Have We Lost the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, Too?

Israel Harel thinks and writes so.


Through a lack of vision and assertiveness, Israel's governments have relinquished the Temple Mount and the Western Wall and weakened the state's claim to other parts of the Jewish homeland.
   
And explains that in 1967


From Lions' Gate, the fighters broke through to the Gate of Tribes and, after a short battle, liberated the Temple Mount. Following a short pause of amazement at the site, they rushed in unstoppable yearning toward the Western Wall. There they let loose an uncontrollable flood of tears. At the wall, not on the mount. They were soon followed, also through Lions' Gate and the Gate of Tribes, by national leaders and commanders from the 1948 War of Independence. They too did not stop on the mount. Even Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the Israel Defense Forces Chief Rabbi, blew the shofar at the wall and not on the mount, a historic blast that has reverberated since.

In these moments, the attitude was set regarding Gen. Motta Gur's famous words, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” Israel's government at the time and those that have followed it, have turned his words into a fiction. The poet Uri Zvi Greenberg referenced this legacy, saying, “You have betrayed your mountain, the highest in the world/your support in this world/without which Israel is not Israel.”

The transferring of control of the mount to the Waqf and the folding of the flag symbolize a lack of vision as well as the confusion that accompanied the shock of that victory. The result has been the missing of myriad opportunities to establish irreversible facts on the ground.

...Jewish hesitancy, Jewish diffidence and Jewish ambiguity were picked up by Arab seismographs, as well as by other opponents of Jewish rule over our capital and other parts of our homeland.