Knesset member Orit Strock of the HaBayit HaYehudi Party was at home in the Avraham Avinu (Abraham the patriarch) neighborhood of Hebron the night of Oct. 29 when she first heard the news about the assassination attempt against Yehuda Glick, a leading advocate of the right of Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount. The person to break the story to her was from her party, Knesset member Shuli Mualem. Mualem had been participating in a right-wing conference at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. Glick was shot at close range at the end of the conference titled “Israel Returns to the Temple Mount.” Mualem then called Strock to tell her the news.

Like all Knesset members on the right, the two women know Glick personally and were intimately familiar with his struggle to allow Jews to visit the Temple Mount. They spent the first few moments of their conversation sharing their shock and personal pain, instead of just focusing on the potentially volatile incident’s immediate political and security implications. Glick was the person most closely identified with the Jewish struggle over the controversial compound. It was his life’s work, and the activist from the settlement of Othniel in southern Mount Hebron was a familiar figure in the corridors of the Knesset.

Strock, a leader of the Jewish settler community in Hebron, is most closely identified with religious-national struggles that some people describe as “messianic.” In the Knesset she co-chairs the Land of Israel Lobby with Knesset member Yariv Levin of the Likud. In 2013, it seemed as if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the minister responsible for negotiations with the Palestinians, Tzipi Livni, were making progress on the diplomatic track. The lobby’s goal was to interfere with the coalition’s activities should the negotiations reach a decisive point.

Plenty of water has flowed down the Jordan River since. The negotiations broke down, and another round of fighting against Hamas erupted in the Gaza Strip during the summer. Now that violence between Jews and Arabs is escalating in Jerusalem, Strock is once again swamped with her old/new battles. “This attack was the crudest poke in the eye imaginable against Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem,” she said Oct. 30 in an interview with Al-Monitor the morning after the assassination attempt. “At this difficult moment, it is incumbent upon us to make a decision. We must make it clear that we have sovereignty over Jerusalem.”