The Temple Mount crisis playing out today seems as much a proxy conflict between Jordan and Turkey as it is a dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. That’s the view of Michael Rubin, who explains the recent history of Muslim maintenance of the site, the third holiest in Islam:

Under the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic Waqf (religious endowment) maintained the Temple Mount. When Jordan emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman collapse, its Ministry of Awqaf took control over Jerusalem’s Islamic Waqf. When Israel won control of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, nineteen years after the Jordanian army sought to make the city Judenrein, Israeli authorities agreed to allow the Jordanian-controlled Waqf to continue to manage affairs on the Temple Mount, even as Israel assumed responsibility for security around the holy site. It’s an arrangement that has worked fairly well.

[Now], however, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration, rather than Jordan, are seeking the lead on efforts to force Israel to abandon its security measures. Consider these recent stories out of Turkey. “As Organization of Islamic Cooperation term president, I condemn Israeli forces’ use of excess force on our brothers gathered for Friday prayer, the Friday prayer not being allowed in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and Israel’s persistence in its attitude despite all warnings,” he said. Erdogan has also telephoned European leaders to urge them to pressure Israel to remove the security measures.

In other words, Rubin concludes, it seems likely that Erdogan is seeking

a collective Islamic administration (under Turkey’s tutelage, of course) and [is implying] that Jordan’s control has run its course. This has as much to do with Erdogan seeking to restore Turkey’s neo-Ottoman claims over Jerusalem a century after the Ottoman Empire lost the city than it does with sincere concern about the Temple Mount itself. If the White House and European Union truly wish to see calm restored in Jerusalem, it is essential they treat the cause and not simply the symptoms. The problem at the Temple Mount has nothing to do with metal detectors and little to do with Israel. Rather, it’s about a struggle for custodianship in the Islamic world, one which it is essential that [the much more moderate] Jordan wins.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.