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The request that had come across my desk a few days earlier need not have changed that. Even though Arik had failed, for now, to bring down the government, he was keen to make political capital from the collapse of Camp David. He now declared his intention to pay a visit to the Temple Mount. The Mount – or as it was called in Arabic, Haram al-Sharif – was part of Israel. The unsubtle point of Arik’s visit was to dramatize his determination to keep it that way. The target of this political theatre was not Arafat or the Palestinians. It was the Israeli public, me, and my government. In an all-perfect world, I would have liked to find a way to block the visit. In a democracy, it wasn’t that easy. The only way I could do so was on the grounds it was a threat to public order or security, a judgement in the hands of our police and security services. I duly asked for the views of Avi Dichter of the Shin Bet, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who in addition to being interim Foreign Minister was Minister of Internal Security, in charge of the police. Both came back with the same answer: though we’d all be happier if Arik stayed down on his farm in the Negev, there was no reason to expect his visit would pose a major public-order issue, and no basis for blocking it. When Shlomo contacted Jibril Rajoub, Arafat’s West Bank security commander, Rajoub asked only that two conditions be imposed, and Shlomo agreed. The first was that the visit not occur on a Friday, when the mosques would be full of worshipers; the second, that Sharon not set foot in either of the mosques on the Haram. Our chief of police informed Sharon that if he didn’t accept the conditions, we’d deny him permission to go. But he agreed. When he went, for about half an hour under police escort on Thursday morning the 28th, he complied.

At first, we thought it would prove a one-off media stunt. But that evening, Danny Yatom brought me an intelligence report with evidence that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was planning for wide-scale violence after Friday prayers, in protest over Sharon’s visit. Danny called Dennis Ross. Madeleine Albright called Arafat, to urge him to ensure this didn’t happen. But as Dennis would remark later, “Arafat didn’t lift finger to stop it.”

The trouble began the next day, shortly after Friday prayers. It was also the eve of the Jewish New Year, and the Western Wall area was crowded. As people poured out of the mosques, a number began hurling stones, some of them the size of small boulders, onto the Jewish worshippers and police below. One knocked out the highly experienced, steady-handed commander of the Jerusalem police, which I’m sure contributed to making the confrontation that followed even worse. By the

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