dawned him that his “everyday” actions, going on patrol, enforcing checkpoints, and so on were “also immoral.” Highbrow obfuscation about the “complexities” of the “conflict” obscure a brutally simple reality. Palestinians whose families ended up on the Israeli side of the “green line” in 1948 are Israeli citizens, though quite unambiguously second-class citizens. Those whose families fled in terror from the mass ethnic cleansing of their villages aren’t allowed to return to the country at all, and generations have grown up in refugee camps. In between, the Palestinians on the West Bank who Eitan was interacting with have spent the last fifty-six years as subjects but not citizens of the state that utterly dominates their lives. As one Palestinian interviewed in Israelism points out, an American who moves to Israel tomorrow will immediately have more rights than a Palestinian who spent their entire life there under occupation.

Over the course of the movie, these stark realities move Simone and Eitan, like many other young American Jews, to realize that their Jewish values are incompatible with support for an apartheid state. They join a modest but growing protest movement against community organizations that support and lobby for Israel. They march in the streets outside of the conference of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). They stage sit-ins at the offices of the ADL, singing traditional Jewish songs as the cops come to arrest them. And the Abe Foxmans of the world take it all exactly as well as you’d expect.

Israelism’s Critics

Writing in the Forward, Mira Fox argues that the picture Israelism paints of establishment Jewish institutions trying to hide the ugly realities of Palestinian oppression from young Jews has become dated since the filmmakers started work in 2016. Doesn’t the BDS movement have a significant presence on college campuses attended by many of those young Jews? Didn’t dozens of rabbinical students sign an open letter in 2021 making many of the same points made in Israelism?

The prevalence of BDS on college campuses, never mind in the rest of American life, tends to be wildly exaggerated in such discussions. UC Berkeley is, unfortunately, far from representative in this regard. And state legislatures around the country have been working hard to crack down on this movement — often stretching the First Amendment to the limit to do so.

But it’s certainly true that, partially as a result of the efforts of BDS activists, the situation among young American Jews is starting to change. The point I’d argue that Fox misses is that, far from invalidating Israelism, this is precisely the story the film tells.

At least Fox is engaging with Israelism’s substance, and she doesn’t spare her readers some of the grisly details revealed in the movie. Writing in the Jewish Journal, the venue’s editor in chief, Davis Suissa, rages that Israelism “assaults the truth.”

There is no mention, for instance, of the UN role in the creation of Israel, Arab aggression at the birth of the state, chronic Palestinian terror and rejection of peace offers, the denial of any Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and on and on. . . . [T]he very notion of Israel advocacy in the film takes on a sinister tone, as if anything short of perfect even-handedness is an unforgiveable [sic] sin. This coming from a documentary that is so one-sided it borders on boredom.

I wasn’t bored watching Israelism. But I suppose that’s a matter of taste. What about the rest of Suissa’s indictment?

What most struck me reading it was that he doesn’t share a single detail from Israelism with his readers. If his only response to a documentary about young Jews coming to support equal rights for Palestinians was, “Yeah, well, what about…” and a recitation of shopworn pro-Israel talking points, he literally could have written that without watching the movie. In private communication, Suissa emphasized that he did watch it, which is why he knew none of his points were mentioned. But what I find less than compelling about that response is that he never bothers to connect the dots. How and why are any of these supposed to invalidate the point of the film?

These stark realities move Simone and Eitan, like many other young American Jews, to realize that their Jewish values are incompatible with support for an apartheid state.

Are we supposed to believe, for example, that the UN is infallible and nothing validated by a UN resolution could be a bad idea? That would be an odd position for a defender of a government that constantly violates more recent UN resolutions.

Assume for the sake of argument that Palestinian leadership was unreasonable in not taking the two-state deal offered at Camp David in 2000. It’s arguable at the very least whether any “two-state solution” could approach justice. “Two-state solution” is such antiseptic language that it’s easy to forget that what we’d be talking about is an ethno-religious partition of the country that would leave millions of Palestinians as distinctly second-class citizens of the “Jewish state” — and continue to deny millions of refugees their right to return.

