Category Archives: Israel

The UN Held A Conference on Jerusalem’s Holy Sites. Where Were the Jews?

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In July, 2026 the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation convened a conference in Cairo devoted to Jerusalem. The UN described Jerusalem as sacred to the three monotheistic religions and the conference as an “important platform for interreligious dialogue.”

Then it offered a remarkable description of what that dialogue looked like: “Muslim and Christian leaders reflected on Jerusalem’s profound significance to the three monotheistic faiths.”

Three religions. Two of them discussing what Jerusalem means to all three.

This was not a conference where religion was incidental. Its first substantive session was a two-hour panel titled “Saving the Holy City, Safeguarding the historic status quo at the Holy Sites.” The speakers included representatives of the Hashemite Fund for the Restoration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, Al-Azhar, the Latin Patriarchate, the Jerusalem Awqaf and Al-Aqsa, and the Coptic Orthodox Church.

There was no Jewish religious representative.

That absence was consistent with the conference’s design. The UN announcement said the gathering would highlight the “concerns of Christian and Muslim leaders regarding restrictions on worship and threats to Holy Sites.”

Not Jewish leaders.

That left an empty chair at precisely the discussion where a Jewish voice might have asked some uncomfortable questions.

Start with the name of the place being discussed.

The conference repeatedly spoke of Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Haram al-Sharif. But this same 144-dunam platform is the Temple Mount, location of the First and Second Temples and the holiest site in Judaism. Yet throughout the conference, the Islamic name and Islamic religious administration were the starting point for discussing the site. Where was the Temple Mount? A conference devoted to Jerusalem’s “multireligious character” could have acknowledged both names.

Then there is the considerably larger question of worship.

The Cairo conference repeatedly invoked freedom of worship and access to sacred places. Yet the historic status quo it sought to protect has restricted Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. Muslims worship there. Jews have historically been allowed to visit only during restricted periods but denied the same right to pray.

At Cairo, former Jerusalem Awqaf official Atallah Naser warned about “settler incursions and rituals” and what he considered an emerging “temporal and spatial division” of Al-Aqsa. Another speaker complained about increased “religious rituals” by Jews at the site.

At a conference about religious freedom, that should have produced an obvious question: Why is peaceful Jewish prayer at Judaism’s holiest site itself treated as a threat?

Nobody on the panel was there to ask it.

Nor was anyone there to ask why the practical restrictions on Jewish worship received so little attention:

  • Why should Jewish visits be confined to particular hours?
  • Why are Jews only allowed to enter the Temple Mount via single portal while Muslims can use any?
  • Why should Jewish religious practice require close police management?
  • Why does a conference concerned with restrictions imposed upon Muslim and Christian worshippers not apply the same scrutiny to restrictions affecting Jews?

Then there is the question of who administers the site.

Cairo speakers repeatedly defended the Islamic Waqf and Jordan’s Hashemite custodianship. The Waqf retains the central religious administrative role at a site that is the holiest place in Judaism. Why?

Why should Judaism’s holiest site have an Islamic religious authority but no corresponding Jewish religious authority? Why should Jewish representatives have no formal role in decisions involving Jewish worship there? Why not shared administration? Why not a multifaith governing or consultative structure? Why not Muslim administration of the mosques alongside recognized Jewish religious rights elsewhere on the enormous platform?

Those possibilities were apparently not part of Cairo’s “interreligious dialogue.”

Instead, the conference treated preservation of the “historic status quo” and protection of “freedom of worship” as though they necessarily meant the same thing.

They do not.

If the status quo restricts the religious practice of one faith at its holiest location, preserving that restriction is not the same question as protecting religious freedom.

Palestinian protesters wave Palestinian and Islamic flags as they rally at the Dome of the Rock following the last Friday prayers of the Muslim month of Ramadan, on April 29, 2022. (Photo by Ahmad GHARABLI / AFP)

UN Committee Chairman Coly Seck supplied the principle that should have started this discussion. “For Muslims, Christians and Jews,” he said, “Jerusalem carries prayers, history and hope.” He declared that freedom of worship is a right and that “No worshipper should be stopped because of who they are. No community should feel that its faith is being pushed out of its own city. Jerusalem’s religious character must not be used as a tool of control. It must remain a bridge connecting people from the three major faiths. A meeting point. A shared responsibility.”

