The Mirrored Key Of The Jewish Temple

Across Western cities, “Nakba” protests fill the streets in May, marking what Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding. Protesters chant slogans of “liberation,” wave Palestinian flags, and brandish large symbolic keys—representing homes lost in the Arab-Israeli 1948 War, and a longed-for return.

*In London, British actor Khalid Abdalla holds a key symbolising the supposed Palestinian “right of return” (photo: Middle East Eye)*

To the casual observer, these demonstrations appear to be non-violent expressions of secular nationalism: a displaced people demanding justice and return. The rhetoric is packaged in the language of “anti-colonialism,” a phrase from the Global South marketed at western universities.

The terminology is secular and political but the facts on the ground tell a different story.

The actual war against Israel is not being led by nationalists. It is driven by radical Islamist groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The attack launched on October 7, 2023, was not called the “Nakba Response” or “Operation Liberation.” It was named “Al-Aqsa Flood”—a title soaked in religious meaning, not national aspiration. It invoked Islam’s third-holiest site which sits atop Judaism’s holiest site.

The strategic use of “Nakba” language in western cities is a deliberate effort to mask a religious war in secular terms. It is designed to resonate with Western leftists who are comfortable championing national self-determination but uneasy with theocratic zeal. It reframes an Islamic holy war as a freedom struggle, making it seem modern, rational, and even “progressive.”

But the religious reality will not remain buried forever.

Because just as SAPs speak of return, so do Jews. If Jews are forced to lose their sovereignty, perhaps diluted in a binational state, it will likely not lead to secular coexistence—it may unleash something far older and deeper: the demand for rebuilding the Third Jewish Temple.

Today, the Temple Mount is controlled administratively by the Jordanian Waqf, which bans Jewish prayer. Since the Second Temple was destroyed in 70AD, Jews have dreamed of rebuilding it, and while that has remained marginal in the modern secular Jewish state, it may surge forward in a post-Zionist situation in which Jews are compelled to relinquish so much.

If Israel is converted to a binational state in which everyone has equal rights, Jews would obviously insist on the same rights as Muslims enjoy today, to pray openly by the thousands on the Temple Mount. The demand to rebuild the Jewish Temple could move from the fringe to the center. The so-called “liberation” of Palestine would be matched by calls to liberate the Mount—from Islamic control.

In that light, the pro-Palestinian protest chants of “liberation” are a double-edged sword. They echo with reciprocal cries: not just the return of SAPs to Jaffa but the return of Jews to the Temple Mount. The religious war launched by Gazans wrapped in secular “Nakba” terminology in the west would be laid bare for what it is.

Muslims and Jews hold keys for places that don’t exist in the holy land anymore – for homes and a Temple. Should one side pursue a “right of return” to create a future-past, the mirrored key will do no less.