Two frightful scenes unfolded in Jerusalem on Wednesday, which seemed, at first glance, to have little to do with each other. One was a terrorist attack: a Palestinian driver plowed his van into a group of pedestrians standing by a light-rail station, killing one and wounding thirteen. A surveillance video showed the vehicle hurtling past a frightened young woman and a soldier, and dragging objects—one tries not to imagine what objects—under its speeding tires. Brandishing a metal rod, the driver then exited the car and attacked more people before police officers shot and killed him. The second scene was a clash between Palestinians, who were hurling rocks and firecrackers from inside the al-Aqsa Mosque in protest against the presence of Jewish visitors at the site, and a police force that cordoned them inside the compound while allowing the visitors to enter.

The first appeared to be a “lone wolf” attack (although Hamas later claimed responsibility). The second was the protest of many. But both incidents have to do with a growing radicalization in Jerusalem, a sense that recent tensions over the holy site in the capital’s Old City are building up to a conflagration.

Some among the group of Jewish visitors who arrived at the site on Wednesday were on a mission: they came to mark one week after Yehuda Glick, an American-Israeli activist who gave a speech at a conference calling for Israel to reclaim the holy site, was shot four times. The morning after he was shot, an Israeli counterterrorism unit killed the Palestinian man suspected of trying to assassinate him. The man had been an employee at a restaurant at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, where the conference had taken place. Fearing retaliatory clashes, Israel took the rare step last Thursday of barring all access to the holy site, which is known by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif (or Noble Sanctuary). The compound had not been closed to visitors since Ariel Sharon, who later became the Prime Minister, toured the Temple Mount in 2000, fuelling the Second Intifada.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the Israeli closure “a declaration of war.” He later urged Palestinians to use “any means” to protect the site, a declaration that Israel lambasted as direct incitement. On Wednesday, Jordan, one of Israel’s sole allies in the region, recalled its ambassador, “in protest at the increasing and unprecedented Israeli escalation in the Noble Sanctuary, and the repeated Israeli violations of Jerusalem.”

To understand the significance of these events is to recognize the politics of prayer and worship in Jerusalem. Perhaps no thirty-seven acres are more contested in the history of the world than those situated in the eastern part of the Old City. Entering one of the Old City’s seven towering gates and walking toward the walled compound entails physically passing through the intersection of the three great monotheistic religions. The Temple Mount, Jewish tradition holds, 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.

The Haram al-Sharif, meanwhile, houses two of Islam’s most important structures: al-Aqsa Mosque, mentioned in the Koran as the “farthest mosque,” from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to Heaven, and the Dome of the Rock, a seventh-century shrine that is one of Islam’s most breathtaking architectural triumphs. It is the third-holiest site in Islam, the place where the angel Israfil will blow his trumpet on Resurrection Day.

For Christians, it’s where Jesus impressed his elders with his knowledge of the Torah, and where he later lashed out against corruption and extortion; his crucifixion took place only a short distance away.

The Temple Mount has also been the target of a raging sovereignty battle between Israelis and Palestinians ever since Israel gained control of the site, in the 1967 war. And yet, apart from occasional (serious) conflagrations, calm has generally held at the compound until now. This has been due in part to detailed Israeli security arrangements, and to the firm hand of the Islamic Waqf council, the trust now appointed by the Jordanians that has administered the site since the Siege of Jerusalem, in 1187.

When Israel seized control, in 1967, its Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, signed a law protecting all holy places from “anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings with regard to those places.” Since then, only Muslims have been allowed to pray at the main compound, while Jews have been directed to pray at the Western Wall. Non-Muslims may enter the Temple Mount at designated times, but are forbidden to pray there. Prayer, of course, is virtually impossible to police, which has made for some strange scenes: stories of Jewish visitors who, upon facing the Foundation Stone at the heart of the Dome of the Rock, are accused of murmuring or swaying and chased away by Waqf security forces.

