On October 27, 2026, Israel witnessed an extraordinary demonstration of democracy. Preliminary estimates put Israeli Arab voter turnout at approximately 80%, potentially exceeding that of Israeli Jews. Nearly a million Israeli Arabs may have voted, with Arab-led parties projected to win 17 to 18 seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. It was among the highest Arab turnouts in decades.
The New York Times chose a different story. Adam Rasgon’s headline declared: “Israeli elections have great consequences for Palestinians, but they don’t get to vote.”
On a day of remarkable Arab political participation, the Times focused on Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank who cannot vote in Israeli elections – who aren’t Israeli citizens. An achievement of Israeli democracy became another story of Israeli power and exclusion.
The last Palestinian parliamentary election took place in January 2006, when the US- designated foreign terrorist group Hamas defeated Fatah. The last presidential election was in January 2005, when Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial, won a four-year term that expired in 2009. He remains president today.
Hamas violently seized control of Gaza in 2007, while the Palestinian Authority continued governing parts of the West Bank. Neither has renewed its national electoral mandate. An entire generation of Palestinians has reached adulthood without electing its national leadership.
That’s not a story for the Times.
Meanwhile, Israeli Arabs regularly elect representatives to the Knesset, organize opposition parties and participate in governing coalitions. In 2021, Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party joined Israel’s government, helping sustain a coalition headed by Naftali Bennett. Arab political parties can help determine who governs the Jewish state.
That’s not a story for the Times.
Israel is routinely accused of being an “apartheid” state that excludes Arabs from political power. Yet Israeli Arabs, roughly one-fifth of the country’s population, exercise the same national voting rights as Jews, hold parliamentary seats and serve as judges. Rather than educate the public about the democracy in Israel, the Times wants its readers to continue to perceive of Israel in racist terms.
It is an antisemitic lens, and the far left continues to be conditioned to view Jews and the Jewish state through a deeply jaundiced perspective.
An agency created to provide temporary relief now needs $70 million to cover its employees’ salaries over just two months. How did UNRWA become so large, expensive and financially dependent?
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is appealing for another $70 million to cover a financial shortfall, with employee salaries for the final months of 2026 at risk.
It is a remarkable moment for an institution established in 1949 to address the immediate humanitarian needs of refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
UNRWA began operations in 1950 with approximately 960,000 people on its registration rolls, distributing food, providing shelter and delivering basic medical assistance. Seventy-five years later, its register approaches six million people, its workforce numbers roughly 27,000, and its annual expenditure has exceeded $1 billion.
Along the way, it became an education system, a healthcare provider, a social-services agency and a major employer with retirement benefits serving people beyond its original refugee population.
The scale of this transformation deserves examination, particularly as UNRWA once again asks donors to finance obligations accumulated over decades.
What Changed in 75 Years?
Measure
Beginning
Later
Change
Registered population
960,021 (1950)
~5.9 million (2023)
6.1×
Employees
5,933 (1950)
27,756 (2022)
4.7×
Annual expenditure
$33.38 million (1950–51)
$1.31 billion (2022)
39.3× nominal
Schools
64 (1950)
706 (2023)
11.0×
Students
33,631 (1950)
543,075 (2023)
16.1×
Education share of regular spending
~1% (1950)
~60% (2002)
60-fold share
Relief share of regular spending
~97% (1950)
9.5% (2002)
Down 87.5 percentage points
Teachers
~800 (1950)
16,965 (2002)
~21×
Students per teacher
~51 (1950)
~29 (2002)
44% lower
Employer retirement contributions
—
$63.5 million (2024)
Recurring annual cost
Personnel expenditure
—
$735 million (2024)
57.7% of total spending
The comparisons use historical years for which measures are available. Expenditure growth is nominal; the initial expenditure figure covers 14 months, compared with 12 months for 2022.
UNRWA’s registered population grew approximately sixfold, while student enrollment expanded sixteenfold and its teaching workforce roughly 21-fold. The agency’s educational responsibilities grew far faster than its registered population, illustrating how profoundly its mission changed.
