Not long ago I asked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu why he doesn’t go up to the Temple Mount. The prime minister has never gone up, even when he was not in public office, and even when he was the head of the opposition. The other Likud leaders, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, did not go up to the Temple Mount either. Only Ariel Sharon went up there, as the chairman of the opposition, in September 2000, which sparked bloody riots on the Mount and in Jerusalem, igniting the Second Intifada.
Netanyahu told me at first that he didn’t need this kind of connection of holiness and then added that if he still wanted a spiritual connection, he would go to the Western Wall tunnel he opened in 1996. As I recall, the tunnel authorized dug by Netanyahu and the Likud leaders in September 1996 led to a mini-war of sorts with the Palestinian Authority, which cost the lives of 19 soldiers and Border Police fighters.
The prime minister did not go up to the Temple Mount on Thursday, Jerusalem Day, either, of course, and not only for spiritual reasons. In recent weeks, he has barely succeeded in restraining Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, the Temple Mount enthusiast, from going up in order to prevent another war with our neighbors.
Since becoming a minister Ben Gvir has gone up to the Temple Mount just once in a hurried early morning visit that drew widespread international condemnation and has not been there since. On Jerusalem Day, his wife, Ayala Ben Gvir, went up instead and used the opportunity to attack Netanyahu and accuse him of trying to harm her husband.
But Thursday’s story is not about Ben Gvir, it’s about the Likud.
Three Likud members of the Knesset, the young guard of the party, went up to the Temple Mount: Ariel Kallner, Amit Halevi, and Dan Illouz. Joining them were Minister of Negev and Galilee Affairs Yitzhak Wasserlauf and MK Yitzhak Kreuzer, both of Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party.
Standing in front of the Dome of the Rock, they sang Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva.
#WATCH: MKs @dillouz, @ArielKallner, @HaleviAmit, and fmr. MK @Shuli_MR sing Israel's National Anthem on the #TempleMount in #Jerusalem.
???? @Beyadenu pic.twitter.com/WRkWPZtMBX
— Israel National News – Arutz Sheva (@ArutzSheva_En) May 18, 2023
The ascension of representatives of the ruling party to the Temple Mount led to harsh condemnation not only from the Palestinian Authority but also from Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries. This time, luckily, there was no flare-up in Gaza and the West Bank following the move.
The Likud is becoming more radical. These days, there are no longer any major differences of opinion between some senior Likud members and those of Otzma Yehudit. In the past, Likud MKs, like Moshe Feiglin and Yehuda Glick, who went up to the Temple Mount were quickly cast aside. Their places have been taken by a rising force in the party, religious MKs who don’t heed either the religious ban on going up or the constraints of the security implications.
The Temple Mount is the holiest site for Jews, as the location of the two biblical temples, while the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Mount is the third holiest shrine in Islam, turning the area into a major source of tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For decades, Jewish religious authorities issued strict prohibitions against visiting the Temple Mount, widely considered to be the holiest site for Jews, on the grounds that people could accidentally defile the site.
It’s no surprise that MK David Bitan, perhaps the real barometer of the old Likud, is horrified by the phenomenon.
“I view Knesset members from the Likud going up to the Temple Mount as inappropriate. It is not worthy. People have become extremists,” Bitan said Thursday.
Moshe Gafni, head of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party and a coalition member, also decried the phenomena, sending a letter to Netanyahu and asking him to prevent MKs from going onto the Mount. However, Gafni’s motivations are largely religious and not political.
“Recently MKs and ministers have been going up to the Temple Mount, just today a large number of elected officials from different factions in the Knesset went up there. The decision is in your hands,” Gafni wrote.
“I am turning and asking you to prevent the ascent to the Temple Mount; For the political reasons regarding world reactions, for the security reasons regarding the incitement it causes, particularly with the Muslim world, and mainly because there is no real reason for them to do so — it is not an exercise in sovereignty, rather a desecration of God’s name at the holiest site of the Jewish people,” Gafni wrote.
Gafni is correct with every word and Bitan recognizes the processes transforming Likud and the dangers.
A Likud, becoming a Jewish supremacist party like Otzma Yehudit would be a disaster. And it’s not just the three MKs who went up to the Mount, there are several current Likud members like Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women Mai Golan, and MK Nissim Vaturi who would be right at home in Ben Gvir’s party.
What business do these people have in the Likud? Where is the connection between them and the venerable national-liberal party that once existed?
From a broad perspective, the left is shifting to the center, which itself is leaning right. And the right is becoming national-religious. At the Jerusalem Day event those celebrating, like every year, were those wearing the knitted kippot of the national religious camp. On this national holiday, it was hard to find even a single secular person, not even the paratroopers who liberated the Old City.
At the Flag March itself, I did an exercise. On King George Street I met young guys, students from a Petach Tikva high school who had come to participate in the parade. I asked them if they knew who Haim-Moshe Shapira was.
No one knew. I told them that Shapira was the leader of the National Religious Party and the Minister of the Interior before the Six Day War. Shapira and the other two party ministers, Yosef Burg and Zerach Warhaftig, strongly opposed the start of the war in a first vote, and therefore it was delayed. After the war, Shapira asked to return the recently conquered territories and turn Jerusalem into an international city, the complete opposite of what it symbolizes now.
“It can’t be,” one of them told me, and another added: “What the hell, get out of here, you are depressing us.”
Do you rely on The Times of Israel for accurate and insightful news on Israel and the Jewish world? If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6/month, you will:
We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you,
David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Andrew Mitrovica
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Marwan Bishara
Timotej Milanov
Tafi Mhaka
Grant Arthur Gochin
Ahmadi Ali
visit website