Those words raise obvious questions about Jewish worship on the Temple Mount.

Cairo simply lacked someone at the table to ask them.

The United Nations called Jerusalem sacred to three religions and convened an interreligious dialogue in Cairo about protecting their holy places. But only Muslim and Christian representatives came. They pretended to discuss the religious interests of three faiths, while using it as an opportunity to blame all religious tension on the Jews not in the room.

A Siddur on the Temple Mount Is Now a “Highly Dangerous Development”

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A Jewish prayer book is now a “highly dangerous development” in the Middle East according to the region’s Muslim leaders.

That was the Arab League’s description Sunday of reports that Israeli police are testing allowing Jewish prayer books — siddurim — onto the Temple Mount. The League warned that allowing them could establish new Jewish religious practices and alter the “historical and legal status quo.”

It wasn’t the only alarm sounded during Sukkot.

Over 1,000 Jews visited the Temple Mount on Sunday, with some openly praying and carrying the Four Species.

For perspective, roughly 80,000 Muslims attended the first Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa during Ramadan earlier this year. In normal years, Ramadan Friday attendance can reach 200,000.

For the Muslim world, Muslims were “worshippers” while Jews were “extremist” Israelis conducting “Talmudic rituals.”

Jewish men covered in prayer shawls hold the Four Species as they take part in morning prayers during the holiday of Sukkot at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, September 27, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh warned that Israel risked transforming the political conflict into a “religious war.” He declared the entire 144 dunams of the Temple Mount an exclusively Muslim place of worship that cannot be divided or shared.

The reaction extends well beyond the Palestinian Authority.

Jordan condemned Sunday’s Jewish visits and again declared all 144 dunams exclusively Muslim. And Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have jointly used the same formulation: the entire compound is exclusively for Muslim worship and the Jordanian Waqf has exclusive jurisdiction to administer it and regulate entry.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the effort to redefine the Temple Mount “status quo,” transforming restrictions on Jewish prayer into a broader claim that the entire compound is exclusively Muslim.

Sukkot takes the story further.

There is no question that Israel is changing its own practice. For decades, Israeli governments maintained the policy that Muslims prayed on the Temple Mount while non-Muslims visited. Israeli police restricted Jewish prayer and barred siddurim and other Jewish religious objects.

Israel observed those restrictions for decades. But it never enacted a permanent statutory ban on Jewish prayer or agreed that the entire Temple Mount would forever be exclusively Muslim.

Now Israel is allowing some Jews to worship at Judaism’s holiest site.

The response is not simply a demand that Israel return to its previous practice. Multiple Muslim governments are declaring that all 144 dunams are exclusively Muslim. The possibility of a Jew carrying a siddur is described as a “desecration of its sanctity,” and jihadi calls for a “religious war.”

And this is happening during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three biblical pilgrimage festivals, historically centered on Jews traveling to Jerusalem and the Temple. Jews were making pilgrimage there during Sukkot more than a thousand years before Islam existed.

A small number of Jews praying peacefully at their holiest site during their pilgrimage holiday is used as incitement to jihad. And Muslim governments demanded that the “international community” take actions against the Jews.

Perhaps it is time for the international community to explain to radical Islamists what coexistence means.

Knowing What Time It Is

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We are in the middle of the Jewish holiday season, and Judaism has demanded a lot from us.

Rosh Hashanah asked us to stand in judgment. The Ten Days of Repentance asked us to examine ourselves. Yom Kippur demanded confession, fasting and repentance.

And then Judaism tells us to be happy.

Sukkot is zman simchateinu — the time of our joy.

The pivot can feel jarring. The melodies of Yom Kippur are still in our heads when we leave the synagogue, eat, begin building the sukkah and prepare for a holiday explicitly defined by happiness.