From Refugees to Generations of “Refugees”
UNRWA’s original registration population consisted primarily of people displaced by the 1948 war. Over subsequent decades, qualifying descendants became eligible for registration, creating a multigenerational population.
By 2023, nearly six million people were registered, including children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees and internally-displaced people. This increase reflects births, successive generations, migration and registration practices, rather than six million people personally displaced in 1948.
UNRWA also expanded eligibility beyond that original population. Following the 1967 war, the United Nations authorized the agency to assist additional displaced people, including individuals outside its registered refugee population.
By 1970, UNRWA was distributing approximately 217,000 monthly food rations to displaced people outside its refugee register, financed by the Jordanian government.
Registration also differs from actual service utilization. In 2023, approximately 2.02 million individuals used UNRWA healthcare services, compared with nearly six million registered “refugees.” Others used education, social services or emergency assistance, while some relied on alternative providers.
So even with the large budget, it doesn’t even cover all of the UNRWA registrants.
From Food Rations to Schools and Clinics
The greatest transformation occurred in what UNRWA actually did.
In 1950, approximately 97% of its regular programme spending went toward relief. Education accounted for roughly 1%.
By 1970, education had overtaken relief as the largest expenditure category. By 2002, education represented approximately 60% of regular programme expenditure, while relief had fallen to 9.5%.
UNRWA had become a substantial education system, with teachers, administrators, buildings, maintenance requirements and recurring operating expenses. Healthcare similarly evolved from emergency treatment into ongoing clinics, preventive medicine, maternal care and treatment of chronic illnesses.
Meanwhile, refugee camps themselves changed. The approximately 30,580 tents recorded in 1950 had largely disappeared by 1961, replaced by established residential communities and permanent structures.
UNRWA’s services increasingly resembled those normally provided by public institutions.
In 1983, UNRWA discontinued its general food-ration programme, shifting toward education, healthcare and targeted assistance. By its revised 1983 budget, education accounted for approximately 63% and relief for 10%. Emergency food distribution would return during subsequent conflicts, but the regular mission had fundamentally changed.
By 2022, however, relief and social services represented approximately 27.5% of total expenditures. This increase reflected a new generation of humanitarian crises, most having NOTHING to do with Israel.
The Syrian civil war beginning in 2011, Lebanon’s economic collapse beginning in 2019, and the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020 created enormous additional demands for food assistance, emergency cash payments and support for displaced families. These crises, alongside continuing emergency assistance in Gaza and the West Bank, substantially expanded UNRWA’s relief operations.
The 2022 figures also include regular operations, emergency appeals and special projects, whereas the earlier historical budgets used different accounting categories. UNRWA spent approximately $387 million through emergency appeals in 2022. The larger relief share therefore reflects both newer crises and a broader accounting of expenditures, while education and healthcare remained its principal permanent services.
Graphic note: The 2022 “Other” category includes approximately 10% for administration and support, 5.7% for infrastructure and camp improvements, and roughly 1% for protection and microfinance. Earlier budget categories and reporting scopes differ from the 2022 total-expenditure presentation.
Emergency Spending That Became Permanent
The 1967 war illustrates how emergency responsibilities could become recurring expenses. For 1968, UNRWA proposed an ordinary budget of $40.2 million and an additional $5.7 million for expanded operations, representing 12.4% of the combined budget. Some emergency activities were incorporated into the ordinary program within a short period.
Subsequent conflicts, including the Gulf War, Second Intifada, Syrian civil war and successive Gaza wars, added further responsibilities. Temporary emergency responses developed into continuing facilities, services and employment obligations.
This institutional evolution creates a financial consequence: permanent services require permanent funding, even as UNRWA continues to operate under a refugee-relief 1949 mandate and depends heavily on voluntary donor contributions.
A Relief Agency Becomes a Major Employer
Education became UNRWA’s largest employer. By 2002, roughly three-quarters of its workforce worked in education.
Salaries and employee benefits consequently became central to its finances. In 2024, UNRWA reported approximately $735 million in personnel expenditure, representing 57.7% of its $1.27 billion total expenditure.
