Wired has gotten a hold of some leaked audio from a session Jared Kushner did with some interns yesterday in which he explains the recent situation with the Temple Mount and how the US pushed Israel to take down the metal detectors.
The transcription below was done by Wired:
And again, all these people make arguments about why they feel the way they do. So as tensions were really mounting, I don’t know if everyone is familiar, but there were two people—two Israeli guards killed at the Temple Mount (and that’s the first time in many, many, many years that that happened, so Israelis [unintelligible] putting up metal detectors on the Temple Mount, which is not an irrational thing to do. You know when you have—police officers were just killed, and weapons that were used to [unintelligible] the weapons to check them—so then what happens is they start inciting it.
They say look, you know, this is a change to the status quo. The Temple Mount is a [unintelligible] occupation of Israel, and Israel was saying we don’t want anything to do with that, we just want to make sure people are safe. And that really incited a lot of tension in the streets.
So we’re going to work with them [unintelligible] to take down the metal detectors there, and then I think one of the Palestinians’ religious leaders was saying, “If you go through the metal detectors, then your prayers don’t count.” And that is not a very helpful thing to have said. And then there was a lot of rage. And there was an Israeli family that three people killed in their home, which was absolutely terrible. You know, so, “I’m going to do this to free the Temple Mount.” So ultimately we were able to work with them, and we were able to get the Israelis to take down to the different forms of surveillance that the Jordanians were OK with, and we talked with the Palestinians the whole time to try to get their viewpoint on it.
And then ultimately they said, “OK, we took down the metal detectors but there’s still a bridge up somewhere.” And they said, “OK, we’ll take that down, too.” And so Bibi was getting beaten up by the press in Israel, because that was very politically unpopular for him to do. At the same time we got a situation in Jordan where an Israeli security diplomat in Jordan was attacked by two Jordanian men, and in self-defense he killed the attackers. So then it worked out where the Jordanians got the Israelis to accept their people from the embassy back to Israel.
Here’s the actual audio from the Kushner leak. This portion begins just after the four minute mark:
The transcript isn’t perfect but it’s pretty close. In the first section I bolded above where Wired says it’s unintelligible, I’m pretty sure I heard Kushner saying:
So we were gonna go work with Bibi, and ultimately got Bibi to take down the metal detectors there.
He basically reiterates the point later in the paragraph when he says:
So ultimately we were able to work with them, and we were able to get the Israelis to take down to the different forms of surveillance…
So I think it’s pretty clear that the Trump administration pushed Netanyahu to get rid of the metal detectors.
This is bothersome because, as Kushner points out, the metal detectors were a logical response to the two Israeli guards getting killed on the Temple Mount. They were put there to prevent this type of violence from happening again and to keep everyone, including Muslims, safe.
The reason the Muslim world got so upset at this is because Israel asserted their control over the Temple Mount when they placed the metal detectors there, and the Muslim world is not okay with Israel having control over the Temple Mount. Kushner said as much in his remarks when he stated that Muslims called the placement of metal detectors there a ‘reoccupation’ of Israel of the Temple Mount. (Wired had it listed as unintelligible).
So the issue wasn’t about the metal detectors, it was about Muslim hatred of Israel controlling the Temple Mount.
And then we made Israel take them down.
How is it that we couldn’t stand with Israel on something so logical?
How will we ever move the embassy to Jerusalem if we can’t stand with Israel on an issue like this?