Israeli ban on MP visits to flashpoint site challenged

An Israeli lawmaker petitioned the Supreme Court yesterday against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ban on visits by MPs and ministers to a flashpoint religious site in Jerusalem, his office said. The petition comes with concerns over whether violence will again flare up for the upcoming Jewish holiday of Passover beginning April 10. The ban was aimed at helping restore calm following a previous upsurge in violence.

Yehuda Glick, who was once shot over his campaign for Jewish prayer rights at the site, calls the 17-month ban “discriminatory” in the petition. The hilltop site in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem is known to Muslims as the Haram Al-Sharif compound, which includes the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam, it is central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu had in October 2015 instructed police to bar ministers and lawmakers from visiting. The order was part of attempts to restore calm following an outburst of Palestinian violence, fuelled in part by fears among Muslims that Israel was planning to assert further control over the site. Jews are allowed to visit the compound but not pray there, and the site has been the scene of regular incidents when Jews try to break the rule and Muslims intervene to stop them.

‘Political’ ban

On Monday, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu had decided to reexamine the ban at the end of June, after the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. But Glick went ahead with his petition nonetheless, railing in a video against the “intolerable and strange reality”. “This is a place that any person from around the world can enter except (Israeli) lawmakers,” he said. Glick noted a “return of calm” at the compound following Israel’s 2015 decision to outlaw the Murabitat and Murabitun, funded by the Islamic Movement in Israel and acting as self-appointed sentinels who harassed Jewish visitors. — AFP