The agency also developed substantial retirement and employment obligations, financed through the contributions of governments and other international donors.
Most local employees participate in a Provident Fund, supported by employee and employer contributions. UNRWA’s employer contributions totaled approximately $63.5 million in 2024, money ultimately financed through its operating resources, principally donor contributions. Employees also contribute from their salaries. International employees generally participate in the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund, supported by employee and employer contributions.
Beyond retirement savings, UNRWA owes qualifying employees end-of-service and termination benefits. These obligations can require substantial payments when employees retire, leave or are laid off. Its audited accounts have recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in accrued employee-benefit liabilities, some of which lack dedicated funding reserves.
The United Nations’ 2025 strategic assessment estimated that mass termination of staff could generate approximately $278 million in indemnity payments, without available reserves to meet them. That figure is distinct from the broader accrued employee-benefit liabilities reported in UNRWA’s financial statements.
An organization created to provide emergency assistance has become a long-term employer whose workforce carries financial obligations extending well beyond any immediate humanitarian crisis.
What Should Happen After Another $70 Million?
UNRWA’s history raises questions that extend beyond the latest appeal.
How many of its nearly six million registered “refugees” actually depend on each service? What proportion of expenditure supports education, healthcare, emergency relief and administration? How much of its operating budget benefits people outside the original refugee registration system?
Could some established services be transferred to existing public institutions, and what would such a transition cost? How should employee retirement and termination obligations be financed? What would constitute a sustainable funding model for the services that remain?
These questions require answers grounded in audited expenditure, service usage, educational outcomes and the practical consequences of institutional change.
The United Nations itself has examined options ranging from predictable multiyear financing to changes in service delivery and transfers of responsibilities.
The $70 million appeal is a symptom of a much larger institutional problem. UNRWA has spent 75 years evolving from temporary relief into a billion-dollar-plus permanent education, healthcare and employment system, financed through international contributions. Another emergency payment may cover the next round of salaries. The harder question is whether the world intends to finance this structure indefinitely—or finally decide who should provide these services, under what mandate, and at what cost.
For decades, the world has been told that Palestinians live under conditions of extraordinary deprivation. Yet before October 7, 2023, several important demographic and social indicators told a very different story.
In 2022, the West Bank and Gaza had a fertility rate of approximately 3.4 children per woman. Among countries with fertility rates above three, the Palestinian territories also reported relatively high life expectancy, low infant mortality and exceptionally high adult literacy.
Uniquely among its Arab peers. Only Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (neither Arab) among high fertility countries, have quality of life statistics remotely close to Palestinian Arabs.
Palestinian Arab adult literacy was 98%. Infant mortality was far below that of many other high-fertility populations. Reported life expectancy was in the mid-70s, although estimates vary by source.
These were meaningful achievements, particularly in a region marked by conflict, poverty and political instability. They reflected billions of dollars of investment in education, extensive public health and educational services.
These incredible quality of life statistics came principally from the charity of western countries. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Norway, Ireland and other countries have provided extensive financial assistance to Palestinian Arabs, both directly and through international institutions such as UNRWA.
Yet these charitable countries face an entirely different demographic reality.
In 2022, fertility in Norway was approximately 1.4 children per woman. Ireland and Germany were around 1.5. Japan approximately 1.3, and the United States around 1.7. All were below the roughly 2.1 births per woman associated with long-term population replacement in low-mortality societies.
The Palestinian territories, meanwhile, averaged approximately 3.4.
So the countries financing Palestinian schools, hospitals and social services were experiencing declining birth rates and aging populations at home. And their taxpayers were helping support a population having roughly twice as many children per woman as their own societies.
And despite the western generosity and much better quality of life than surrounding Arabs, these same Palestinians decided to launch a genocidal war against Israel and destroy the world that Europeans and Americans financed.
Member of Gazan terrorist group during massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023
The uncomfortable question for international donors is whether charity to a people who prioritize destroying their neighbor over building a society is logical. Or moral.
