Rabbi Melamed writes what late Religious Zionist leader Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook would have decided about the halakhic question of ascending the Temple Mount had he seen the political situation today.
The controversy with the Wakf is a nationalistic issue, but there is also an halakhic issue on which rabbis disagree. The late Chief Rabbi Goren tried to arrange a mass prayer on the Mount in 1967 and was stopped by the government.
The sages ruled that when a person builds a house for himself and arrives at its final stage, the whitewashing of the walls, he must remember that the Holy Temple still lies in ruins. He must therefore leave a square cubit of wall without whitewash.