Moreover, even if you accept in the abstract that a “two-state solution” would be acceptable, the deal offered at Camp David fell well short of a full withdrawal to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. But assume that Palestinian leaders should have taken it — and ignore the many times since then that they’ve been desperate enough to say they would now take it if it were offered again. How does that justify the thirty-three years of military occupation and denial of civil rights to West Bank Palestinians before 2000? How does it justify Israel continuing a brutal occupation regime, one absolutely guaranteed to produce a never-ending supply of armed resistance in response — some of which takes forms that could reasonably be called “terror”? Why not just unilaterally withdraw? Or, if not, extend Israeli citizenship to Palestinians?

A high school where 10 percent of the graduating class joins the Israeli army is pretty clearly engaging in strident advocacy on behalf of Israel. That’s a problem that goes well beyond a “lack of perfect even-handedness.” Nor is that the film’s complaint about the ADL, AIPAC, or the schools attended by Simone and Eitan. These young Jews don’t want communal institutions that are “even-handed” about apartheid. They approach the oppression of the stateless Palestinian population in the spirit of the Jewish prophet Amos: “Let justice roll down like rivers, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

A Generation Gap

I watched the movie on Thursday at an advance screening at the Silver Lake Independent Jewish Community Center. The event was cosponsored by the Los Angeles chapters of IfNotNow and LA Jews for Peace. It was a warm night in Southern California. The projector was set up outside, and the start time was delayed while we waited for the sun to go down.

That this predominantly Jewish audience didn’t react to Israelism the way Foxman or Suissa did says something about the politics of the venue, of course, but it also speaks to one of the central themes of the movie — a growing generational divide over Israel among American Jews. While my own background was very different from the Simones and Eitans of the world, I’m part-Jewish and this point struck a chord with me.

I can vividly remember watching news coverage of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 2006 with my late grandmother. She thought Israel was “defending” itself. That’s the last thing it looked like to me. She was a good person and I miss her. And I can understand where her perspective on Israel came from — she came of age at a time when the memories of Auschwitz and Dachau were all too fresh and the idea of a place of guaranteed Jewish sanctuary had obvious appeal. Even so, our reactions to what we were seeing were so different that we might as well have been watching different channels.

After the movie was over, Simone Zimmerman and director Eric Axelman sat on the edge of the stage and took questions from the audience. One of the questions was from a Palestinian-American man who asked about how to respond to people who took offense when phrases like “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” were used to describe the treatment of Palestinians.

In his response, Axelman pointed out that recent polling shows that more than a third of American Jews under the age of forty agree with the statement, “Israel is an apartheid state.” The message is starting to get through. It’s about time.

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In a society with almost no social safety net or guarantee of economic stability, even professional athletes like Denver Nuggets guard Bruce Brown are forced to choose between job satisfaction and economic security.

Bruce Brown of the Denver Nuggets during a game against the Phoenix Suns at Footprint Center on April 6, 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Chris Coduto / Getty Images)

This year’s National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs were an unexpected boost for me. As the Denver Nuggets steamrolled to their first championship in franchise history, it was a sudden resurrection of my childhood obsession with basketball, with the additional bonus of it being a bonding fan experience with my kids and friends. One of the people who made it so special was Nuggets guard Bruce Brown — who right now faces a complicated life choice inside a parable about the larger American economy.

First, a little bit about this player that I love: Brown is the NBA version of a best supporting actor in a great movie. He’s that hyperenthusiastic, multitalented off-the-bench force just below the superstar level who turns good squads into champions. He’s one of the few Vinnie Johnsons of his era — the type of player embodying the real teamness of the best version of a sport whose professional league too often promotes an annoying one-on-five, MVP-savior vibe.

So after the Nuggets won the finals, my kids and friends and I were high-fiving when we read the news that Brown wants to stay in Denver for another season, even if the NBA salary cap would mean such a decision would require him to accept less financial remuneration than he could get as a free agent on the open market.

“I want to stay,” he told the Denver Post. “It’s a perfect fit. And money is not everything. The money will come. So I’m not worried about that right now.”

Today, though, that prospect seemed to dim — the Athletic reports that Brown is declining to exercise his existing contract’s option to renew his deal with the Nuggets. He could still eventually come back to the Nuggets, but he’s going to test out the open market.

As a fan, I’m bummed. I want to know Brown will continue to be part of Denver’s ethos and part of a Nuggets team that exudes the kind of old-school solidarity that is so rare in American life writ large.

But I also think he’s making a rational — and moral — decision.