Norway, Ireland, Germany and Japan cannot purchase peace simply by financing another generation’s schools and hospitals.
A society’s children deserve more than the opportunity to survive infancy, learn to read and live long lives. They deserve leaders who will not gamble away those achievements in war, and an ideology that values coexistence with a Jewish State.
J Street calls itself “pro-Israel and pro-peace.” Apparently, that requires pretending Hamas has no agency nor role in the conflict.
In a Facebook post marking the anniversary of the Gaza ceasefire, J Street laments displaced Palestinians, continuing deaths, stalled reconstruction and the absence of a new Palestinian government. It then delivers its indictment:
“We cannot claim to stand for Israel’s future while looking away as its government denies Palestinians the possibility of one.”
Notice who is missing from this account of Gaza’s future: Hamas.
Hamas launched the October 7 massacre. Hamas continues to maintain an armed organization. Hamas has resisted surrendering its weapons and relinquishing military control. Yet in J Street’s telling, the obstacle to peace is Israel’s government.
Hamas becomes a passive spectator to its own war. Palestinians become people without political leadership or responsibility. Israel alone possesses agency, and therefore Israel alone receives blame.
J Street knows better. Its own policy analyses acknowledge Hamas’s continued armed presence and the necessity of disarmament. Yet when communicating with its Facebook audience, those inconvenient facts disappear.
J Street claims to be pro-Israel and pro-peace while treating Hamas as an innocent bystander and Israel as the sole villain. That is more than intellectual dishonesty. It is moral cowardice masquerading as moral clarity.
HISTORICAL ECHO
We have seen this in Jewish history before – those in leadership positions enabling the mob rather than confronting depravity.
In the wilderness, Aaron fashioned a Golden Calf rather than confront a crowd demanding an idol. Today, condemning Israel has become a new Golden Calf, an act of public devotion that substitutes fashionable outrage for moral judgment. J Street, which claims to speak for Jewish values and Israel’s future, should recognize the biblical warning. Instead, it leads and joins the worshippers, sacrificing moral clarity on the altar of popular approval.
Before the October 7, 2023 Gazan massacre of Israelis and the subsequent war in Gaza, Palestinian Arabs enjoyed one of the most favorable combinations of high fertility and low childhood mortality in the surrounding Arab world.
Typically, wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have few children and lower infant mortality, defined as a child dying before five years old. Poorer countries and those in conflict have more children and higher infant mortality, like Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
Yet in 2022, Palestinian women had approximately 3.6 children each, while the under-five mortality rate in the West Bank and Gaza was roughly 14 deaths per 1,000 live births.
Compare that with Syria, where approximately 21 children per 1,000 died before their fifth birthday. In Iraq, the figure was 23. In Yemen, 41. The difference was enormous. West Bank and Gaza Arabs were much closer to the exceptional high fertility and low infant mortality rates of Israel.
If one were to expand the regional focus to Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti, one would see an even more dramatic gap – Sudan (4.38; 51.7), Ethiopia (4.2; 46.5), Eritrea (3.79; 36.6) and Djibouti (2.7; 51.9). On the other extreme for wealthy Gulf states are UAE (1.15; 5.3) and Qatar (1.74; 6.1).
Applying Syria’s childhood mortality rate to approximately 144,000 Palestinian births in 2022 would imply roughly 950 additional deaths before age five. Iraq’s rate would imply another 1,300 deaths compared with the Palestinian rate. Yemen’s would imply nearly 3,900 additional deaths.
Extend those differences illustratively across 20 annual birth cohorts, assuming similar numbers of births and mortality differences, and the results are striking: approximately 19,000 additional Palestinian childhood survivors compared with Syria’s rate, 26,500 compared with Iraq’s, and 78,000 compared with Yemen’s. Using the same methodology for Sudan or Djibouti would result in nearly 110,000 Palestinian Arabs childhood deaths.
The Palestinian territories benefited from robust vaccination programs, maternal healthcare, hospitals, and medical services developed over decades, including services provided through United Nations and Palestinian institutions, international organizations, and cooperation with Israel.
