“If we think you’re praying, you’ll be arrested,” the Israeli cop said impatiently as we walked up the Mughrabi Bridge, almost like a flight attendant reminding a delinquent passenger to turn off her iPhone.
One person in our Orthodox Jewish tour group was intent on being that passenger, the annoying one who gets kicked off the plane. As soon as we ascended the Temple Mount—to us, Judaism’s holiest site—he began moving his lips without speaking audible words, à la Hannah in the Book of Samuel. In other words, he was praying. Like Eli, the High Priest, our police supervisors were irate: a burly officer promptly whisked him off for detention. Suddenly scared of ending up in Israeli jail, none of us uttered a single word the rest of the trip…….
The Temple Mount has earned that resumé of instability through an entangled religious history. Known to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, it is host to twin mosques—Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock—and the former location of the First and Second Jewish Temples. When Israel captured the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif in 1967, it reached a compromise with Jordan, under which Israeli police would provide for the site’s security and the Wakf, an Islamic trust, would oversee the site’s religious functions. As the aforementioned incidents show, this arrangement has been far from peaceful.
Categories: Arab World, Asia, Israel, Judaism, Religion