Kohelet, which Jews read on Sukkot, provides an answer: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to be silent and a time to speak. A time for war and a time for peace.

Kohelet does not suggest that human beings experience only one emotion at a time. We can mourn and feel gratitude. We can love and be angry. We can be frightened and hopeful.

But Kohelet points somewhere else: that emotions and activities do not only exist in time, but time is defined by emotion and activity.

Different moments call for different responses. The emotions we might personally carry do not relieve us of the obligation to recognize what the present moment demands.

Israel offers a powerful example today.

Israel has inflicted extraordinary damage on enemies that sought its destruction. Hamas and Hezbollah have been badly degraded, and Iran has suffered devastating blows. Israelis can feel enormous relief at what Israel has survived and accomplished.

At the same time, Israel faces extraordinary international hostility and diplomatic isolation. The image at the United Nations this week captured that reality starkly: as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium, dozens of delegations walked out, leaving him addressing a largely empty chamber.

So what should Israelis feel today? Relief? Alarm? Both?

Kohelet does not require one feeling to vanquish the other. The challenge is recognizing which response the present moment calls for.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks captured something similar in describing the distinctive nature of joy: “Joy lives in the moment. It asks no questions about tomorrow. It celebrates the power of now.”

That may explain why Sukkot follows Yom Kippur so quickly. Judaism does not give us weeks to transition from solemnity to celebration. We finish fasting and begin building a sukkah. We do not need to resolve every worry before experiencing joy. As Rabbi Sacks continued, joy “knows that yesterday has gone and tomorrow is unknown.”

Tomorrow will bring whatever tomorrow brings. Kohelet asks us to recognize today.

Zman simchateinu. This is the time for joy.

The Palestinian Clock Has Many Hands

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The Palestinian clock has many hands.

One points to June 1967 for borders, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Another points to 1948 for refugees and their descendants.

Another reaches to 1947, before the United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

Another reaches to 1917, before the Balfour Declaration endorsed a Jewish national home in Palestine.

And when even that is too late, the clock can be wound back to the Ottoman era, when Palestine was governed by a Muslim empire.

Muslim women prepare to enter the Western Wall Plaza in 2010 (photo: First One Through)

The hands do not need to agree. They serve different purposes.

The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas has spent decades demonstrating how it works.

1967: The Border Hand

For the borders of a Palestinian state, Abbas is precise.

In his 2016 address to the United Nations, he said the PLO had accepted a Palestinian state on the “4 June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He has repeated the formulation for years. In 2014, he called for Palestinian independence over the “entire Palestinian Territory occupied in the 1967 war,” with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2022, standing beside President Joe Biden, Abbas again called for a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the 1967 borders.”

Why June 4, 1967? Look at the picture the clock produces.

There were no Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Its Jewish residents had been expelled after the Quarter fell to Jordanian forces in 1948. By June 1967, Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish community no longer existed either, evacuated after Palestinian Arabs massacred them in 1929.

Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem

So June 4, 1967 creates a remarkably convenient baseline. The Jewish communities that exist today in eastern Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank disappear from the photograph.

But the Palestinian clock has another hand.

1948: The Refugee Hand

When Abbas talks about Arab refugees, June 1967 suddenly becomes useless. So the clock jumps backward another nineteen years.

In 2021, Abbas appeared before the United Nations holding up the deed to his family’s property and said Palestinians still possess deeds and keys to their former homes. He argued that Palestinian refugees have the right to “return to their homeland” and recover their properties.

In 2025, he was even more explicit. Abbas said there were now more than seven million Palestine refugees and declared that the “right of return” was an inalienable right that Palestinian Arabs “will not forsake.”

Entrance to UNRWA “refugee camp” in Bethlehem with a key on top representing that UNRWA is the portal for descendants of internally displaced Arabs to move into grandparents’ houses in Israel

Watch the hands.

For the territory of a new Palestinian state, the clock says 1967.

For Palestinians claiming homes and property inside Israel, it says 1948.

