Thirty-five acres. No treaty, no ratified law, no formal sovereign. Just a handshake that has held for almost sixty years.
And Daniel wants the origin story.
He does. Here's what he wrote. He says the beginning of the status quo around the Temple Mount is one of the most consequential decisions in modern Jewish and Israeli history. And he wants to go deeper than we did before. We looked at East Jerusalem back then, how the city got divided by a border, how the eastern half lived under Jordanian control. Now he wants the part that comes after. How did the Waqf end up as custodian of the site. What does the historical record actually show about the internal Israeli decision making in those days when the Old City came into Israeli hands, when the arrangement that governs the Mount today was first improvised.
So he's asking how it started, who made it, and why it stuck.
Three questions. And a fourth one underneath. What is the Waqf's relationship to Israel and Jordan, really, given that it owes something to both.
That's the part I find hardest to answer cleanly. Which is usually a sign it's worth doing.
So let's start with what the status quo actually is. Because almost nobody agrees on the definition, and you can't trace the origin of something you haven't pinned down.
It's four principles, basically. Internal civilian management of the compound stays with the Muslim Waqf. Public order and security rest with Israeli forces. Only Muslims may pray there. Non-Muslims may visit but not pray.
And the gates.
Non-Muslims enter free through the Dung Gate. Muslims enter free through eight other gates. That's the architecture.
Here's what makes that remarkable. This wasn't a cabinet decision. It wasn't a law. It wasn't a treaty. It was one man, Moshe Dayan, acting on his own initiative, and the state only caught up with him afterward.
And the man who did it was the man who hadn't wanted the Old City at all.
Which is the irony sitting at the center of the whole story. Dayan resisted taking it. Then he designed the arrangement that turned the Mount into a permanent flashpoint. The outcome is the opposite of what he was trying to achieve.
What was he trying to achieve?
Separation. Keep nationalism away from the holy sites. Let religion be religion and let the state handle security. He thought if he could draw that line cleanly, the Mount would stop being a fuse.
And instead he built a governance structure that has no clean sovereign at all. The Waqf is a Jordanian government organ. Religious authority sits with a mufti appointed by the Palestinian Authority. Israel controls access and security.
Three parties, none of them in charge, all of them with a veto. So what does the archival record actually show about how that came to be?
It shows Dayan was dragged into it. He's standing on Mount Scopus on the second day of the war, and he whispers to Uzi Narkis, who's the GOC Central Command colonel at that point. What do we need this Vatican for?
That's the line. What do we need this Vatican for.
Narkis later described how Dayan saw the Old City. A threatening mosaic of mosques and churches. And he said Dayan was very reluctant to occupy and liberate the Old City. Those are Narkis's words.
So who forced it?
Begin and Allon. Menachem Begin and Yigal Allon took the matter directly to Eshkol, over Dayan's head. The decision to enter the Old City was effectively imposed on the defense minister by two cabinet colleagues who went around him.
And what does Dayan do the moment they have access?
First thing, on advice from Meir Shamgar, who was the chief IDF prosecutor at the time, he orders the Israeli flag taken down from the Dome of the Rock. The paratroopers had planted it. Dayan had it removed.
That's a signal. That's not a small gesture.
Then he tells Narkis to withdraw a paratroopers company that was slated to be stationed permanently on the northern part of the Mount. So two moves, almost immediately. No flag, no permanent military presence on the compound itself.
Where's that coming from? Is that instinct, or is somebody feeding him?
There's a person. A reserve officer named David Farhi. Hebrew University lecturer on Islamic countries. And Farhi's argument was precise. Muslims will reject any significant changes to the status of the mosques when they're made by any non-Muslim power.
Meaning the form of the change matters less than who does it.
Farhi's point was that even a benign change imposed by Israel would be read as a violation. So the only structure that could hold was one where Muslims administered the site themselves and Israel's role stayed outside the doors.
And then June seventeenth.
June seventeenth, nineteen sixty-seven. Dayan goes into the Al-Aqsa Mosque and meets the leadership of the Supreme Muslim Council and the Muslim Waqf. Inside the mosque.
What does he offer them?
The oral agreement. The Mount and its shrines belong to Islam and would be administered by the Waqf. Jews could visit but not worship in organized prayer. Israel's security forces would guard the site.
Just to be clear about the shape of this. No document. No signature. A conversation in a room.
And the Waqf's reaction tells you how unexpected it was. Sheikh Saad a-Din al-Alami, who became mufti of Jerusalem after the war, admitted the Muslims were surprised at Dayan's generosity.
