MKs Yehuda Glick (Likud) and Shuli Mualem (Habayit Hayehudi) are not happy or grateful over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to permit Knesset to go up to the Temple Mount one day a week, Kipa reported. According to the announcement, as of this week, Arab and Jewish MKs will be able to ascend for at least one day—this coming Tuesday—as part of a police pilot project.
MK Glick responded acerbically to Netanyahu’s “gesture,” suggesting it was a hoax the PM is staging ahead of his government’s response to a petition he filed with the High Court of Justice against the ban.
“The Prime Minister should tell the High Court by September 15 why he does not allow MKs to go up to the Temple Mount,” Glick said, adding, “He creates this attempt so he can come to the court on September 15 with clean hands and say ‘I tried and it did not work.'”
“This is a decision I find difficult to justify using logic or contemplation, unless its purpose is to forge reasons to continue and forbid Knesset members from going up to the Temple Mount, supposedly to maintain the public order,” Glick said.
Glick questioned the wisdom of the PM’s “pilot” in terms of security and public order, saying, “Is it reasonable to expect that if all the MKs, Jews and Arabs alike, go up during the same day, it would help maintain public order?”
Which is why Glick rejected the pilot, saying, “I informed the Prime Minister’s Office that I did not intend to be a guinea pig for the prime minister’s tests. Letting into the Temple Mount on the same singular day Arab and Jewish MKs will turn the World’s center of peace into a center of political confrontations.”
“I do not want to go to the Temple Mount as a politician to promote an agenda and to engage in unnecessary conflicts,” Glick said. “I want to ascend as an individual, and commune with the King of the Universe who chose to settle His emanation there. When the prime minister decides to treat MKs as human beings and not as lepers, I would gladly go up to the Temple Mount.”
Initially, a plan to test the renewal of MKs’ permit for one whole week had been approved the Prime Minister and the Attorney General, but Netanyahu decided to cut the experiment to a single day.
MKs’ ascent to the Temple Mount was halted in November 2015, following incitement to violence by Arab MKs who visited the compound. After the violent events on the Temple Mount had calmed down a few weeks ago, Police Jerusalem District Commander Major General Yehoram Halevi recommended that Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh renew the permit ahead of the Jewish high holidays.
On Wednesday, MKs Glick and Mualem, who co-chair the Knesset lobby for the Temple Mount, arrived at the Mughrabi Gate and asked to be allowed in, despite the PM’s ban. After hectic calls between police at the gate and the Jerusalem headquarters, the MKs were escorted off the Temple Mount.