Apply 1967 consistently and the mass refugee claim reaching into Israel loses its 1948 baseline. Apply 1948 consistently and Jewish communities and property claims erased by the 1967 baseline return to the picture.

The clock cannot stay on either date.

It has to move with the argument.

1947: The Sovereignty Hand

Israel already exists in 1948, a bone in the throat of Palestinian Arabs, or a “painful settlement” to quote Abbas. So the sovereignty hand moves to 1947.

In November of that year, the United Nations proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. So the clock reaches a moment before Israeli sovereignty.

But international recognition of Jewish national aspirations predates partition by decades.

Move the hand again.

The Holocaust: The Colonial Hand

Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial. He dismisses the entire victimization of Jews and argued that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves – and Palestinian Arabs have been forced to pay the price for it.

In an April 2018 speech in Ramallah he said “the reason for the hatred of the Jews is not their religion but their function in society…. So the Jewish question, which was prevalent in all European countries, the anti-Jewish (sentiment) was not because of their religion, but because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on…. So their narrative about coming to this country because of their longing for Zion, or whatever – we’re tired of hearing this. The truth is that this is a colonialist enterprise, aimed at planting a foreign body in this region…”

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting Nazi Germany in 1943

1917: The Zionism Hand

In his 2016 United Nations address, Abbas attacked not the borders created by the 1967 war or the displacement of 1948, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

He called it the “notorious Balfour Declaration” and demanded that Britain apologize for the “catastrophes, miseries and injustices” he said it had created.

Look how far the clock has moved. A century.

A time when there was no modern state of Israel. There was no 1948 refugee crisis. There was no occupation resulting from the 1967 war. There wasn’t even a British Mandate for Palestine yet.

The objection has reached the international recognition of Jewish national aspirations themselves.

Still too late.

The Ottoman Hand

Before Balfour, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Even though there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the land was totally controlled by Muslims. Jews remained a small minority.

Abbas’ longtime adviser on Religious and Islamic Affairs and the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge, Mahmoud al-Habbash said in 2014 that “The entire land of Palestine is [Islamic] waqf and is blessed land… it is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it.” In 2016 he said about Jerusalem “We cannot allow or agree to it being under sovereignty that is not Muslim sovereignty.”

Israeli police block Jewish man from ascending to the Temple Mount because he is a Jew, in Novemnber 2025 (photo: First One Through)

Abbas referenced the Ottoman period in a speech in 2014 when he said “Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived peacefully together in Palestine for centuries. So peace between religions runs through the heart of the most sacred City in the world, Jerusalem. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Jericho the Oldest City on Earth. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Palestine.”

Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter makes the point clear: “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife.”

Watch the Hands

There is one time the Palestinian clock rarely points to: today. Because today leaves too many Jews in the picture.

Jews live in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank. Israel exists as a Jewish state. Jewish sovereignty and self-determination are facts rather than historical proposals.

To say openly that Jews should be removed from those places, that the Jewish state is illegitimate or that Jews should be denied national rights would make the prejudice difficult to disguise.

History offers a more respectable vocabulary. Just choose an earlier date when the particular Jews, Jewish sovereignty or Jewish rights inconvenient to the argument were absent.

That is why the Palestinian clock needs so many hands. No single date erases everything neatly.

History provides the dates. Antisemitism chooses the hand.

Related:

Mahmoud Abbas’s Particular Anti-Zionist Holocaust Denial (July 2017)

Sanctioned for Bidding to Build Homes

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An Israeli construction company sees a government tender to build residential housing. It prepares a bid and submits it.

It does not have to win the tender or break ground. Merely submitting the bid would be enough to expose it to American sanctions.

Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Ruben Gallego (Arizona) have introduced legislation targeting construction in E1, the area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. The legislation would impose sanctions on foreign persons involved in construction there, expressly including those “submitting a bid for E1 tenders.”

Warren makes the consequence explicit: those who facilitate construction in E1 should understand that they “risk losing access to the U.S. financial system.”