Surprised at his generosity. That's the mufti's own word.
His own word. Dayan explained himself later, in his nineteen seventy-six memoir. He wrote that it was evident that if they did not prevent Jews from praying in what was now a mosque compound, matters would get out of hand and lead to a religious clash.
So the prohibition on Jewish prayer wasn't a concession he stumbled into. It was the mechanism. He wanted the Mount to be Arab-administered and Jewish-visited so that religion and nationalism stayed apart.
That was the theory. And here's the fact that has to sit underneath all of this. No Israeli government ever formally ratified the arrangement. Not the government of the day. Not any government since.
Not in fifty-nine years.
Not once. It stayed verbal. And there's an argument that it stayed verbal on purpose.
Say that again.
The arrangement remained vague by design. It allowed Jews to continue to believe that they had not given up the Temple Mount on paper. If it had been written down and ratified, somebody would have had to sign away something explicit. Leaving it unwritten meant nobody had to.
So the vagueness isn't a bug. The vagueness is the deal. Okay, but let's go back a step, because there's a piece here that's easy to skip. Why the Waqf? Of all the bodies that could have administered the site, why did Dayan sit down with that particular institution?
Because it was already there. The Al-Aqsa compound had been administered as a waqf since the Muslim reconquest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in eleven eighty-seven. That's not a typo. Eleven eighty-seven.
So when Dayan walks into that meeting, he's dealing with an institution that's been running the site for seven hundred and eighty years.
Through the British Mandate, nineteen seventeen to forty-eight, the Waqf continued to administer daily affairs. Through the Jordanian period, forty-eight to sixty-seven, the same. The current Jerusalem Waqf administration was actually instituted by Jordan after its nineteen forty-eight occupation of the West Bank. It's an organ of the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf.
So it's not a religious body that happens to be Jordanian. It is Jordanian. Structurally.
Its staff are Jordanian government employees. It's guided by a council, all appointed by Jordan. The director since two thousand five has been Sheikh Azzam al-Khatib. And the custodianship itself traces back to nineteen twenty-four, when the Supreme Muslim Council chose Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, as custodian of Al-Aqsa.
Here's the split that I think people miss. Administrative authority and religious authority are two different things.
They are. The Waqf administers. But religious authority on the site rests with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and that position is appointed by the Palestinian Authority.
So you have a Jordanian payroll, a Palestinian religious authority, and Israeli security. Three employers, one site.
Which is why the Waqf's position is so delicate. It's a Jordanian government organ that operates inside territory Israel controls, under the religious authority of a Palestinian appointee, with Israeli police at the gates.
So that's what the status quo is on paper. But the archival record shows the paper didn't exist. What happened in the weeks and months after?
The government only discussed it two months later. August sixteenth, nineteen sixty-seven. Resolution number seven sixty-one of the Ministerial Committee for Preservation of the Holy Places.
And what does it say?
When Jewish worshippers ascend to the Temple Mount, they will be directed by the security forces to the Western Wall.
Read that carefully. It doesn't forbid Jewish prayer on the Mount. It redirects it.
That's the operative move. And three days earlier, on August thirteenth, the committee had specifically rejected a suggestion to ban Jewish prayer on the Mount. They wouldn't do that. Instead they instructed that Rabbi Goren be told to desist from arranging prayers there.
So the committee wouldn't write down a ban. They wouldn't formalize it.
They wouldn't. They'd tell one rabbi to stop organizing, and instruct the security forces to steer people to the Wall. That's the entire formal apparatus.
Which is thin. That's not governance. That's a nudge.
Now here's where the cabinet minutes get surprising. Three months after the war, Israel did not have full control of the site.
Say the number again.
Largely controlled by the Waqf. That's the language in the minutes. The Waqf was charging one pound from each Jew or tourist visiting the mosque.
Admission fees. On the Temple Mount. To a Jordanian-run body. Three months after the paratroopers took it.
And it was sending protest letters. Signed, The Jordanian Hashemite Kingdom. Claiming the Western Wall is the property of the Waqf.
That's a body that doesn't understand itself to have lost.
It doesn't. And Dayan's response to those letters is one of the most revealing things in the record. He said, if they write a letter in Jerusalem on behalf of the Jordanian kingdom, it means that for them Jerusalem isn't Hebrew but belongs to the Hashemite kingdom. That being the case, the situation there will remain unchanged.
