While Ben-Gvir’s decision to visit the site was not necessarily surprising to Palestinians, for whom Ben-Gvir is widely seen as a Jewish supremacist and provocateur, it is nonetheless indicative of a larger pattern of incitement against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
“Ben-Gvir has said explicitly that his priority is to change the status quo arrangement on the holy sites in Jerusalem, so when he goes up to visit, we can only assume that it is a nod in that direction, that it is with that goal in mind,” says Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute’s Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian affairs program. The worst-case scenario, he adds, is if Ben-Gvir succeeds in normalizing such actions to the point that they are no longer seen as a big deal. “It’s just like the settlements,” Elgindy says, referencing the seizure of Palestinian land for Israeli settlement in the occupied territories. “The whole settlement enterprise didn’t overnight become 700,000 settlers. It was built brick by brick, house by house, road by road. That’s how the erosion of the status quo is happening.”