What Are You Willing to Die For?

Day 172. Realists ask what a state wants, what it can afford and how much force it can bring. There’s another question I haven’t given enough weight: what are you willing to die for?

This week, Itamar Ben-Gvir proposed killing 30 to 40 people in Gaza every night. Not only people presenting an immediate threat. He said there are people there “who are not worthy of life.” Then he finished the thought: “They’re not even people.”

Ben-Gvir doesn’t command the Israeli military. He does control the national police and prison system. That distinction matters. So does the office.

Al-Aqsa Mosque has been on my radar since the beginning of this war. Not because I’m predicting Israel will destroy it. I haven’t seen evidence of such an order or plan, and I’m not reporting one. I’m watching the distance between an idea and the people who now have the authority to execute it.

Muslims know the wider sanctuary as Al-Haram al-Sharif, home to Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Jews know the same platform as the Temple Mount, the site of the First and Second Temples and the holiest place in Judaism.

Those aren’t simply two names on a map. They describe two sacred histories and, for some believers, two incompatible futures.

Under the longstanding status quo, the Islamic Waqf administers the compound under Jordanian custodianship. Muslims pray there. Jews may visit but officially may not pray. Israel controls security and access.

The status quo works only while everyone agrees to postpone the ultimate question of what should stand on the Temple Mount.

Ben-Gvir is no longer pretending that nothing is changing.

Three weeks ago, he entered the Temple Mount on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day mourning the destruction of the ancient Temples. He celebrated Jewish prayer there and said visitors were “feeling like they’re the owners of the place.”

In May, Ben-Gvir stood on the Temple Mount waving an Israeli flag alongside Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of his Jewish Power party. Kroizer later wrote: “The time has come to get rid of all the mosques and work to construct the Temple!”

Ben-Gvir declared: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”

Last year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Jerusalem’s mayor, “I will give the money, you will build the Temple.” People present said it was a joke. There wasn’t an appropriation, construction order or demolition plan.

The joke still had an audience.

Before becoming the American secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth told an Israeli conference that the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount could become another Zionist “miracle.” He said he didn’t know how it would happen, but he believed that it could.

None of those statements is an Israeli demolition order. Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that the status quo hasn’t changed. They don’t establish that most Israelis want Al-Aqsa destroyed.

They establish that the restoration of the Temple is being discussed by men who control the police, the purse and the Pentagon.

A belief doesn’t need a majority once its believers have keys.

The other side has been equally explicit about what the site means to it. Hamas named the October 7 attack Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Ismail Haniyeh said the group was fighting “for the sake of Al-Aqsa Mosque, our sanctities, and our prisoners.”

That doesn’t justify the murders or hostage-taking. It doesn’t make the attack a defense of anything. It tells us the religious frame wasn’t incidental branding. Hamas wanted Palestinians and the wider Muslim world to hear Al-Aqsa in the name of the operation.

Jordan now warns that Israeli actions on the Temple Mount present an “imminent” threat and could ignite a religious conflict across the Muslim world.

“Jerusalem is a tinderbox,” its foreign minister said.

Here’s where realism has to become more realistic.

All three religions represented in this struggle prohibit idolatry. All three distinguish the Creator from the things created.

Solomon dedicated the First Temple by acknowledging that even the highest heaven couldn’t contain God, “much less this house.” The Christian scriptures say the God who made the world doesn’t live in temples built by human hands. The Quran says east and west belong to Allah, and that righteousness isn’t found merely by turning toward either direction.

Their own texts warn against mistaking a place for the God worshipped there.

The Temple Mount can be holy without being God. Al-Aqsa can be sacred without containing God. The people standing around it are also part of the creation these religions say belongs to God.

That’s what makes Ben-Gvir’s statement so revealing. The people must become “not even people” before the stones can become more valuable than their lives.

Hamas performs the same inversion when it places Al-Aqsa’s name over murder and hostage-taking. A sanctuary becomes the language through which human sacrifice is made righteous.

Each side insists it worships the Creator, not the creation. Yet each can make the same platform the thing to which human beings must be sacrificed.

At what point does defending a holy place become worshipping it?

Realism should be built for this question. It asks us to see the world as its participants see it, not as we think rational people should see it. Sacred belief is an interest. Prophecy can become policy. Once people organize around a belief, vote around it, arm themselves around it or kill under its name, the belief becomes a material fact.

You don’t have to believe any of it. Neither do I.

Disbelief doesn’t put us outside the blast radius.

On a spreadsheet, every price has a ceiling. The Temple Mount is where people insist it doesn’t.

I’m not predicting that Israel will destroy Al-Aqsa. I’m saying the rhetoric around the Temple Mount has moved from fringe aspiration into government office, while its threatened defense has already been used to name and justify a massacre.

The realist question isn’t which side is right about what God wants.

It’s what each side is willing to die for.

Then what it’s willing to kill for.

And finally, how many people who believe none of it are they willing to make die with them?