Israel Needs to Reassert Its Rights in Jerusalem

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Feb 7, 2026

Photo via Unsplash.com

David Weinberg is the managing fellow of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, who has recently published here his argument on why Israel should delay no longer but, in the face of the European countries that have decided to recognize a “state of Palestine” — which would likely have its capital in east Israel— reassert its rights to Jerusalem: “Re-liberating Jerusalem: Why Israel must assert sovereignty over its capital, now – opinion,” by David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, January 24, 2026:

Three news items of the past week serve as reminders that the security and sovereignty situations in Jerusalem require urgent government action.

The first is the passing of the heroic Jerusalem archaeologist Gabi Barkay, who led protests against Wakf’s destruction of Temple Mount antiquities and founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which for the past 20 years has sought to recover and research the ruined, residual antiquities, with important results. Barkay played a major role in pushing back against Palestinian ideological violence in Jerusalem and in reclaiming Jewish historical rights.

The second is the notable change in police policy on the Temple Mount, allowing Jewish/Israeli visitors to bring pages with prayer texts onto the Mount. This is one more blessed step forward toward full-scale and regular Jewish prayer at the site – the holiest place on Earth according to Jewish tradition – with all necessary accoutrements (Torah scrolls, prayer books, tallit and tefillin, and more) in a permanent location.

Aside from being essential from a religious perspective, this is long overdue pushback against the Islamic denialism of Jewish history in Zion and the Palestinian attempt to turn the Temple Mount into ground zero for warfare against Israel.

In 1967, after Israel came into possession of the Old City in Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a fateful decision to ban Jews from praying on the Temple Mount, either aloud or silently, and also forbade Jews from bringing any prayer book, tefillin, or other religious objects to the holiest site in Judaism. He did not want to further inflame the Arabs, who were already suffering from their crushing defeat in the Six-Day War. It was a terrible decision, for it prevented Jews from being able to pray at the holiest site in Judaism, and allowed the Arabs to believe that eventually they would again possess Jerusalem. Recently, the police have looked the other way when Jews have prayed on the Mount, but it is time to explicitly end Dayan’s folly, and to announce that Jews the same right to pray on the Temple Mount as the Muslims have always had. Furthermore, Jews should be allowed to visit the Mount for more than the four hours a day that they are now limited; again, like the Muslims, they should be allowed to visit and pray at any hour.

Third is the razing of the large UNRWA compound in Maalot Dafna (Sheikh Jarrah) in Jerusalem, the necessary and uber-justified result of new laws passed in the Knesset outlawing UNRWA operations in Israel.

This, too, is a long-overdue pushback against the Palestinian refugee-martyrdom narrative, perpetuated by UNRWA’s support for the so-called Palestinian “right of return,” and it is punishment for the involvement of UNRWA personnel and administrators in Hamas operations against Israel in Gaza….

UNRWA has been an enemy of Israel for its entire existence. In its schools, the textbooks are full of anti-Israel and antisemitic venom. From an early age, the students in UNRWA schools are raised in an atmosphere of Jew-hatred that unsurprisingly leads some of them, when grown, to become jihadists eager to murder the Jews. UNRWA has responded to its critics by promising to cleanse its textbooks of such hatred; it never has.

In addition, UNRWA knowingly permitted Hamas to use its school buildings in Gaza to store weapons and to hide its fighters. Hamas also used school buildings as places from which to launch rocket attacks on Israel, hoping that the IDF would refrain from responding by firing on a school building where children might have been located.

Palestinians have grabbed over 2,600 dunam (1 sq.m) of land and built over 30,000 illegal structures in and around Jerusalem. Over the past decade, 1,500 unauthorized buildings have gone up in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Shuafat and Kafr Akab alone, with some of them 15-20 stories tall, built without heeding engineering standards. (God help residents of these buildings if an earthquake hits Jerusalem.)

How many people in the outside world know about the Palestinians’ illegal seizure of land, and their building 30,000 structures on them? Very few. The international media have no desire to present the Palestinians as anything other than victims of the mad-dog Israeli settler-colonial state.

History instructs us: Jerusalem belongs to Israel. It has been the capital of the Jewish people for three millennia. There should be no flags flying on the Temple Mount other than the flag of Israel. It is outrageous that the flags of terror groups — the Islamic State (ISIS), Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad — should have until now been tolerated. Nor does the flag of another nation, Turkey, whose leader has declared Israel to be its enemy, have a right to be flown over sovereign Israeli territory. No banners calling for the annihilation of Jews and the Jewish state should be allowed. The Israeli police have to tear down such banners and flags whenever they appear on the Temple Mount.

When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, there was an outcry by the Arabs, who were sure that if they screamed loud enough at the UN, they could force Israel to undo the move. They were wrong, and now East Jerusalem is widely accepted as part of Israel. When Israel annexed the Golan Heights, won from Syria in the Six-Day War, again there was an Arab outcry, but again, the world got used to it, and now the Golan is even more firmly in Israeli hands because the Druze on the Golan, who were originally hostile to Israel, now see the Jewish state as the guarantor both of their security and that of their fellow Druze inside Syria whom al-Sharaa’s army has attacked.

Let the Jews pray openly at the Temple Mount, and let them bring with them their prayer books, tefillin and tallit, and other religious paraphernalia. Let them no longer be limited to four hours a day to visit the Temple Mount, but allowed to do so during all the hours of the day, just as Muslims have been doing without interruption. Let the Israelis prevent the display of any flags save that of Israel on the Temple Mount. Let any Muslim preacher on the Temple Mount who denounces Jews for “judaizing Jerusalem” or for “storming Muslim sites” be banned from the Mount, and possibly jailed for inciting violence. The world will in the end accept this new dispensation, as it has accepted the annexation of east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.