That is an extraordinary penalty for bidding to build homes in an allied country.

And the piece of land that has generated this response is remarkably small. E1 covers roughly 12 square kilometers, or 4.6 square miles. The entire West Bank is roughly 5,655 square kilometers. E1 therefore represents about 0.2% of the West Bank—roughly one five-hundredth of its territory.

And that sliver of undeveloped land has generated calls to reach for one of America’s most powerful economic weapons.

The United States has long used its dominance of the international financial system as one of its most powerful foreign-policy tools. Iran has faced sanctions over its nuclear program and other activities. North Korea has been subjected to extensive sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Russia has faced sweeping sanctions connected to its military aggression.

American sanctions can also reach companies outside those countries. Do business with an American adversary and a foreign company may discover that it has to choose between that relationship and access to the American financial system.

Congress has occasionally been willing to impose that choice on allies.

Turkey is a NATO member. Yet the United States sanctioned Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries after Ankara purchased Russia’s S-400 air-defense system from Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms exporter. The transaction involved an advanced weapons system, an American adversary and concerns about the security of American military technology.

European companies encountered the same American financial power over Nord Stream 2. Congress enacted sanctions aimed at companies participating in construction of the pipeline, including businesses from American allies, for engaging with a Russian pipeline carrying Russian gas into Europe. Congress viewed it as increasing European dependence on Russian energy and strengthening Moscow’s geopolitical leverage.

E1 presents something completely different.

There is no Russia on the other side of the transaction. No Iran. No North Korea. No weapons purchase or nuclear technology. No American adversary receiving the proceeds.

There is an Israeli government tender to construct residential homes in the immediate suburb of its capital.

Nor is this simply an initiative of four senators.

Fifteen additional Democratic senators have joined them: Michael Bennet (Colorado), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), Martin Heinrich (New Mexico), Tim Kaine (Virginia), Mark Kelly (Arizona), Andy Kim (New Jersey), Jeff Merkley (Oregon), Chris Murphy (Connecticut), Patty Murray (Washington), Jack Reed (Rhode Island), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Adam Schiff (California), Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) and Peter Welch (Vermont).

That brings the proposal’s Democratic Senate support to 19 senators.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons

The United States developed financial sanctions to confront hostile states, weapons programs and transactions with American adversaries. It is a powerful tool meant to confront grave risks to America. Yet in this proposal, the triggering transaction is an Israeli housing project occupying roughly one five-hundredth of the West Bank, which poses zero threat to the United States.

The Democratic senators sponsoring the legislation describe E1 construction as a threat to a future Palestinian state, presumably because the Palestinian Authority demands a country devoid of any Jews and it must include Jerusalem. Their proposed response is to make companies and individuals participating in that construction grounds for exclusion from the American financial system.

For these 19 Democratic senators, countering Palestinian Arab aspirations has become a threat to the United States.

That is the question their bill puts before Congress: Should the financial weapon America has used against adversaries and national-security threats now be turned against businesses of a close ally because they bid to build homes on 0.2% of the West Bank?

ACTION ITEM

Contact these senators about their proposed bill on E1 and find out whether the Democratic Party has become so unmoored from its mission of protecting Americans that it is using its greatest financial weapon to serve Palestinian Arabs objecting to Jewish homes.

Sen. Chris Coons Washington office (202) 224-5042, Wilmington (302) 573-6345, Dover (302) 736-5601

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Washington office (202) 224-4543, Boston (617) 565-3170, Springfield (413) 788-2690

Related:

What Is Actually Being Built in E1? (August 2026)

Why Is Israel Still in the Name of the Iran War?

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The Guardian continues to place its Iran coverage under the banner: “US-Israel war on Iran.”

Al Jazeera uses the same formulation.

It was an accurate description when the war began. It isn’t anymore.

The United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Iran retaliated against both countries. For the opening weeks, the United States and Israel were both directly at war with Iran. That fighting ended with the April 8 ceasefire.

There was one brief interruption. In June, after Israel attacked Hezbollah in Beirut, Iran fired missiles at Israel. Israel responded by striking Iran. The exchange lasted roughly two days ans stopped.