Furtive worship at the compound used to be a rare sight, primarily because of a rabbinic ban: for years, rabbis prohibited believers from ascending the Temple Mount for fear that their tumah—a state of ritual impurity that occurs when one has come into contact with a dead body or with certain bodily fluids—would contaminate the site. Dov Halbertal, a rabbi in the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community, told Israel’s Channel 10 last week that the reasoning behind the Jewish ban on the Temple Mount is twofold: “In terms of halakha”—Jewish law—“this is the most volatile place on earth. One stray bullet from those who ascend the Temple Mount could become a strategic threat to the Jewish nation worldwide.”

In recent years, with the growing influence in Israeli society of religious blocs like the settler movement, there have been calls to disregard the rabbinical restrictions and to reclaim the Temple Mount for Jewish worship. (Lawrence Wright wrote in 1998 about one effort to that end.) According to Israeli police, more than eight thousand Jews ascended the mount last year, almost double the number five years ago. And some twenty new organizations have sprung up calling for Jews to flock to the site: these include more moderate groups who want Jews to be able to pray at the Temple Mount alongside Muslims, as well as extremist elements that seek the destruction of its Muslim sites in order to make way for a Third Temple. Glick, the activist who was shot last week, headed one of these groups, called the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation. Israeli police had once barred him from the site because of his activities.

A report produced by Ir Amim, an N.G.O. that focusses on Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem, has found that the vast majority of the Temple Mount groups receive funding from both the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality. A growing number of politicians in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition openly support them, including three Knesset members who spoke at the conference last week where Glick was shot. (Also present at the conference was Yehuda Etzion, who had been convicted of a 1984 plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock.)

The national-religious movement justifies its call for Jewish ascension to the Mount by claiming that it can pinpoint exactly where the Holy of Holies is located within the site, and that it’s therefore possible to avoid treading there and defiling it. The Ir Amim report suggests that the real reason behind the renewed call to ascend the Temple Mount is political: following the Oslo Accords of 1993, Israel’s national-religious movement, worried that a future peace agreement with the Palestinians would include a compromise on the compound, has been trying to change the facts on the ground by reclaiming Jewish sovereignty there.

Shimon Riklis, a tour guide for Jewish groups to the Temple Mount, told Channel 10, in a heated debate with the Haredi Rabbi Halbertal, “We’re not doing this in order to provoke the gentiles. Halbertal isn’t a Zionist. I am! We’ve returned to the Land of Israel, we’ve founded a country, we know exactly where the Temple is located.” He went on, “This is about the basic rights of human beings. I should be allowed to murmur.”

At the same time that the Temple Mount groups have been gaining strength, settlement expansion has been ongoing in East Jerusalem, and a growing number of local Islamist leaders, such as Sheikh Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement in Israel, have mobilized supporters to fight Israeli control of the area. Last week, the official Hamas-run television channel called on the Arab residents of Jerusalem: “Don’t wait until tomorrow.” The broadcast continued, “Jerusalem is in danger more than ever. If you don’t wake up now, then when?” (The driver of the plowing van may have heeded this call.)

On Friday, a day after closing the site, Israel reopened it for Muslim worshipers over the age of fifty. (Younger worshippers are viewed as more likely to stoke violence.) According to Ir Amim, age restrictions at the site have been implemented thirty times this year, compared with eight times last year—further proof of the increased tensions. On Sunday, despite a plea from Netanyahu to his government “to work to calm the situation” and show “responsibility and restraint,” Moshe Feiglin, a hardline member of the Prime Minister’s Likud Party, toured the site. Uri Ariel, a minister, lashed out in a Facebook post against the Jordanian government: “The Temple Mount and Jerusalem are under Israeli sovereignty, just as Amman is under complete Jordanian sovereignty, and it’s time for them to realize it.”

Over the weekend, I spoke to Danny Rubinstein, a leading Israeli journalist who has covered Palestinian affairs since 1967. He sounded concerned over these latest developments. “The shooting will only encourage Jewish ascension to the mount: it gives the issue both exposure and legitimacy,” he said. “There’s a feeling of increased Jewish provocation that then leads to grave actions from the Palestinians.”

The growing influence of the Temple Mount groups, on the one hand, and of Islamist movements in East Jerusalem, on the other, has imperilled the future of the site. The tension isn’t just about politics. For anyone who cares about history, religion, or peace, these are worrisome days.