One of the most sacred sites on earth has become a place of episodic chaos and cacophony, a place where hatred and contempt are openly expressed, and where an unequal battle is being waged over incompatible claims.

Spearheaded by “Temple Mount” groups, various Jewish “redemptionists” have mounted a calibrated campaign for major unilateral Israeli changes to the Status Quo on the Haram al-Sharif (which Jews prefer to call the Temple Mount) in order to advance toward their goals “millimeter by millimeter”. The time has come, these organizations say, to brush aside what’s left of the inconvenient Status Quo arrangements, inherited from the Ottoman period and adapted by Moshe Dayan in June 1967, which left administration of the mosque esplanade in the hands of the Islamic Waqf (or “Trust Foundation”).