On Friday, for the first time in weeks, the Temple Mount was opened to Muslim worshippers of all ages, including younger Palestinians, who are frequently barred from attending Friday prayers when tensions in Jerusalem are high.

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote, "What does Jerusalem need? It doesn’t need a mayor, it needs a ringmaster." In his poem "In Jerusalem," Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish adds:

I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How

do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?

Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?

The Old City of Jerusalem is that fortunate one-third of a square mile in the world where holy sites of the three major monotheistic religions are intimately contained. In its four quarters are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Via Dolorosa, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount, upon which sit the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine and one of the Middle East's most recognizable buildings.

For Jews, as Ruth Margalit explains, the Temple Mount "is where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, and where God gathered the dust that created Adam. It’s there, the Bible says, that King Solomon built the First Temple, circa 1000 B.C., where Herod refurbished the Second Temple, and where Titus tore it down, in 70 A.D. Its inner sanctuary is known as the Holy of Holies—a place where no one but the High Priest was allowed to tread. The Western Wall, the extant remnant of the wall that flanked the courtyard of the Second Temple, is the holiest site in Judaism."

Owing to the delicate nature of everything associated with the site, the name Temple Mount doesn't even cover all of the theological bases. Last week, the Palestinian Liberation Organization demanded that media stop using the term "Temple Mount" to describe the venue, which it says doesn't "adhere to international law." The Temple Mount, the widely used term for the site in English, is known as the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary by Muslims. (Cautious diplomats employ all of the aforementioned names.)

The Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound is the name for which the PLO was lobbying. The context was political, but the subtext was religious; in essence, saying that Jewish claims to the site (and Jerusalem in general) are bogus. It would not be a stretch to say that this is very much a standard part of political playbook of Palestinian and Islamist groups.

Of course, this dynamic goes both ways. In 2010, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel took out full-page ads in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times in which he talked about the sanctity of Jerusalem for Jews. But he couldn't resist making this point:

For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture -- and not a single time in the Koran.

"The Virgin Mary is mentioned a lot more in the Koran than she is in the Bible," Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine told me. "But I don't know anyone who would claim on the basis of that, that the Virgin Mary is more holy to Muslims than to Roman Catholics."