Five Israeli army battalions are on standby, ready for any challenge that may rise on Friday, when threatened protests are expected to escalate in response to flaming rhetoric from Arab leaders over metal detectors installed at entrances to the Temple Mount compound.
More IDF units are preparing to deploy in Judea and Samaria as well, given the current tensions, which are still escalating.
Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) director Nadav Argaman and emissary for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, attorney Yitzhak Molcho, met in talks Wednesday with Jordanian officials over the matter.
And the White House issued a statement Wednesday expressing concern while calling on Israel and Jordan to “make a good faith effort to reduce tensions and find a solution that assures public safety and the security of the site,” while maintaining the status quo.”
The head of the Islamic Waqf Authority on the Temple Mount, Azzam al-Khatib, has ordered imams and other Islamic clerics in Jerusalem not to speak in the city’s mosques this Friday. The Waqf has called on the mosques to instead close, and urged followers to perform their prayers in the streets surrounding the Temple Mount outside.
The Speaker of the Jordanian Parliament has likewise done his best to further ignite the flames, calling on the protesters to be strong in their “resistance.”
The Jerusalem Grand Mufti, Mohammad Ahmad Hussein, added to the incitement by warning the Islamic faithful in the city that their prayers would not rise to heaven if they passed through the metal detectors in order to enter the Al Aqsa Mosque.
The leading Fatah faction of the Palestinian Authority, headed by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, called on protesters earlier in the week to march towards checkpoints in Judea and Samaria, to flood the streets with Muslim worshipers around the sacred site, and to hold a “day of rage” on Wednesday.
Each day this week, in fact, violent Arab rioters have claimed the newly-installed metal detectors at the entrances to the Temple Mount compound as the excuse for the latest round of “Islamic rage.”
But it appears the security measures are nothing more than the latest excuse for violence.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques – not to mention myriad others – pointed out last weekend that countless other sacred sites employ similar security measures in order to prevent terrorism.
The metal detectors were installed last weekend in the wake of just such an attack: Three Israeli Arab terrorists from the city of Umm al-Fahm opened fire at point-blank range at Israeli police officers at the Temple Mount, murdering two and wounding several others. Those who died weren’t Jewish; they were members of the Druze community in northern Israel, but that made no difference to the killers. As King Salman pointed out in his comments, “terrorism does not discriminate.”
Muslim worshipers have no problem, however — nor do their clerics or leaders — with metal detectors when they enter to pray at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, or they go on the Haj pilgrimage to the Holy Mosque in Mecca.
No one is egging them on to start trouble at those sites, nor offering them bonuses and incentives if they do.