Today, to mark Yom Yerushalayim—the day commemorating the reunification of Jerusalem under Jewish sovereignty—a group of Israelis did something provocative and controversial. They prayed.

The provocative part is where they prayed, of course: at the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount. Or, as Reuters called it, the “Al Aqsa mosque site.”

The group was led by Itamar Ben Gvir, a radical rightist and Knesset member who has been in a cold war with the Israeli state itself since his youth. Ben Gvir does and says a thousand genuinely controversial things a day. But I simply cannot muster outrage over this, and I increasingly find it difficult to understand anyone who can.

Praying at the Temple Mount violates the “status quo,” an unofficial set of rules governing the sharing of the holy sites. After Israel reestablished sovereignty over the entire city of Jerusalem, including its holy sites, in 1967, the state agreed to let Arab authorities continue to administer the Mount. In return, Jews could visit the area during restricted hours but they could not visibly pray.

The mosque compound built atop the remnants of the Jewish Holy Temple represent the most famous and most prominent symbol of colonialism in the world today—the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem led to a persistent period of destruction and despoiling of Jewish holy sites.

The “status quo” was negotiated by Moshe Dayan, the great Israeli war hero who displayed an astonishing lack of judgment. In an attempt at magnanimity in victory, Dayan agreed to a scheme of religious apartheid against the Jews that also guaranteed perpetual conflict and tension in the capital.

And that is also part of a longer story of Jewish generosity in Jerusalem that has no precedent in history—a microcosm of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict itself.

One Arab criticism of the plan to partition British Palestine from the beginning was their belief that the Jews should not have self-determination in any area where they weren’t the numerical majority. Which is what made Zionists’ acceptance of partition so noteworthy: Jerusalem has been a majority-Jewish city since the mid-1800s. By the dawn of the 20th century Jews already had a supermajority of the population.

Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, and it was a Jewish city for more than a hundred years before partition—and yet the British proposal was to take Jerusalem out of the Jews’ hands and “internationalize” it. Still, the Jews accepted the partition.

That is because the two sides in the conflict in Mandate Palestine were divided between those who  wanted self-determination—the Jews—and those who didn’t want the Jews to have self-determination. The Arabs of Palestine were, at the time, interested mainly in preventing Jewish liberation, not establishing a separate state of their own in the land. To the Jews, nothing was ever more important than their ability to live in their land. To the Arabs, nothing was ever more important than preventing Jews’ ability to live in their land.

The irony of Jews’ generosity—there is really no other word for it—regarding Jerusalem is that we know exactly what happens when the Jews are not given oversight of their holy places. Here is historian Yardena Schwartz, whose 2024 book on Hebron has established itself as one of the most important works of the 21st century, describing what the Western Wall area looked like in 1928:

“Residents of the Mughrabi Quarter, named for the North African Muslims who lived there, often cursed, spat, and hurled garbage at Jewish worshippers. Arab residents walked through the narrow passageway with their donkeys, which sometimes relieved themselves beside Jews in prayer. The Western Wall and the Mughrabi Quarter, like the Temple Mount, were property of the Waqf.”

Note the difference: With the waqf in charge of Jewish sites, those sites are used as a garbage dump and a place for donkeys to relieve themselves. Today, the mosque compound above it is guarded by soldiers of the Jewish state who occasionally arrest Jews for praying. The waqf has been single-minded in its ISIS-like attempts to destroy the ancient history at the site. Israel has honored and protected the artifacts there, which tell the history of civilization.

And that is the most important lesson in all of this. Jews are Jerusalem’s only hope. In the hands of anyone else, the holy places and the heritage of mankind are buried in refuse. Only in Israel’s hands is access guaranteed for everyone. Yom Yerushalayim should be a holiday observed by the entire world.