The Congressional Research Service says the June 7–8 fighting “appears to be the last direct exchange of fire between the two countries as of September 2026.”

The United States and Iran, meanwhile, have continued fighting.

That makes the media labeling increasingly strange.

The Guardian and Al Jazeera maintain an entire section called “US-Israel war on Iran” even when it is clear even in their own articles that Israel is no longer involved. Even more, it is Iran and its proxies that have waged war ON ISRAEL, not the reverse.

Why?

Does keeping Israel permanently attached to the war serve a purpose — reinforcing the idea that every American bomb dropped on Iran is also somehow an Israeli bomb, and every American decision to continue the war is part of an Israeli-American campaign? That every spike in energy prices is Israel’s fault?

For outlets whose audiences are already intensely hostile toward Israel, the distinction is not trivial. It is propaganda to inflame millions.

Coexistence, Until the Wrong Jews Show Up

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A group of religious Jewish youths recently appeared on a Galilean hillside near the Israeli Arab town of Majd al-Krum. Protesters quickly described them as West Bank settlers establishing an illegal outpost as part of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s campaign to “do in the Galilee what we are doing in Judea and Samaria.”

The facts are considerably different.

Part of the property lies within Majd al-Krum’s municipal boundaries but belongs to the Jewish National Fund. It is surrounded by privately owned Arab agricultural land. In January 2026, JNF granted seasonal grazing rights over approximately 1,050 dunams to Gabi Damari, a livestock farmer from Tal-El, a Jewish community in the Galilee. The purpose was to reduce vegetation and the risk of fires. That authorization came roughly seven months before Smotrich announced his Galilee initiative, and no evidence has emerged that Smotrich sent Damari or the young men.

Damari said he brought youths from Judea and Samaria to guard equipment following thefts while his goats were delayed from arriving on the land by veterinary restrictions. Nothing reported thus far establishes that the young men were moving permanently to the Galilee or creating a residential community. They were living at a grazing site operated by a local farmer under a preexisting JNF authorization. (Ynet)

That did not make everything at the site proper. The camp included large tents, beds, utilities and equipment, some of which reportedly extended onto private land. Those were legitimate grounds for investigation and enforcement. JNF ultimately ordered excess structures removed, restricted the size and location of any shelter and limited how many people could remain. It did not cancel Damari’s grazing rights.

The protest, however, was not confined to property lines or permit conditions. Majd al-Krum’s council warned that the encampment was intended to change the area’s “demographic reality.” Hadash figures called it “land seizure” and “creeping transfer.” Sujood Badran, a local political activist arrested during the demonstrations, later recounted protesters chanting: “Arab land belongs to Arabs. Zionist, get up and leave.” She also described the area as “occupied Palestine.” (Times of Israel, Israel Hayom)

Haviva Ner-David offered the liberal Jewish version of the same exclusion. She praised the Galilee as a shared society “balanced 50-50” between Hebrew and Arabic speakers, including Muslims, Jews, Druze and Christians. Yet she said these particular Jews had come from outside to “ruin that,” pledged to protest “until they are truly gone” and promised that if they tried another Galilean hilltop, “we will go there, too.” (Ner-David’s post)

She proudly carried a protest flag bearing a dove and olive branch, presenting it as a symbol of Arab-Jewish partnership. Yet the flag identifies Majd al-Krum only in Arabic. There is no Hebrew and nothing representing the supposedly Jewish half of that partnership.

The protestors seemingly were taking a page from the Arab League that also protests new Jewish homes inside Israel. And the JNF has taken note, ordering the Jews to leave the area.

The legal standard should be straightforward. Private property must be respected. Grazing permits do not authorize unlimited construction. Theft, intimidation and racism should be punished whether committed by Jews, Muslims, Christians or Druze. None of those principles makes a person’s birthplace, religious appearance or previous residence grounds for expulsion.

