Picture this: it's 1929, almost 20 years before Israel's founding. Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, prominent Muslim leader in Jerusalem and well-known Hitler associate, has just fabricated a claim that Jews plan to take control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Spurred by his antisemitic campaign, Arabs throughout the Holy Land brutally murder 133 Jewish men, women, and children with guns, clubs, and axes.
Over the century that followed, Jerusalem underwent many significant transformations. After Israel's 1948 War of Independence, the city was split between Jordan and Israel, and in 1967, it was unified as Israel's capital after the Six Day War. Its population has since expanded tenfold. But remarkably, though so much has changed, Al-Husseini's lie has survived it all.
Jerusalem is always a magnet for tourists, pilgrims, and lovers of history, particularly during major religious holidays. This year, a rare convergence of Passover, Ramadan, and Easter brought an unprecedented influx of worshipers to the city's ancient core.
At the center of this spiritual maelstrom is the Temple Mount complex, a site sacred to both Judaism and Islam that houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Despite its small size, during Ramadan the area accommodates hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims within its ancient walls. One of those walls is the renowned Western Wall, a millennia-old Jewish prayer site, which also sees tens of thousands of worshipers during Passover.
With only an ancient stone wall separating these two massive groups, tensions are understandably high. That's why long-standing security measures designate separate visiting hours for Jews and Muslims at the Temple Mount to prevent conflict. But recent years have seen another component of Al-Aqsa-related incitement aiming to obstruct visits by Jews to their holiest site, the Temple Mount, portraying them as "taking over" and "defiling" the area with their "filthy Jewish feet" and encouraging Palestinian youth to "defend" against fabricated Israeli threats.
In fact, visits by Jews are conducted in accordance with agreed-upon limits placed on all non-Muslims; Jews can only visit the Temple Mount at fixed times, cannot enter Al-Aqsa Mosque and may not even pray at their most sacred site. Statistically, their visits are also minimal: last year, 1.25 million Muslims visited the Temple Mount during Ramadan alone, while Jewish visitors in all of 2022 were fewer than Muslim worshipers on a single Ramadan Friday.