He's saying, you've told me who you think you are, so I'll treat you as that.
That's the logic. You want to sign as a kingdom, I'll leave you running the place as a kingdom. Which is one of the stranger inversions in the whole story. The Waqf's own self-description is what locked the arrangement in place.
And Eshkol's response to the fee?
Eshkol objected to cancelling it. He said this custom has been going on for years. The justice minister chimed in that he'd paid fifteen pennies to enter during the British Mandate.
They're treating it like a parking fee that predates the state.
Which is exactly what it was, administratively. The fee had been part of how the site was run for decades before Israel existed in its current form.
So who finally puts a stop to it?
Begin. Later, Menachem Begin pushed an adjustment. Israeli police were stationed at the Mughrabi Gate specifically to stop the fee being charged to Israelis. Muslims were exempt, so this was about the Jewish and tourist traffic.
And only that gate?
Only that gate. Oversight of the other gates stayed with the Waqf. So even the correction was surgical. One gate, one fee.
The arrangement was never ratified, so how did it survive? That's where Jordan comes in.
That's the arc of the whole second half. In nineteen sixty-seven, Jordan was nothing more than the employer of the Waqf. Today it's Israel's partner in managing the Temple Mount.
That's a promotion. How did that happen?
It happened because Jordan was the only party with a physical stake in the site's condition. Jordan renovated the compound's cracking eastern and southern walls. That's structural work. You can't do that from a distance.
What else?
Jordan vetoed a proposed replacement for the Mughrabi Bridge. And it demanded limits on Jewish visitors, and got them.
So it went from payroll clerk to a party whose objections have to be accommodated.
Then it gets formalized. The nineteen ninety-four Israel-Jordan peace treaty, Article nine, commits Israel to respect the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem.
The peace treaty.
What started as a verbal understanding in a mosque in sixty-seven becomes a treaty obligation twenty-seven years later. And then in twenty thirteen, there's an agreement between King Abdullah the Second and Mahmoud Abbas recognizing Jordan's role. That agreement is described as replacing the decades-old verbal agreement.
So the verbal thing gets written down, but not by Israel. By Jordan and the Palestinians.
That's the striking part. The document that succeeds the verbal agreement isn't an Israeli document at all.
And there's a longer pattern underneath this. Herman, you made the point on a previous episode that the only things that have ever broken the holy site deadlock are external pressure and outside money. This looks like another case of it.
It does. Jordan donated one point four million dollars to the Waqf in twenty seventeen. And the total Hashemite spending on administering and renovating Al-Aqsa since nineteen twenty-four is estimated at over a billion dollars.
A billion dollars over a century. That's not custodianship as a title. That's custodianship as a budget line.
And in twenty seventeen, Jordan enlarged the Waqf council from eleven members to eighteen, installing Palestinian officials and religious leaders on it for the first time.
So Jordan expands the body's Palestinian representation while keeping the appointments in Amman.
That's the move. Broaden the council, hold the appointment power.
Okay. So the arrangement gets formalized. Is it still intact?
That's contested, and this is where the record gets uncomfortable for everyone.
Go.
INSS published an analysis in February twenty twenty-five by Shmuel Berkovits. And it reveals that since twenty eighteen, Jews have been authorized to pray quietly at a specific spot on the Temple Mount. INSS itself calls that a breach of the status quo.
Quietly. At a specific spot. That's not a legal change anybody announced.
It isn't. There's no resolution, no cabinet decision, no treaty amendment. There's an understanding about one place and one volume level.
Which is how the whole thing has always worked. It changes the same way it was made. Somebody decides something and doesn't write it down.
Forty-five thousand Jews ascended the Temple Mount in twenty twenty-three. And in January of that year, Ben-Gvir's visit lasted thirteen minutes. Thirteen minutes triggered a UN Security Council session two days later.
Thirteen minutes.
And Netanyahu had already made the point in twenty twenty, when Ben-Gvir offered electoral support in exchange for a prayer commitment. Netanyahu's response was that it would set the Middle East on fire and enrage a billion Muslims. And then he said, there is a limit.
So the Prime Minister of Israel is saying out loud that this arrangement is a limit on Israeli sovereignty.
In those words. That's what he's saying.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Public Security Minister, put it in one line. In no period and under no government has there ever been any binding framework for preserving the status quo.
That's the retired official's own assessment. There is no binding framework. There never was.