Despite the incremental 19,000 to 110,000 young Palestinian Arabs alive today because of healthcare investment and coordination with Israel, anti-Israel organizations have been accusing Israel of pursuing a “genocide” and the destruction of the Palestinian population. These figures illustrate the precise opposite. Israel is a Palestinian Arab child MAKER.
The demographic record deserves to be confronted: Palestinian Arabs were raising large families, with child survival outcomes that compared extremely favorably with much of the neighboring Arab world.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has once again postponed Palestinian elections, this time from November 2026 until September 2027. It is a familiar routine for the 90-year-old leader, who was elected in 2005 to a four-year term and has remained in power for 21 years. Palestinians last elected a legislature in 2006, when Hamas defeated Abbas’s Fatah party. Since then, Abbas has repeatedly promised elections, postponed them and continued governing by decree, knowing that he will be trounced in elections.
This latest postponement for the authoritarian leader has consequences far beyond Palestinian politics. In September 2025, Canada, France, Britain and Australia recognized a Palestinian state, citing commitments by Abbas to democratic elections and governance reform. Just over a year later, those promises have been broken.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly predicated recognition on Abbas’s commitment to fundamental governance reform, elections in 2026 excluding Hamas, and demilitarization. Australia’s Anthony Albanese similarly cited Palestinian commitments to elections, reform and demilitarization.
French President Emmanuel Macron secured written assurances from Abbas to hold presidential and legislative elections under international supervision. Britain’s Keir Starmer endorsed Abbas’s commitment to elections within a year of a ceasefire. Belgium tied further diplomatic implementation to elections and Hamas’s disarmament.
These Western governments knew Abbas’s record when they accepted his promises. He had already postponed national elections in 2021.
Meanwhile, only 32% of Palestinian Arabs are in favor of a two-state solution with a majority opposed according to an October 2026 Gallup poll. So what Palestinian state are western governments trying to recognize anyway?
The implications are straightforward. Western governments should announce that they are standing by their words and not going to recognize a Palestinian State headed by an authoritarian corrupt Holocaust denier, nor one with a genocidal jihadi legislature.
The Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) do not want a state to coexist next to a Jewish State; they want to control every inch of the holy land. Perhaps it is time for western governments to recognize what these regional Arabs have been saying consistently for a century.
Resilience is a word we use so casually that we sometimes forget what it actually means. It comes from the idea of springing back: absorbing a blow without allowing the blow to determine what comes next.
Israel received an extraordinary demonstration of it Wednesday morning.
Flydubai Flight FZ1073 was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying roughly 150 Israelis when something went terribly wrong in the cockpit. The plane plunged rapidly, eventually transmitted the international code for unlawful interference and diverted to Saudi Arabia. Israeli officials now say they are investigating the incident as an attempted terrorist attack. According to Israeli officials cited in press reports, a pilot was stabbed during the cockpit struggle, and passengers and crew helped overpower the attacker. Everyone aboard survived.
The investigation is continuing, and some details remain unsettled. But the response aboard the aircraft is striking. A plane full of people suddenly drops thousands of feet. There is violence in the cockpit. Passengers realize their lives may depend upon what happens in the next few minutes. People act and the attacker is subdued. The aircraft lands.
That is resilience in its most compressed form.
Inside the cockpit chaos: Passengers describe blood, screams on Flydubai flight
For a slower version, look at Kibbutz Be’eri.
On October 7, 2023 Be’eri suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of jihadists from Gaza. Nearly three years later, its residents are rebuilding houses, schools and community facilities and preparing for a broader return. Most of the community says it wants to return. The rebuilding effort describes its purpose in the simplest possible terms: returning home rather than allowing jihadi terror to decide whether the community continues to exist.
That is resilience too. Not forgetting or forgiving. Not pretending nothing happened nor escaping grief. Rebuilding anyway.
There is another way some societies and movements can process grievance, and it has almost the opposite dynamic.
