Just when we are lulled into thinking that maybe things are improving in this corner of the world, we are rudely awakened by the latest bout of Moslem violence on the Temple Mount. What caused it? The professed reason is the allegation that Israeli plans to tunnel under the Temple Mount, thereby endangering the sanctity and stability of the Dome of the Rock and the El Aksa mosque – Islam’s third (!!!!) holiest site (after Mecca and Medina).
This is a blatant lie as the work being done at the southern end of the western wall of the Temple Mount enclosure is visible for all to see. Absolutely no tunnel. So what is the real reason for the furor?
Over these past weeks Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have been killing one another, including many children, at an alarming rate. You may not have been aware of this violence as the death of a Palestinian child is only news when he is, perhaps, killed by Israeli fire, not when he is killed by an armed Palestinian. The folk in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have voiced their fears of civil war. How best to stop the deadly Hamas and PA rivalry? Open a new front – against the common enemy – Israel.
And what better rallying call than “Save the third most holy site to the Moslem world from the Israelis”?
It was after the outbreak of Arab violence in September 2000 that I began writing my newsletters and they were initially sent to people whom I had guided over the years on their visits to Israel. Many no doubt remember the southern wall, the Kotel and perhaps even their visit to the Temple Mount area, and even the mosques. In the interim, my mailing list has swelled and includes people who have not yet visited Israel. For them a little background. Please bear with me!!!!
The Temple Mount is a large rectangle on which historically was the compound on which the biblical Temple stood. That Temple was built by King Solomon just less than three thousand years ago. It was destroyed in 586 BCE by the Babylonians. Less that a generation later the Persian King Cyrus (who had destroyed the Babylonian Empire) allowed the Temple to be rebuilt, henceforth the Second Temple.
Originally the area of the Temple Mount enclosure was smaller than it is now. It was slightly enlarged by the Hasmonean kings but it was King Herod who added the entire southern section in the first century BCE. An extraordinary engineering feat created a platform on the southern slope of the original Temple Mount enclosure and on it Herod built the colonnades and market place typical of Roman temples. (It was here that Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers).
Access to the Temple Mount from the south was up the steps, which stretched almost the full width of the southern wall, and which have been exposed in archaeological excavations, and then through a magnificent tunnel and finally up to the enclosure itself. A visit to http://www.archpark.org.il/ will help you visualize it as it was then and until it was totally destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Evidence of that destruction can be seen in the excavation along the southern part of the western wall of the enclosure.
There is no consensus as to what stood on the Temple Mount area prior to the building of the Dome of the Rock in 691 CE and the El Aksa mosque there-after. While the Dome of the Rock is architecturally unchanged since then, the El Aksa mosque served as a church during the Crusader period and has undergone many structural changes. As it stands on the southern extension, which rests on large arches, it has also suffered damage due to earthquakes through the centuries.
The cavities under the El Aksa mosque were explored by amateur archaeologists of the 19th and early 20th century and it is rumoured that Moshe Dayan entered the Temple Mount area through the arched access from the Southern steps but no academic archaeological excavation has taken place. Any opportunity for such an excavation has been thwarted by the systematic destruction wrought by the Moslem authority on the Temple Mount, the Wakf, over these part few years.
Ostensibly the Wakf planned merely to enlarge the exit to the area under the south eastern corner of the Temple Mount, which had been used as a mosque. In actual fact, using tractors and small bulldozers they destroyed all evidence of all earlier archaeological strata. Only a few intrepid Israeli archaeologists protested. True to the doctrine of appeasement, of keeping the “peace” at all costs, the Israeli department of antiquities, archaeologists and biblical scholars throughout the world, the Israeli police and courts all stood by in silence and watched the wanton destruction.
(For more details about the archaeological excavation conducted in the “rubbish” dumped during the afore- mentioned work by the Wakf, please see the article on my site www.ratzer-holyland.com)
This construction work together with heavy rains a few winters ago caused a structural weakening on the southern wall and the southern part of the eastern wall of the Temple Mount enclosure which have been repaired by Jordanian and, I have been told, Italian engineers.
Damage was also caused to the ramp which leads to the entrance Mughrabi to the Temple Mount. This ramp can be seen on the southern side of the Kotel ( Western Wall) plaza, next to the women’s section. There are a number of gates on the Temple Mount through which Moslem worshippers can both enter and exit. Non-Moslems however may only enter through the Mughrabi gate which brings them to the court yard in front of the El Aksa mosque.
Reinforcing the weakened ramp was not viable so it was decided to construct a new ramp suspended on pillars. Drawings of the plans have been in the papers for months as some archaeologists feel that the placing of the ramps will cause irreparable damage. But some solution had to be found to ensure access through the Mughrabi gate and this seems to be the least destructive.
