Ben-Gvir’s Al-Aqsa visit: A direct challenge to Jordan’s Jerusalem custodianship

On the morning of 23 July, as Jews observed Tisha B'Av, the annual fast mourning the destruction of the First and Second Temples, more than 4,000 Israeli nationalists stormed into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was among them. Some prayed openly. Some sang the Israeli national anthem. Eight Arab and Islamic governments condemned the visit within hours.

It would be easy to read this as one more flare-up in a conflict that produces flare-ups on a rolling basis. That reading misses what is actually at stake. What Ben-Gvir's visit threatens is not just calm in Jerusalem's Old City. It is a hundred-year-old arrangement, built on treaty law and religious legitimacy, under which a foreign monarchy, Jordan's Hashemite dynasty, acts as custodian of a city it does not govern.

That arrangement did not begin as politics. It began as a vacuum. The Hashemites trace their lineage to the Prophet Muhammad's own clan, called the Banu Hashim, and had served for centuries as hereditary Sharifs of Mecca, a position that carried real religious weight across the Muslim world. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the Ottoman Caliphate in March 1924, Palestine's holy sites lost the institution that had nominally protected them. Jerusalem's Muslim leadership, under Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, looked for a replacement and found one in Hashemite prestige. In 1924, the Supreme Muslim Council—incidentally created by the British—pledged allegiance, or bay'ah, to Sharif Hussein bin Ali and formally asked him to fund and protect Al-Haram al-Sharif. The demands were met. Sharif Hussein bin Ali paid for the restoration of the Dome of the Rock and set a precedent for royal guardianship that predates the state of Jordan itself. Soon, the Hashemites lost control of Hijaz, which houses Mecca and Medina, to the emerging Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli war turned that spiritual role into something closer to governance. King Abdullah I captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank and later formally annexed the territories, establishing Jordan as the sovereign guardian over the Old City. To institutionalize this responsibility, Amman created the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf (Department of Islamic Endowments), placing the administration, daily maintenance, and staffing of Al-Haram al-Sharif under direct Jordanian civil jurisdiction.

Then came the 1967 War, in which Jordan, along with Egypt and Syria, faced humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel. Israel occupied East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, wary of igniting a religious war on top of a territorial one, made a calculated trade, i.e.,Israel would hold security control, but the Waqf would keep running the compound's internal affairs. Non-Muslims can visit the outdoor compound of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—haram al-Sharief (known to Jews as the Temple Mount) during specific tourist hours, but they are strictly forbidden from entering the actual mosque buildings and from praying or performing religious rituals on the site. That compromise is the "Status Quo" still invoked, and it survived precisely because both sides had reason to leave it alone.

Jordan spent the next decades making that makeshift arrangement more difficult to undo. When King Hussein severed Jordan's administrative ties to the West Bank in 1988 to back Palestinian statehood, he made one exception: that the Islamic Waqf of Jerusalem would continue under Jordanian funding and authority. Article 9 of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, six years later, committed Israel to honourJordan’s “special role” over the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem and to give priority to that role in any future settlement. In 2013, King Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority president Abbas had signed an agreement in Amman, whereby the Palestinians endorsed that Jordan would remain legal guardian of the holy sites until and unless a sovereign Palestinian state takes over.

None of this is a Muslim-only story. The guardianship also covers Jerusalem's Christian sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a duty Jordan traces back to the seventh-century Umari Covenant between Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab and Patriarch Sophronius, which guaranteed Christians in Jerusalem freedom of worship and protection of property. In practice, this means King Abdullah II has personally funded restoration work at the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and Amman positions itself as the neutral party keeping peace among Jerusalem's often-competing Christian communities. The Jordanian treatment of Jewish Holi sites is not rosy, and several Jewish synagogues and other sites in East Jerusalem were destroyed or damaged when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian control until 1967.

Ben-Gvir’s visit to Al-Aqsa with his followers, and that too on a Jewish day of mourning, is not some distant headline for Jordan. Rather, Jordan experiences it as an attack on a role written into its treaties, its religious identity and its domestic stability. Jordan holds a substantial portion of the Palestinian population. Any perceived failure to protect Jerusalem's sanctity carries political weight back at home. Jordan cannot ignore this. A century of bay'ah, war, treaty, and quiet diplomacy has built this custodianship into something closer to law than sentiment. Each incursion tests whether that law still holds. And this is probably why Jordan keeps objecting so vehemently.

Mohammed Shoaib Raza is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for West Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.