This is a society with almost no social safety net or guarantee of economic stability — a society that tells us every single day in so many ways that if you don’t seize all that you can when you have the chance, you risk missing out and facing everything from foreclosure to medical bankruptcy to retirement poverty. For professional athletes, their window of financial opportunity can be especially fleeting. One injury without a guaranteed multiyear contract can slam shut that window forever. Many end up broke within just a few years of retirement.

Brown is a valuable worker in an industry that made $1.4 billion on sponsorship deals alone last year. Like every other worker in that industry, he has a right to ask for as much of a share of that as he can negotiate for. He owes no economic loyalty to the billionaire owner of the Nuggets (or any other team), and even if he could make more money later in Denver, taking a one-year Nuggets contract in lieu of guaranteed multi-year money is a huge risk in an economy that refuses to derisk people’s access to the basic necessities of life.

Of course, if Brown wants to take that risk or accept less money because he gets more job satisfaction out of his current situation, that’s also his right (and one more easy to economically navigate because it’s a choice between different seven-figure salaries). It’s one of those money/job-satisfaction trade-off choices that lots of people face throughout their lives — and everyone comes up with their own ways to make those calls.

Even for pro athletes negotiating multimillion-dollar contracts, these decisions are fraught in a country that has made myriad policy choices normalizing a culture of economic precarity — a culture that constantly lets us know we are all one illness, car accident, or natural disaster away from bankruptcy.

It’s easier to choose job satisfaction over maximized remuneration if you know there’s a safety net in place guaranteeing that no matter what happens, you and your family will always have access to medical care, food, housing, education, and retirement. But that’s not the society we’ve chosen to create.

As a selfish Denver fan and as a dad who has loved bonding with my kids over Bruce’s threes and dunks and steals, I hope he stays. But if he goes, I can’t begrudge it. In a dystopian economy, workers need to jealously protect their own economic self-interest, because nobody else will.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

The terror cell was responsible for a number of shootings, including on an IDF checkpoint near Jenin, according to the Israeli military.

By JNS and World Israel News Staff

The Israeli military on Thursday eliminated a three-man terror cell in Samaria, in a drone strike on their vehicle that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed as “flipping the equation” against terrorists.

The cell had fired on a military checkpoint near Jalamah in the Jenin area, and was responsible for a number of attacks on Judea and Samaria communities, according to a joint statement by the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and Israel Defense Forces.

Two of the terrorists were members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while the third was a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, according to Tazpit Press Service.

It was the first drone strike carried out by the Israeli military in Judea and Samaria since 2006, according to IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari. Three weapons were also found in the vehicle, he added.

“This was about removing a threat,” said Hagari. “We identified a vehicle shooting at the crossing and removed the threat.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant also commented on the strike.

“I praise the security forces who a short time ago carried out a targeted elimination of a terrorist squad that was firing towards Israeli territory, and had previously carried out several shooting attacks,” he said.

“Against terrorism we will take an offensive and proactive approach, we will use all the means at our disposal and we will exact the heaviest price from any terrorist or terrorist courier,” he added. “We will pursue and overtake our enemies.”

On Monday, an Apache helicopter gunship was called in to cover the evacuation of wounded Israeli forces from Jenin, marking the first Israeli airstrike in Judea and Samaria since the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.

Netanyahu praised the strike, saying that the IDF “settled the score” with the terror cell, which was responsible for several shooting attacks.

“We are always surprising, we are always flipping the equation,” he said in a video statement.

“We have done it during Operation Shield and Arrow and we did it again last night in Jenin.

“The cell that was taken out by an unmanned aerial vehicle has carried out several terror attacks in the past and it was about to carry out more,” Netanyahu said.

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This week, a 44-year-old woman from Ohio was arrested for allegedly touching and “rubbing” a 4-year-old boy in front of his house. The woman, Lisa Nacrelli, was attempting to lure the child back to her home and claiming to be a Child Protective Services (CPS) case worker. According to the Norwood Police Department, Nacrelli was charged with one count of criminal child enticement, one count of impersonating an officer, and one count of trespass in a habitation.

The boy’s father wrote in an affidavit that the woman, Nacrelli, had “walked up to my child” and began “talking to him and rubbing him” making the child feel uncomfortable and prompting him to go get his mother. Additionally, a security camera outside of the family’s home captured the incident. The footage showed that Nacrelli, wearing dark sunglasses, a green top, and striped skirt, had approached the child and started rubbing his back and running her hands through his hair. Nacrelli then asked the child to come home with her at least three times before speaking with the boy’s mother.