Jews living in the West Bank are routinely denounced as obstacles to peace and told to move inside Israel. Now, when Jews associated with those communities appear inside Israel, they remain “settlers,” their presence becomes a demographic threat and self-described coexistence activists organize to make them disappear.

Coexistence that ends when the perceived wrong kind of Jews arrive is not coexistence. It is demographic exclusion in dove’s clothing.

ACTION ITEM

Contact the JNF at jewishnationalfund@jnf.org to make sure that they are not expelling Jews from Israel, but simply keeping grazing land for its intended purposes.

At the UN, Borders Are Inviolable, Except Israel’s

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At the closing of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its president, Annalena Baerbock, offered a final defense of the international order.

At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.

Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.

Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023

If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.

Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.

Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.

The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.

The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.

Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023

Britain’s Only Acceptable Ethnic Cleansing

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Britain is suddenly alarmed about supposed “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.

The British government warns that Israeli policies could force Palestinian Arabs from parts of Judea and Samaria. It is sanctioning Israelis, condemning “settlements” and portraying demographic change in territory claimed by Palestinians as a grave moral offense.

Britain has seen ethnic cleansing in this territory before. Its reaction was very different.

In 1948, The Kingdom of Transjordan crossed the Jordan River and conquered Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. It then destroyed and expelled the Jewish communities that had lived across the territory. The ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was emptied of its Jews. Jews were then barred from their holiest sites, as synagogues were destroyed or desecrated.

Interior view of a ruined building with crumbling walls and debris, featuring an archway and a soldier standing amidst the ruins.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in 1949

The result was remarkably complete: the territory Jordan occupied was ethnically cleansed of Jews. And less than two years later, Britain formally recognized Jordan’s union with the territory it had invaded and conquered, one of the only countries in the world to do so.

Jordan then made the demographic principle explicit. Its 1954 nationality law extended Jordanian nationality to former Palestinian citizens residing in the kingdom while expressly carving out “the Jews.”

Jordan expelled and excluded the Jews in its holy land, and Britain’s response was recognition.

In 2005, Britain would celebrate again, this time in Gaza.

Israel decided to dismantle every Jewish community in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers physically removed roughly 8,000 Jews from their homes and twenty-one Jewish communities disappeared. A Jew-free Gaza emerged.

Britain did not describe this as ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “courage” and offered Britain’s “full support” for the withdrawal. His foreign secretary called it a hugely significant step toward peace.

Now consider 2026.

Britain warns against the possible displacement of Palestinian Arabs from Area C of the West Bank, territory that has remained under Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo framework pending a final agreement. It speaks of forcible displacement, imposes sanctions and treats the prospect of Palestinian Arabs losing their communities as intolerable.

The moral principle sounds admirable. It would be more convincing if Britain had ever applied it equally to Jews in the region.

When some Palestinian Arabs might be displaced from territory it hopes to use in a future Palestinian state, Britain suddenly discovers that removing a particular ethnic population from its homes is beyond the pale. Instead, England demands that the region be ethnically cleansed – of Jews – citing the antisemitic UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

There is a British consistency here: ethnic cleansing is only appropriate when Jews are removed.

For generations, British policy has treated the removal of Jews from disputed territory as compatible with peace. A Palestinian Gaza without Jews was progress. A Jordanian West Bank without Jews was acceptable. A future Palestinian state is still routinely imagined as a place where Jewish communities cannot remain.

Only the possibility of some Arab relocation produces moral outrage.

That exposes the deeper problem with the diplomatic vocabulary surrounding the conflict. “Two states” has quietly come to mean one multicultural Jewish state containing a large Arab minority alongside one Palestinian state expected to contain no Jews. One and one-half states for Arabs; half a state for Jews.

England understands the ethnic cleansing of Jews – it did it itself in 1290 – the only minority group to ever be expelled from the country. It seems to continue to only have a taste for that kind of hatred and ethnic cleansing, including in the Jewish homeland.

The Temple Mount Status Quo Is Being Rewritten

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The Palestinian Authority has declared the Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism — the “exclusive right of Muslims.”

That is not the historic status quo. It is an attempt to rewrite it.

