Twenty-four hours after National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spent 13 minutes on Temple Mount, the heavy-duty retaliation landed. Not from Hamas.

They, or another Palestinian proxy launched their feeble response the previous evening — a misfired rocket which landed short without even clearing Gaza’s border. No, the real shockwave caused by Ben-Gvir’s jaunt on the mount came in the form of a headline in Yated Ne’eman.

“Provocation on Temple Mount. Global Blitz of Condemnations” blared the mouthpiece of the “Lithuanian” rabbis, in white letters on blood-red background.

Yated is no redtop. It is the staid bastion of strictly-Orthodox ideology, its writers all vetted and every word it prints authorised by “the spiritual committee.” And more to the point, it’s the newspaper of Degel Ha’Torah, half of the United Torah Judaism party, loyal member of the coalition.

The new Netanyahu government was not even five days old and already the newspaper of one of its coalition partners was attacking the leader of another partner in the sternest of terms. “These false displays endanger the lives of Jews and play into the hands of the inciters from the minarets,” thundered Yated’s editorial.

“Who has allowed these people (and for shame, there are among them those with Charedi appearance) to endanger the lives of Jews without need and against clear halacha … what value is there in a ‘victory lap’ of a few minutes in front of the cameras, except for the hope of a media dividend?”

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Benjamin Netanyahu

Degel Ha’Torah’s ideology is a nuanced affair. For more than 30 years, they have shunned left-wing governments, because as their late leader, Rabbi Elazar Shach, famously said in a speech in 1990, they are “breeders of rabbits and pigs” and “don’t know what Yom Kippur is”.

But their preference for Likud, who are “closer to Jewish tradition”, forces them to be party to increasingly right-wing governments. By going up to Temple Mount, Mr Ben-Gvir has broken two rules — first, the Charedi rabbis strenuously object to Jews going there, until the Messiah comes (Mr Ben-Gvir’s rabbis rule otherwise), and more importantly, he has broken the rule of “not provoking the goyim”.

As of now, they’re not threatening any coalition reprisals, but the red headline was the government’s first yellow card.

Mr Ben-Gvir shot back in a tweet saying that “Yated Ne’eman is against a state for the Jewish people.”

Before Mr Ben-Gvir went up to Temple Mount, the main concern was for security implications — would it cause rioting around Al Aqsa and in east Jerusalem and would Hamas retaliated with a barrage of rockets?

On Tuesday he had two meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu. Temple Mount came up in both. As prime minister, Mr Netanyahu could order his national-security minister not to go.

The last thing he wanted was for the world to see the most controversial member of his new government, in its first week, at the most sensitive site in the Middle East. Especially when he’s just announced that one of the three main missions of this government will be “to broaden the circle of peace” and get more Arab countries to join the Abraham Accords process.

Next week, his foreign trip as newly re-elected prime minister was to be to the United Arab Emirates. But Mr Netanyahu was loath to clash with his minister. Instead, he placed the responsibility on the security chiefs. If they say it’s OK, I won’t stop you.

Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai was easy. After all, Mr Ben-Gvir is his new boss and he isn’t about to tell him that the force is incapable of allowing him to go wherever he wants without riots breaking out.

Then Mr Ben-Gvir met with Shin Bet director Ronen Bar. It couldn’t have been an easy meeting: after all, for most of his life, Mr Ben-Gvir was a subject of interest for the security service, often undergoing lengthy interrogations.

In his previous career, he specialised as a lawyer in representing other Jewish terror suspects, and trained them how to withstand Shin Bet questioning. But in this meeting, he got what he wanted out of the Shin Bet. Director Bar gave his professional assessment that there were no warnings of an immediate threat.

At the time of writing, aside from a few Molotov cocktails thrown at a police station in East Jerusalem (which missed) and the misfired rocket from Gaza, there’s been no violent response from the Palestinians.

All the damage so far has been from “friendly fire”. Mr Netanyahu has shown he cannot control his senior minister. The coalition partners are openly fighting. And next week’s trip to the UAE has been postponed for “technical reasons”.

Meanwhile the Emiratis, who for the past few years seemed the most dependable of Israel’s Arab allies, are calling for an emergency meeting at the United Nations Security Council. Not bad for a first week in office.

Intelligence failure
The only silver lining for the government from the Ben-Gvir-Temple-Mount affair is that at least the intelligence assessments seem to have been accurate.

Hamas and the other Palestinian organisations have not used it as an opportunity for a violent escalation. That may seem like a routine success, but no intelligence service should ever take success for granted.

On Wednesday afternoon, at the Glilot base of the IDF’s military intelligence branch, new intelligence officers paraded at the end of their course.

At one point in the ceremony they formed the number 50 — marking 50 years since the Yom Kippur War and causing at least one parent to frown at the lack of historic awareness. Yom Kippur was the worst debacle in the history of Israeli intelligence when it failed to detect sufficiently in advance the plans of Egypt and Syria to attack Israel simultaneously.

News of another intelligence failure was swallowed up last week by the headlines about the new government’s inauguration.

Apparently, the suspected perpetrator of the 23 November bombing of two bus-stops in which two people were killed and a dozen wounded had been arrested already a month ago.

The initial assessment of Israeli intelligence after the bombings was that they could only have been carried out by a network with the knowledge and infrastructure to build two powerful explosive devices and detonate them simultaneously at crowded spots in Jerusalem.

But Islam Faroukh, a 26-year-old engineer living in a Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, had carried out the attack on his own.

Faroukh was inspired by Daesh’s Salafist-jihadi ideology and the Shin Bet have not been able to detect any collaborators. A far cry from the sophisticated network they had originally said must be behind the bombings.

Faroukh was not on the Shin Bet’s radar and was eventually found hiding out in a cave in the Judean Desert.

One man, acting alone, succeeded in carrying out the most significant bombing attack in Israel in a decade -— a stark reminder that as good as Israel’s intelligence penetration of Hamas and other Palestinian groups is, there are still plenty of lone wolves out there. Something to think about the next time a minister goes for a walk on Temple Mount.