I was amazed to see Sheik Ra’ed Salah, an Israeli citizen and head of the Islamic Movement’s radical Northern front, look the camera in the eye and declare to all viewers that he was a witness to the fact that a tunnel was being dug. The inaccuracy (I am being polite) and ‘chutzpah (nerve is the closest translation of this Yiddish word) of this charge are unbelievable. There is not a shadow of doubt that all the work is being conducted outside the western wall of the Temple Mount, in the area between the Kotel itself and the exposed south western corner.
Unperturbed by being caught straying from the truth and disappointed at the unexpectedly muted response (so far) to his calls for an uprising, Sheikh Salah is now insisting that Israel has no right to make changes anywhere in Jerusalem. You read that correctly. Not only on the Temple Mount, not only on the western wall of the Temple Mount but in all of Jerusalem. In fact, according to him, Israel has no legal jurisdiction in Jerusalem at all.
He is not alone in this view. History is constantly re-written, even by the illustrious Jimmy Carter. (See the article on my site www.ratzer-holyland.com) So, why should Sheikh Salah be different? Let us together trace the modern history of Jerusalem, the last two centuries.
“A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. … It seems to me that all the races and colours and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty, and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Muslim rule more surely than the crescent flag itself, abound. … Jerusalem is mournful and dreary and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.” ( Apparently the Moslem world cared nothing for its “third holiest site”).
Those words were written by Mark Twain who visited Ottoman/Turkish ruled Jerusalem in 1867. (Innocents Abroad). In the same year Sir Moses Montefiore, the English Jewish philanthropist, purchased land outside the walls and the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls was built, the first of many. By 1917, when Palestine was conquered by the British, the Jewish population far exceeded that of the Moslems and Christians together.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 proclaimed that Palestine was to be the National homeland of the Jewish people. The League of Nations, precursor of the United Nations, ratified this declaration. Despite this, during the thirty years of British rule Jewish immigration rights were severely curtailed. Against all odds the Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem continued to grow.
In November 1947 the UN voted to accept the recommendation of the UN Special Committee on Palestine to divide Palestine into six sections according to the demography of the population, Jewish or Arab. According to this same UN Resolution 181, Jerusalem, an enclave in the Arab allocation, was to be international, thereby ignoring the demographic criterion as one hundred thousand Jews lived in Jerusalem and only twenty thousand Arabs.
In May 1948, the nascent State of Israel was attacked by the neighbouring Arab states, re-enforced by volunteers from as far away as Iraq, Libya, Morocco and Yemen. UN Resolution 181 was supplanted by the cease fire agreements signed between Israel and here neighbours. Jerusalem was divided between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan according to those same cease fire lines.
For the next nineteen years the Temple Mount and its mosques came under the jurisdiction of the Jordanian Wakf. Jordan invested very little, if anything, in the development of Eastern Jerusalem. The only special acknowledgement that the Temple Mount received in the Moslem world was when King Abdullah, grandfather of the late King Hussein, great-grandfather and namesake of the present king of Jordan, was assassinated one Friday morning while at prayer in the El Aksa mosque.
In May 1967 Egyptian President Nasser unilaterally expelled UN troops from Sinai, closed the international Straits of Tiran and the Suez canal to any vessel sailing to or from Israel. By international law, war had been declared on Israel. Jordan signed a pact with the UAR (Egypt and Syria) and, despite diplomatic messages from Israel to refrain from joining the hostilities, Jordan decided to open fire along the entire border with Israel, including, of course, the divided city of Jerusalem.
And, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Within days the Jordanian army was defeated. The concrete wall dividing Jerusalem was removed and the city re-united. The Israeli Knesset passed a law, based on international law which grants the victor the spoils of a war which it did not start, whereby Jordanian Jerusalem was formally annexed.
East Jerusalem, the Old City and the Temple Mount all came under Israeli control, quite legally. As a special gesture of conciliation, Moshe Dayan decided that the Jordanian Wakf would continue to supervise the Moslem religious affairs on the Temple Mount.
UN Resolution 242, November 1967, makes no reference to Jerusalem. In fact there is also no reference to a Palestinian entity as at that time no such entity existed and its establishment was not even on the agenda.
Mark Twain would not recognize Jerusalem of 2007. It is now a city of over half a million. Christians have free access to all their holy sites, without the need to pay baksheesh, as was customary during both the Turkish and Jordanian periods. Jerusalem Arabs prefer the Israeli identity card to that of the Palestinian entity. For the first time Jews were able to pray freely at the Kotel, the Western Wall.
But no longer safely. For Moslem rioters on the Temple Mount constantly try, and often succeed, to throw rocks down onto to those praying at the Kotel below. While it is in the nature of Jews and Christians to pray at their holy sites, violence, and incitement to violence, is almost as frequent as prayer in Moslem mosques. Not only in Israel but all over the world.
We can but hope and pray that this present bout of violence will soon pass.
