How bizarre can Middle East politics get, you ask? In Israel—a democratic state which protects freedom of religious practice by law; a state which in principle is meant to express and protect the millennial longings of the Jews—a Jew who ascends the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, and utters the briefest of prayers, even under his breath, is subject to arrest and prosecution by Israeli police. Why? He is, allegedly, engaging in a provocative act which may lead to violence. That is, at least, the view of Israel’s public security minister Avi Dichter. Dichter recently wrote to two parliamentarians who, according to Haaretz, sought to pray in silence and without prayer shawls at the site. Such an act, Dichter wrote, is banned. It might “serve as a provocation” and result in “disorder, with a near certain likelihood of subsequent bloodshed.”

I do not think Dichter is wrong to suggest that Jews praying on the Temple Mount may upset Muslims, who also pray on the Temple Mount. Nor do I think that violence is an impossible outcome. The real question is: What happened to the individual’s rights in the face of the violent mob? Isn’t that what the police in a democracy are for—to deter precisely the kind of bloodshed that intimidates people into giving up cherished practices? And from the Jewish side—why go through the (quite considerable) trouble of having a Jewish state if a Jew cannot pray at his religion’s holiest site?