And Mickey Levy, who was Jerusalem District Police Commissioner in twenty thirteen, said any attempt to change the status quo on the Temple Mount will be perceived as an emotional-religious attempt, and we cannot even begin to imagine the destruction. And then he said, if we are not exceedingly cautious, World War Three will start here.
That's a police commissioner describing a site he was responsible for policing.
And yet here's the tension. INSS says the quiet prayer authorization since twenty eighteen is a breach. JNS and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs argue the status quo has eroded heavily in the other direction, in favor of the Muslim side. Both can't be describing the same arrangement.
They can, because there is no single authoritative definition of what the status quo is. That's the core problem. It's a phrase everyone uses and nobody has written down. So any change can be called a breach by whoever didn't want it.
The absence of a definition is the whole game.
It has been from June seventeenth, nineteen sixty-seven.
We've traced the decision making and the institutional evolution. What does this actually look like on the ground?
Hilbert: Who signs the pay slips?
Sorry?
Hilbert: The Waqf staff. Who signs the pay slips.
Jordan. They're Jordanian government employees. The money comes from the Ministry of Awqaf in Amman.
Hilbert: It does. It comes on the twenty-eighth of the month, most months, and if the twenty-eighth falls on a Friday it comes on the Thursday before. I knew a man, Nabil, he worked maintenance on the eastern wall for eleven years. He used to say the only thing he was sure of in his life was the twenty-eighth.
You knew a man who worked on the Mount.
Hilbert: I knew a man who knew every gate on that site and which key opened it and which man held the key. That's a different kind of knowledge than what's in your minutes.
Which gates have their own keys?
Hilbert: All of them, at least two. There's the key that opens the gate, and there's the key that decides when it opens. Nabil had the first kind. He never had the second kind. He was very clear about the difference.
What did he think the status quo was?
Hilbert: He'd never heard the phrase. I asked him once, after a Friday, and he looked at me like I'd asked him what the weather was in a language he didn't speak. He knew the schedule. He knew which policeman stood at which gate on which shift. He knew that if a certain officer was on duty, the northern gate opened five minutes late. That was his status quo.
That's a governance arrangement described by the person operating it.
Hilbert: It is. And it had nothing to do with treaties. The treaty says respect the present special role. Nabil's version was, the man with the second key lives in Amman and has never seen this gate.
The real authority is in the daily logistics.
Hilbert: It's in who shows up. There was a form, a small green form, that the Waqf used to record visitors. Two copies, one for the office, one for the file. I saw a stack of them once, from the eighties, and they were all filled in by hand, the same handwriting on every one for about three years. One man did that. One man recorded every visitor to that site for three years and then presumably retired or died and somebody else took over the pen.
That's the part nobody writes about.
Hilbert: It isn't. The arrangement everyone argues about is maintained by people doing jobs. Somebody unlocks a gate. Somebody signs a form. Somebody's pay slip comes on the twenty-eighth. The grand argument is happening above their heads and they're the ones actually holding the thing up.
The status quo isn't a document at all. It's a shift roster.
Hilbert: I looked into one of those green forms myself, once, in the early two thousands. I wanted to buy one, actually. There was a man selling old Waqf paperwork, and I priced it. He wanted four hundred dollars for a single form. I said no.
You priced a piece of Waqf paperwork.
Hilbert: I did. I still think about it. Four hundred dollars was a lot at the time.
You didn't buy it.
Hilbert: I didn't buy it. I should have. The point isn't the form. The point is that the thing everyone calls the status quo is not what the people working there experience. They experience a schedule and a pay slip and a man with a key. Everything else is people like us talking. That's it. Anyway. The twenty-eighth is a Tuesday this month.
So. Was it ever ratified?
No. Not once in fifty-nine years. Every source agrees on that. And the reason it survived is that it was left vague on purpose. It allowed Jews to keep believing they hadn't given up the Temple Mount.
The definition is still contested. INSS says the quiet-prayer authorization since twenty eighteen is a breach. The Jerusalem Center says the erosion runs the other way. Both sides have the same phrase in their mouth and different things in mind.
Which is the real durability of it. An arrangement nobody can define is an arrangement nobody can formally end.
Hilbert's version is the one that stays with me. The status quo is a shift roster. Somebody unlocks a gate and somebody signs a form and the pay slip comes on the twenty-eighth.
The most consequential governance arrangement in modern Jerusalem rests on a conversation in a mosque in June of nineteen sixty-seven that nobody ever wrote down. Every treaty and every law gets ratified. This one just got remembered.
Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop.
This has been My Weird Prompts.
If you want to send us something, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