After entering the family’s residence, Nacrelli told the mother that she was with CPS and performing an “inspection,” however, she did not leave any contact information. Upon reviewing the security footage, the parents noticed that Nacrelli had been touching their son inappropriately for several minutes.

In a signed statement, Nacrelli admitted that she had been drinking since she woke up that morning and was only trying to “scare” the boy’s parents into providing better supervision of their child. Nacrelli is currently being held at the Hamilton County Justice Center on $10,000 bond with her next hearing set for June 29.

Knesset member Amit Halevi floated the idea earlier this month of recognizing separate areas on the Temple Mount for the two faiths.

By David Isaac, JNS

A Likud lawmaker’s plan to divide the Temple Mount between Jews and Muslims has drawn outrage from Muslim political, religious and terrorist corners. The real outrage, say Temple Mount activists, is that Jews don’t have equal rights to Judaism’s holiest site.

Knesset member Amit Halevi floated the idea earlier this month of recognizing separate areas on the Temple Mount for the two faiths. He noted that there was plenty of room for Jews and Muslims: 144 dunams, or 35 acres.

According to Halevi’s plan, Jews would receive the central and northern parts, where the First and Second Temples once stood (the gold-plated Dome of the Rock now stands on the site, but as Halevi noted, it is not a mosque). Muslims would receive the southern part, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque is currently located.

“It will be a historical, religious and national statement,” Halevi told Zman Israel, a Hebrew-language news site. The Muslims have created a “narrative” about the Temple Mount and claim complete ownership over it, according to Halevi. “Just because they pray there, that does not make the entire Temple Mount a holy place for Muslims,” he said.

Yisrael Medad, a Temple Mount activist for over 50 years, who made his first trip to the site in October 1970, told JNS that Halevi’s plan isn’t so far out.

“It parallels the situation at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, which basically works on that principle,” he said. There, certain days are reserved for Muslim prayer and other days for Jewish prayer.

“According to Amit Halevi’s proposal, the area reserved for Jews would put them mostly out of sight of the Arabs. In other words, it’s a very large place and therefore, can be very easily divided,” said Medad, noting that he and others had proposed interim plans in the past to provide areas for Jewish prayer without upsetting Muslim sensibilities.

One idea was to cover part of an existing colonnade that runs for 400 meters (1,300 feet) along the Temple Mount’s western wall, with one-way mirror plexiglass so that Jews could enter and pray without drawing attention from Muslims. Another was to convert a small building, located about about 50 meters (160 feet) from the Gate of the Tribes, into a synagogue (it’s currently used as a storeroom).

“I’m being overly sympathetic to the Muslim position, but there are at least three different areas where you could have Jews enter the Temple Mount area in a very unobtrusive fashion that wouldn’t upset Muslim sensibilities,” said Medad.

The problem is that the Muslims treat the entire Temple Mount as if it’s their property. A 2013 agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Jordan leaves no stone undeclared for Muslims: “144 Dunums, which include the Qibli Mosque of al-Aqsa, the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock and all its mosques, buildings, walls, courtyards, attached areas over and beneath the ground and the Waqf properties tied-up to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, to its environs or to its pilgrims (hereinafter referred to as ‘Al-Haram Al-Sharif’).”

The “Waqf” refers to the Islamic Waqf, a Jordanian religious trust, which retains administrative control on the Temple Mount. Although Israel drove Jordan out of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, then-IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan handed control of the site to Jordan in an attempt to defuse the religious aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

‘Netanyahu is no less guilty’

Arnon Segal, a journalist who writes a weekly column on the Temple Mount and authored a 2020 book on the subject, said that while it’s easy to blame Dayan for everything, it’s not right.

“After all, this agreement has been maintained by the government … until today. [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is no less guilty of this. How is it possible that today in 2023 Jordan still controls the Temple Mount? How is it possible that we go to consult them about what is happening there?” he said.

“It’s against the law. The state authorities violate the laws of the state itself,” he continued. “There is a Basic Law: Jerusalem the Capital of Israel, which prohibits the transfer of the territories of Jerusalem to foreign sovereignty or foreign control, and this is exactly what they are doing on the Temple Mount.”

Halevi’s plan calls for abolishing Jordan’s status on the Mount.

“I realize it’s an event. It’s an agreement between countries, but we have to deal with it. It requires change even if it is a process that will take time,” said the lawmaker.