After Israel took control of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1967, day-to-day religious administration of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif remained with the Islamic Waqf, while Israel retained responsibility for security and substantial control over access. The Waqf permitted Muslims to pray on the Mount, while non-Muslims could visit, prayer was restricted.

The arrangement governed administration, access and worship. It did not declare the Temple Mount the exclusive possession or religious entitlement of Muslims.

The Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Governorate crossed that line explicitly on September 6. It condemned Jews conducting “Talmudic rituals and prayers” as attempts to “alter its religious character,” declared the entire 144-dunam compound the “exclusive right of Muslims” and warned against changing its “identity.”

Those words matter.

Waqf administration is one thing. Restrictions on Jewish prayer are another. Declaring the site itself the “exclusive right” of Muslims is something else entirely.

The status quo regulates what Jews may do there. It never determined what the place is.

The First and Second Jewish Temples stood on the Temple Mount. Jewish prayer has faced Jerusalem for millennia. Jewish liturgy, mourning and hopes for redemption are bound to it. Many observant Jews have historically declined to walk upon portions of the Mount precisely because they consider the ground too holy to enter without the required ritual purity.

For some Jews, not ascending is itself an expression of the Mount’s extraordinary Jewish sanctity.

That makes the new language especially provocative. Jews visiting Judaism’s holiest place become “settlers” conducting “incursions.” Jewish prayer becomes threatening “Talmudic rituals.” A restriction accepted to preserve religious peace is transformed into evidence that Jewish religious expression does not belong there at all.

Jewish restraint was supposed to preserve coexistence. It cannot become a permission slip for Jewish erasure.

The international reaction sharpens that dynamic. The United Nations itself has called upon the parties to refrain from “provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” especially in places of “religious and cultural sensitivity.” In the very next paragraph, it demanded that Jerusalem’s historic status quo be respected “in word and practice” and urged “all sides” to halt provocations and incitement at the holy sites.

By the UN’s own standard, words can threaten the status quo. Yet when an official Palestinian governmental authority declares Judaism’s holiest site the “exclusive right of Muslims,” it is greeted with a silent nod of approval.

And this occurs as the anti-Israel horde discusses so-called “Jewish supremacy.” Zohran Mamdani has attacked privileging one religion over another (meaning Jews over Muslims). Hasan Piker denounces “ethnoreligious supremacist values.” At the Jewish Temple Mount, the principle stripped of abstraction: one religion claiming exclusive entitlement to the holiest site of another.

And that raises a more fundamental question about the status quo itself.

Perhaps placing religious administration of a multi-faith holy site exclusively in the hands of one of the religions claiming it was always structurally unstable.

The Waqf is not a neutral administrator. It is an Islamic religious institution representing one faith at a site sacred to several. That arrangement can function while custodianship means administration. It becomes difficult to justify when the authority entrusted with the site participates in or endorses a doctrine that denies another faith any legitimate claim to it.

The test should be remarkably simple: Can the authorities administering the Temple Mount state unambiguously that it is Judaism’s holiest site?

Acknowledging that fact surrenders nothing about Islam’s attachment to Al-Aqsa. But an administrator that cannot acknowledge the most basic religious identity of the people whose holiest site it administers has a profound conflict with the responsibilities of custodianship.

If the Waqf and Jordan cannot pass that test, their fitness to exercise exclusive administration should be questioned.

The logical alternative is administration by a political authority obligated to protect multiple religions rather than a religious authority representing one of them. Israel already bears responsibility for security at the compound and exercises substantial control over access. Any new arrangement would have to fully protect Muslim worship and Islamic holy places while recognizing rather than suppressing the religious attachments of others.

The status quo was built on the assumption that Islamic administration could coexist with Jewish restraint. The assertion of “Muslim exclusivity” is breaking that bargain.

If the Waqf cannot acknowledge Judaism at Judaism’s holiest site, it should no longer be entrusted to administer it.

Related:

US Embassy In Israel Only Invites Muslims To US To Study (September 2023)