Jordan's King Abdullah will not respond to his parliament's calls to use the recent debates in the Knesset over allowing Jews to pray en masse on the Temple Mount as an excuse to expel the Israeli ambassador from Jordan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, will be hearing the king's cries of "Dir balak" ("Don't you dare" in Arabic), or, in Hebrew, "Ribono shel olam [God in heaven], what are you doing to me with your Knesset debates-" Our neighbor is truly burdened by those Knesset debates. The Jews have a right to pray on the Temple Mount, where Isaac was almost sacrificed and where David established his kingdom, and even where Jesus angrily confronted the money lenders. It is an eternal right. It is not open to questioning. Scattered on the mount are the remnants of the Temple, mentioned once by Bill Clinton to the horror of Yasser Arafat, who did not even want to discuss dividing Jerusalem with Ehud Barak. But the proposal initiated by Likud MK Moshe Feiglin to set this natural right in legislative stone is an own goal for Israel, in the midst of its grand struggle to have its Jewish identity recognized. Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein managed to block the vote. It is an achievement, but it would have been better to allow the vote and render Feiglin in the minority. During the War of Independence, the Arabs seized the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. In a daring move, David Ben-Gurion moved the capital to west Jerusalem in December 1949. His move has yet to win the world's recognition. In his yearning for Jerusalem, Menachem Begin said that "when the time is right" the capital must return to the Old City, but he never tried to start a war to liberate the Temple Mount. The separation from the Temple Mount was painfully expressed in the immortal song "Jerusalem of Gold" written by Naomi Shemer prior to Independence Day in 1967: "How the cisterns have dried/The market-place is empty/And no one frequents the Temple Mount/In the Old City." A few days later the Arabs attacked on all fronts and the "right time" had arrived. Begin and Yigal Allon pushed the government to liberate the Old City, and Shemer changed the lyrics: "We have returned to the cisterns / To the market and to the market-place / A shofar (ram's horn) calls out on the Temple Mount / In the Old City." Defense Minister Moshe Dayan immediately ordered his forces to tear down the barriers and the city was "joined together." But while wandering the paths of our forefathers, the man who would later become president of the Supreme Court, Meir Shamgar, turned his attention to the blue and white flag the paratroopers had raised on the Mount after its liberation. Dayan and Shamgar assumed the act would escalate the violent conflict from an Israeli-Arab one to a Jewish-Muslim one, and the flag was lowered. Thus, a reality was established that was certainly reasonable for its time: Israeli control with Arab autonomy on the Mount where the Mosque of Omar and Dome of the Rock sit. This is not a complete victory, but is still significant. In any agreement with the Palestinians everyone knows that access to the Western Wall and Temple Mount will not only be free, but that the world will recognize Israeli sovereignty in parts of the Old City. Indeed, how different this would be from the days when even the United States did not recognize (and still doesn't) the neighborhood of Rehavia as being under Israeli sovereignty. And what does the future hold? Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount will start again after a hiatus of 2,000-year hiatus if a deal is signed with the Palestinians, or in Begin's spirit, "when the time is right."