“Thus, in 2014 and 2015, the prime minister and king found themselves in emergency consultations – direct and indirect, brought together by US Secretary of State John Kerry – on how to calm clashes between the Israeli police and Palestinian youths in and around the Holy Esplanade,” says the ICG report. “The 2014 understandings, reaffirmed in 2015, comprise four commitments, three by Netanyahu, one by Abdullah.
“Netanyahu committed to keep all Knesset members, some of whom had made incendiary statements about Israeli sovereignty and replacing the Dome of the Rock with a Jewish Temple, off the Esplanade; to refrain from categorical age or gender limitations on Muslim access, as the police frequently had imposed as a security measure, that backfired (it didn’t backfire, it worked, but it meant the Arabs couldn’t stage a riot with firebombs on command, and the King won’t have it); and to keep provocative activists from the site and limit religious Jewish groups permitted to enter.”
By “provocative activists” the report means Jews who shut their eyes and mumble a verse, Jews who say a blessing over an apple before ingesting it, and, the mother of all international provocations, Jews who dare say Shema Israel on the Temple Mount.
“Abdullah’s single, crucial commitment was to keep the young Palestinians who became the next day’s stone-throwers from surreptitiously entering the compound at night,” says the report, essentially revealing that it had always been up to Abdullah, through his agents in the Waqf, to curb the violence if he only wished. He just didn’t wish for it until the supposed sovereign of that area capitulated to him like a schoolboy parting with his lunch money.
But if your blood pressure hasn’t yet climbed beyond what would be medically advisable, here’s the paragraph that will surely give you those heart palpitations they’ve warned you about:
“The real bind is that Israel in effect has annexed East Jerusalem, so even were the government much less sympathetic to the religious Zionist agenda, it would have to jump through hoops at the Esplanade to avoid implementing Israeli domestic law, which not surprisingly provides for Jewish access to and worship at Jewish holy sites.”
Imagine the insolence: Israeli law actually supports Jewish access and worship at the Temple Mount — if the Netanyahu government were to apply its Zionist agenda there. Thank God they’re not that crazy. Because, every sane person who has seen what a few Arabs can get done with a few rocks and a Molotov cocktail, “for Jerusalem’s Palestinians, the PA and Jordan – and so for Netanyahu to keep relations with them even – the Esplanade must be treated according to its internationally recognized status: as occupied territory.”
One can only imagine what would have happened to the blessed status quo had Netanyahu’s government suddenly attempted to follow a Jewish policy on the Temple Mount.
Pheew..