Muslim reaction to the proposal was swift. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called for “imposing sanctions on Israel to prevent any change at Al-Aqsa Mosque.” The Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem said, “The Aqsa Mosque is a redline.” The P.A. Ministry for Jerusalem Affairs warned, “The implementation of this plan will lead to religious war.”

Muslims often refer to the “status quo” when they sense any change on the Temple Mount favoring Jews.

Said Segal, “’Status quo’ is a respectable term for racial discrimination and an apartheid policy toward the Jews on the Temple Mount, in which Muslims can enter through nine of the 10 gates of the Mount and for all non-Muslims there is one gate, and at that, religious Jews are discriminated against.”

Most of Israel’s political leadership, whether right or left, favor maintaining the status quo for fear of igniting Arab violence. For example, when Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Mount in early January, sparking a cascade of criticism from Arab countries, terror groups, and even the U.S. embassy, Netanyahu’s office quickly released a statement saying he was “committed to strictly maintaining the status quo, without changes, on the Temple Mount.”

More dramatically, Netanyahu, explaining his government’s failure in March 2020’s election, said that one reason was his refusal to accede to Ben-Gvir’s demand to allow prayer on the Temple Mount.

“I know it would set the Middle East on fire and raise the wrath of a billion Muslims against us. I said there is a limit, there are things I am not willing to do in order to win the elections, I will protect the State of Israel,” he said.

The problem with the status quo, say Jewish activists, is that it’s a one-way street. “It’s the most non-static of status quos,” said Medad. “Arabs have continuously changed the status quo to their advantage over the past 50 years.”

The most infamous example of such a change was when the Waqf began an unsupervised construction project in 1996, digging up an area in the southeastern section of the Mount called Solomon’s Stables and turning it into a large mosque.

In 1999, the Waqf built a monumental entrance to the new mosque, illegally bulldozing a giant pit. Most of the 9,000 tons of soil from the project was unceremoniously deposited from dump trucks in the Kidron Valley.

Israeli archaeologists, hoping to turn lemons into lemonade, initiated the Temple Mount Sifting Project in 2004, making discoveries in the archaeologically rich soil dating from the Middle Bronze Age II (1950–1550 B.C.E.) to the present. Most finds date from the First Temple period (10th century B.C.E.).

“Muslims deny there’s any archaeology there,” said Medad. “They spin a completely illogical, ahistorical version of events. They deny there ever was a Temple. They deny we have any historical rights. At the same time, there isn’t a word in the Koran about Jerusalem.”

‘The whole world imitates our tradition’

Particularly frustrating to Segal is how other nations lay claim to Jewish history and tradition—“They claim that they’re the true Israel”—while “we scorn the most sacred place in our tradition.”

At last month’s coronation in England, Segal noted, King Charles was crowned with anointing oil made from olives from the Mount of Olives, pressed near Bethlehem. His throne sat above the Stone of Scone, which legend traces to the rock which Jacob rested on in Beit El. And at the moment Charles was crowned, Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ was played, with lyrics inspired by the biblical account of the anointing of Solomon.

“The whole world imitates our tradition, and we behave as if our country appeared out of nowhere and has no past and no history. Jews have prayed 2,000 years, three times a day, to return to this spot and now we are running away from our faith. It drives me crazy,” he said. “Do you know there is not a single sign in Jerusalem in Hebrew that points to the Temple Mount? They direct passengers either to the Western Wall or to ‘Al-Aqsa.’”

“You will see a sign from the rabbinate saying it’s forbidden to enter the Temple Mount. It’s a lie. There is no Jewish law forbidding visits to the Temple Mount. The rabbinate, too, runs from the holy site,” he said.

Despite the obstacles, Segal is optimistic, pointing to the statistics.

“In 2009, 5,000 Jews went up to the Temple Mount. In 2022, 50,000 Jews went up, 10 times as many.”

Segal said these are still not the numbers he would like to see. Part of the problem, he said, are the limitations placed on Jews.

“It’s a trial to go up there. The hours are inconvenient. If I come wearing a kippah, the state restricts me in a thousand ways, and even if I go, it’s under constant threat of arrest due to any deviation from the path, even moving too fast or too slow. It’s like being an army recruit.

“It’s no wonder people aren’t so eager to go up. It’s unpleasant to feel as if you’re in exile, as if Ottoman rule has returned.”

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