At a meeting with Muslim religious leaders atop the Mount on June 17 that year, agreement was reached on a so-called reformulated status quo under which the Jordanian Muslim Waqf would continue to hold religious responsibility for the compound under overall Israeli supervision; prayer on the Mount would be reserved for Muslims only; Jews would be allowed to visit but not to pray there.
This constituted a strikingly radical decision. Having finally regained sovereignty in a bitter defensive war over the holiest place in Judaism, the site of the two biblical Temples, here was the defense minister of the revived Jewish state promptly relinquishing the Jews’ right to practice their religion there.
Dayan was, pragmatically, seeking to tamp down the post-war frictions with the Muslim world, for which the Al-Aqsa Mosque atop the Haram al-Sharif is the third-most holy shrine. And he was utilizing the halachic ban on Jews so much as setting foot on the Temple Mount for fear that they might inadvertently desecrate the area where the Temple’s Holy of Holies, its inner sanctuary, had stood. The Temple Mount was in Israel’s hands, but the Jews’ holiest place for prayer would remain the Western Wall, the retaining wall of the compound, beneath it. READ MORE
