Jerusalem holy site clashes fuel fears of return to war

 As we waited to see exactly what would happen, so was Israel’s prime minister. A right-wing nationalist himself, some of those here once supported Naftali Bennett. But not anymore. Angry chants on Wednesday told him to “go home”.

“We came here because it’s the Passover holiday, to show that this city is ours, that it belongs to the nation of Israel,” said Matan, gripping the hand of his smallest child. “This is our city, our capital, our country.”

The prevailing feeling was that as the leader of an ideologically diverse coalition, which includes an Arab Islamist party, Mr Bennett had sold out and failed to deal effectively with recent tensions in Jerusalem.

A prominent banner declared his rival, the opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, to be “king”, and there were big cheers for far-right politician, Itamar Ben Gvir.

He told me that Mr Bennett was being held back from doing the correct thing by his fragile government, which recently lost its parliamentary majority after one of his own MPs quit, saying she could not be part of it anymore.

“It’s not our prime minister’s orders, it’s the power of the coalition,” Matan said.

“Naftali Bennett was ordered not to allow Jews onto the Temple Mount,” he added, referring to a contested holy site in Jerusalem that is known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and is the location of the al-Aqsa Mosque. “They gave him instructions to free 400 terrorists who threw stones.”

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