Let's crowdsource this: What do you think have been Israel's most important missteps ...
Here's one example of what was probably a costly mistake. What are others?

A central aspiration of Israel from the Inside is to generate thoughtful and respectful conversation about tough issues that Israel faces, internal as well as external.
The recent meeting between Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Jordan’s King Abdullah II was an apt reminder of the ups and downs of Israel’s relationship with Jordan, a Kingdom in which a Hashemite minority rules a Palestinian majority, at times brutally. King Abdullah thus has to do a great deal to mollify the Palestinians in his country, which he accomplishes in part by fueling discord over Israel’s actions on the Temple Mount.
Below is a brief reprise of how Israel ended up with the status quo agreement with Jordan that now prevails.
But our interest here is not the Temple Mount, but a broader question of Israeli history ….
What, to your mind, are the other critical strategic mistakes that Israel has made? Domestic and foreign. Religious, economic, cultural. And why? What makes that decision a mistake?
Let’s use the comments section to crowdsource this, and in upcoming columns, we’ll address some of the ideas that readers raise. (A reminder that only respectful discourse is welcome.)
The status quo with Jordan is a strange one. Israel controls access to the area, but it is the Waqf, Jordan’s Islamic Religious Endowments Authority, that controls what happens there, including archaeological digging and the issue of who gets to pray there. Since Israel captured the area in 1967, the agreement has been that non-Muslims (i.e., Jews, for all intents and purposes), may visit the Temple Mount as long as they refrain from prayer and worship. Thus, Israel controls the territory in which the Temple Mount is situated, but while Muslims can pray there, Jews are not allowed to.1
How did this come to be? It almost didn’t.
In his book, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, Gershom Gorenberg quotes a conversation that took place almost immediately after the Temple Mount was captured by Israeli paratroopers on June 7, 1967. The Chief Rabbi of the IDF, Rabbi Shlomo Goren (who famously blew the shofar at the Wall, and would later be appointed Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi rabbi), said to Gen. Uzi Narkiss, “Now’s the time to put one hundred kilos of explosives in the Mosque of Omar (the Dome of the Rock), and that’s it, once and for all we’ll be done with it.”
“Rabbi, stop,” Gorenberg reports that Narkiss retorted.
But Goren would not relent. “You don’t grasp the immense meaning of this,” the rabbi said to the general. “This is an opportunity that can be exploited now, this minute. Tomorrow it will be impossible.” Goren reports that Narkiss then said, “Rabbi, if you don’t stop now, I’m taking you from here to jail.”2
Goren apparently did relent, and ultimately, it was not Goren, but Moshe Dayan, who fashioned Israel’s policy for the Temple Mount.
When Israeli soldiers, consumed with fervor by their astonishing victory, raised an Israeli flag over al-Aqsa, Gen. Dayan rebuked them, “Do you want to set the Middle East on fire?” said Dayan, “We have returned to the holiest of our places, never to be parted from them again.... We did not come to conquer the sacred sites of others or to restrict their religious rights, but rather to ensure the integrity of the city and to live in it with others in fraternity.”3
Ambassador Michael Oren, whose book on the Six Day War is now a classic, puts Dayan’s position in context.
The great irony of [the current crisis] is that when the Jews had the opportunity to take over al-Aqsa on June 7, 1967, when an Israeli flag flew over the Dome of the Rock, when the rabbi of the [Israel Defense Forces] was advocating blowing up the mosque … along came the great warrior Moshe Dayan. He said, “Not only are we not going to blow up the mosque — we’re going to take down the Israeli flag and give the mosque back to the Jordanians, who just tried to wage a war of annihilation against us.”
Oren, though, like many, believes that Dayan, though well intentioned, made a grievous error.
“Understand the magnanimity of that gesture. We’ve been paying for it ever since.”4
If Dayan believed that he was defusing the possibility of the Temple Mount becoming a locus of Palestinian nationalism, he was sadly wrong. Precisely the opposite has happened. The Muslim guards now responsible for the area do nothing to prevent Muslims from throwing rocks down onto Jewish worshippers at the Kotel, and when Israeli police have to intervene, the guards do nothing to assist.
David Horovitz explains why Dayan’s decision was, in retrospect, so misguided:5
And no compromise agreed to by Israel today could compare in its repercussions to the impact of that agreement 50 years ago, which has empowered a Palestinian and wider Muslim false narrative that asserts the Jews actually have no connection to the Mount, no history there, no legitimacy there — and by extension no sovereign legitimacy in Israel either. Why did defense minister Moshe Dayan’s concession on June 10, 1967, fuel that false narrative? Because, the way it was perceived in much of the Muslim world, the Jews could not and would not have relinquished their authority over the site if it truly constituted the most sacred physical focal point of their faith. Israel’s restraint, its religious realpolitik, in other words, has come to be regarded as proof of our illegitimacy. And of our duplicity. We were not the returning liberators; we were interlopers, who could and would be resisted until we returned to whence we ostensibly came.
Efraim Halevy puts matters no less starkly:6
How sad it is to recall Mordechai Gur’s touching call “Temple Mount is in our hands,” uttered in the wake of bitter battles and such high casualty toll. The Mount remained in our hands for several hours only, and future generations will look into the reasons for handing it over to our enemies immediately after the victory, without getting anything in return and without eliciting any understanding for our right to the site. Indeed, people work in mysterious ways.
The view that Dayan made an enormous error is widely held in Israel. Our goal here is not to revisit that decision, of which the recent Lapid-Abdullah meeting is a reminder, but rather, the broader question of what other fundamental decisions that Israel has made over the years were, in retrospect, mistakes ….
Getting out of Gaza is a common response. What else comes to mind? We’ll use this question as a way of fostering a new Israel from the Inside conversation.
Our twitter feed is here; feel free to join there, too.
Dov Lieber, “Amid Temple Mount tumult, the who, what and why of its Waqf rulers,” The Times of Israel July 20 2017, https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-temple-mount-tumult-the-who-what-and-why-of-its-waqf-rulers/
David Horovitz, “Jerusalem in the unholy grip of religious fervor,” The Times of Israel, November 6, 2014. (https://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-in-the-unholy-grip-of-religious-fervor/)
David Horovitz, “Jerusalem in the unholy grip of religious fervor,” The Times of Israel, November 6, 2014. (https://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-in-the-unholy-grip-of-religious-fervor/)
Yardena Schwartz, “Jerusalem’s Forever Crisis,” Foreign Policy, August 2, 2017. (https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/02/jerusalems-forever-crisis/)
David Horovitz, “On Temple Mount, Israel long since made its fundamental compromise,” The Times of Israel, July 18, 2017. (https://www.timesofisrael.com/on-temple-mount-israel-long-since-made-its-fundamental-compromise/)
Efriam Halevy, “Is Temple Mount in our hands?,” Ynet News, July 7, 2010. (https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3916664,00.html)
Allowing Haredim to bypass the army (decision from the early 50s) has done both them and the State a grave injustice and profound problems.
Coddling the ultraOrthodox and allowing them to engage in hateful and violent behavior