This book explores three contemporary women’s movements in and around Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade: Women for the Temple, a messianic Jewish Orthodox women’s movement campaigning for access to Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif; Murabitat, pious Muslim women activists mobilizing for the defense of al-Aqsa Mosque from Jewish claims; and Women of the Wall (WOW), a Jewish feminist organization working against restrictive gender regulations at the Western Wall. Using these cases, the book demonstrates how attention to gender and to women’s engagement in conflict over central sacred places is essential for understanding the intra-communal processes that make contested sacred sites appear increasingly “indivisible” for parties in the inter-communal context. More broadly, the book argues that a gender analysis of contested sacred places enriches and sharpens both our description of the “choreographies” of such sites and our analytical understanding of the contemporary dynamics of conflict in these sites; in particular the processes that give rise to the problem of “indivisibility.”

Since 1996 the Islamic Movement in Israel has organized a popular mobilization campaign under the slogan “al-Aqsa is in Danger.” The movement has re-centered al-Aqsa Mosque as the central religious-nationalist symbol of the Palestinian struggle. In the process, it has tried to enlist the Palestinian community inside Israel, Jerusalem, and the occupied Palestinian territories as well as the Arab and Muslim worlds. Pious Muslim women have joined this campaign en masse, participating in the kind of public protest action that goes well beyond the traditional gendered division of labor advocated formally by the Islamic Movement. The chapter examines these and other women’s activities for al-Aqsa to trace their strategies of the removal of intra-communal divisions and the domestication of the holy – which are in many ways similar to their deployment in the Jewish Israeli cases. Activities include organizing religious, educational, and recreational activities for women, students, and children, celebrating personal occasions such as marriages, utilizing social media to articulate the bond between women and al-Aqsa, and other activities that enhance Muslim presence at the site and transform it from a distant, divided, and exclusive place of worship to one enmeshed in the everyday.