A grievance can become something to preserve rather than overcome. Suffering becomes justification for retaliation. Retaliation produces a counterattack. The counterattack becomes a new grievance. That grievance then justifies another attack. Instead of absorbing catastrophe and trying to restore ordinary life, the political ideology continually replenishes itself from catastrophe.
There is a name for this process: grievance-fueled radicalization. Over the course of a century, it has become the mantra of Palestinian Arabs.
Palestinian Arabs mutilate Israelis in Ramallah and hold bloody hands aloft to cheering crowd at start of Second Intifada in October 2000
And it is impossible to understand Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad without understanding how powerfully this mechanism operates within their ideology.
Hamas’ foundational charter did not merely object to particular Israeli borders or governments. It presented Palestine as an Islamic waqf that could not be surrendered and described the struggle over the land in explicitly religious terms. It was a call to “cleanse” the land of Jews and “Crusaders.”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad is even less ambiguous. The U.S. State Department has described PIJ as committed to Israel’s destruction and the creation of an Islamic state throughout historic Palestine, including present-day Israel.
Hamas and PIJ bring back body of dead woman to cheering crowds in Gaza on October 7, 2023
The Palestinian jihadi movement built around grievance can interpret the consequences of its own violence as additional evidence for the grievance that justified the violence in the first place.
Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad supplied an unusually stark example after October 7. He argued that Israel itself was responsible for the bloodshed, said Hamas would repeat October 7 again and again, and rejected the idea that Israel had a legitimate place on the land.
Consider the circularity. Israel’s existence is a grievance > Hamas attacks Israel is resistance > Israel response is a new grievance.
The cycle reproduces itself indefinitely because almost every possible outcome feeds it.
That is fundamentally the opposite of resilience.
Resilience does not require forgetting a grievance. Israelis certainly have not forgotten October 7, just as the people of Be’eri have not forgotten what happened in their homes. Resilience is the decision that suffering will not become the organizing principle of everything that follows.
The passengers on FZ1073 did not have the luxury of theorizing about any of this. Their aircraft was falling. They fought for control of it.
Be’eri has been doing essentially the same thing for three years, only much more slowly: taking back control of what comes next.
Israel has built resilience around what comes after catastrophe: survive, rebuild and move forward. Palestinian jihadist movements have built their cause around grievance that must be preserved, intensified and avenged. Coexistence becomes possible only when their stated mission to eliminate the Jewish state no longer governs the conflict.
For the Palestinian Authority, Jews who visit Jerusalem during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three pilgrimage holidays, are “terrorist colonists.”
What did these Jewish “terrorists” do? According to WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, they prayed, sang and clapped together. They gathered among themselves for peaceful Jewish worship at Judaism’s holiest site during a Jewish pilgrimage holiday.
This is terrorism?
This is the language of jihad. It begins by transforming ordinary religious practice into aggression. A Jew praying becomes a provocateur. A group singing together becomes a threat. A religious pilgrimage becomes an invasion. Once worshippers have been labeled “terrorists,” hostility toward them has already been given a vocabulary of supposed self-defense.
That is radical Islam applied to one of the most contested religious sites in the world: not simply insisting upon Muslim rights, but denying equivalent Jewish religious rights and portraying their exercise as an attack.
Every global leader taking the podium at the United Nations should condemn this screed. So should political leaders around the world asking voters to believe they oppose antisemitism and religious extremism.
The question is simple: Do you condemn the Palestinian Authority calling Jews engaged in prayer at their holiest site “terrorist colonists”?
Ignoring this rhetoric while rallying to the defense of the Palestinian Authority encourages the targeting of Jews around the world. The people WAFA describes are not firing weapons or fighting soldiers. They are Jews praying, singing and observing Sukkot.
Islamic supremacy does not only call for expelling every Jew. It also means insisting that Jews remain religiously subordinate – that Muslim prayer is a right while Jewish prayer is a provocation.
Calling Jewish worship terrorism is where the demand for Islamic domination becomes even darker. It turns Jews practicing Judaism into the enemy and fuels a global jihad.
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 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.
