The Temple Mount "problem"

Below is a lengthy but excellent overview and history of the Temple Mount "problem." This tiny piece of real estate probably holds the key to world peace or war in the coming months.

The Jerusalem Post
Friday, August 25 2000 10:26 24 Av 5760

Faithful to the bitter end?
By Michael S. Arnold

(August 23) - Time and again throughout Jewish history, says Gershon
Salomon, foreign powers have occupied Jerusalem and taken over the Temple
Mount, desecrating the Jewish people's holiest site.

First the Babylonians occupied the city, destroying the First Temple and
exiling the inhabitants of Judea. Some 400 years later the Greeks took
control of the rebuilt Jewish temple, desecrating it with pigs and pagan
idols, and sparking the Maccabean revolt that briefly reasserted Jewish
sovereignty in the land.

A few hundred years after that, Roman legions overran Jerusalem, sacking
the city and razing the Second Temple to the ground. Again, the destruction
was a prelude to Jewish exile, this time lasting 2,000 years. In the
interim, first Christians and then Moslems built places of worship above
the Holy of Holies -, in Jewish tradition, the seat of God's presence on
earth.

Even in his worst nightmares, Salomon, leader of the Temple Mount Faithful,
never imagined that a sovereign Jewish leadership would contemplate turning
over control of the holy plateau to foreign control.

Yet that is exactly what Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a small coterie of
secular, left-wing aides proposed at Camp David, Salomon and other Temple
Mount activists say, even if the initiative was disguised by convoluted
proposals and sweetened with an insistence that any final agreement include
the right of Jews to pray on the mount.

Quoting Scripture, Salomon says that God promised to protect the Jews so
long as they upheld the sanctity of His holy mountain. The implication, of
course, is that by relinquishing sovereignty over the Temple Mount Israel
also would be forfeiting God's protection. The Palestinians know this, he
claims, which is why they insist on controlling the mount.

By discussing arrangements for Palestinian control of the Temple Mount,
Salomon asserts, Barak is inviting the third exile of the Jews - and
Salomon and his followers are not about to let it happen.

"I don't believe that Jewish life can continue to exist without the Temple
Mount," he says. "The moment such an agreement is signed, I am sure that
tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Jews from
around the world will go to the Temple Mount. We will force our way in to
pray, and we will refuse to move, we will stop the agreement with our
bodies. If necessary, we will give our lives not to allow [the Temple
Mount] to be given to foreigners, not to see this terrible moment."

AS NEGOTIATIONS with the Palestinian Authority approach their endgame, and
as control of Jerusalem, and especially of the Temple Mount emerge as the
final barriers to a comprehensive agreement, right-wing activists are
stepping up their struggle to prevent concessions on the mount.

"Everything will stand or fall on this issue," says Moshe Feiglin, leader
of Zo Artzenu and one of the driving forces behind the demonstrations held
each afternoon outside the Old City's Lions' Gate. "If you give up the
Temple Mount of your own free will you give up your identity - you commit
spiritual suicide. There's a large majority behind us on this issue that
doesn't want to disconnect from the dream of generations. Unfortunately,
that majority is being overcome by a small minority that don't want to be
Jews."

Seven activist groups - all but the Temple Mount Faithful, in fact -
recently merged in an umbrella organization called The United Association
of Movements for the Holy Temple, under the direction of Bar-Ilan
University literature professor Hillel Weiss. Trying to reverse the
traditional halachic prohibition on Jews going up to the Temple Mount -
issued to prevent "unclean" Jews from accidentally stepping into the area
of the Holy of Holies - Weiss and others are collecting signatures of
prominent rabbis who say that Jewish prayer indeed is allowed, and should
be encouraged, on most areas of the Temple Mount.

Activist Yisrael Medad, founder of El Har Hashem - To the Mountain of the
Lord - hopes to organize marches around the walls of the Old City and
prayer gatherings at the Old City's gates. Other groups, such as the Old
City's Temple Institute, have been building replicas of temple utensils
from specifications in the Bible, and publish a newsletter to alert Jews
around the world to what they call the desecration of the Temple Mount by
unsupervised Wakf construction.

According to reports from last month's Camp David summit, Barak either
suggested or accepted American proposals that would offer the Palestinians
unprecedented concessions in Jerusalem, including control over Arab
neighborhoods of the city, unfettered access to al-Aksa Mosque, and the
freedom to fly a Palestinian flag from the Dome of the Rock.

Other suggestions reportedly included a plan for shared control that would
give the Palestinians sovereignty above ground - that is, for everything
that happens on the Temple Mount - while preserving Israeli sovereignty
below ground, where the ruins of the ancient temples ostensibly are located.

If such ideas are accepted, Weiss says, it will lead to a crisis of faith
among right-wing and religious Jews.

"It will be like Judas Iscariot all over again," he says. In such a case,
"I believe that many Jews, even hundreds of thousands, will return their
identity cards to the state. I won't feel that I belong to this state
anymore, psychologically and even legally."

Rabbi Chaim Richman, public-affairs director of the Temple Institute, says
concessions on the Temple Mount are likely to lead to bloodshed.

"Giving sovereignty of the holiest place in the Jewish world to the
expressed enemies of the Jewish people, I imagine there would be a lot of
people who wouldn't be able to live with themselves," he says - though he
personally opposes violence, as the prophets said the Third Temple would
come about by peaceful means. "To see the Palestinian flag flying there
would probably lead to violence in Jewish circles."

Many activists are not bothered by the prospect that their opposition could
scuttle an agreement, possibly leading Israel into another war.

Some, indeed, seem to welcome the possibility, believing that from the
ensuing chaos will emerge a new Israeli leadership not afraid to take bold
steps to assert Jewish control over the Temple Mount - and, perhaps, even
build the prophesied Third Temple, the construction of which is expected in
some circles to usher in the Messianic Age.

Not everyone accepts the activists' apocalyptic vision. In addition to many
left-wing and secular Israelis who couldn't care less about dividing
Jerusalem or giving up the Temple Mount, there is the steadfast opposition
of the Palestinians.

The Temple Mount - or Haram a-Sharif, as the area is known to Moslems - is
"a closed file," Wakf spokesman Adnan Husseini says. "The issue has been
settled by God, and there will be no negotiations.

"Moslems can't discuss it and can't make any compromise. This is the stance
that every Palestinian and Arab and Moslem will adopt, forever.

"If [the Jews] want to dream of something that was here 3,000 years ago,
then we will dream about the situation before 1948, when there was no State
of Israel."

Citing the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks, however, Salomon says that
the prospect of war is little reason for this generation of Jews to shirk
its divine duty.

"In the moment of crisis, the great revolution will begin," he says in a
telephone interview from Canada, where he is on a speaking tour. "We are
very close to destruction. The dark clouds of war are coming close.

"Especially if we bring [the Palestinians] into Jerusalem and the Temple
Mount, we shall be attacked, and this time from within the very heart of
our land."

At issue, perhaps, is the very purpose of the Zionist enterprise: whether
the State of Israel exists so that Jews can live in safety and prosperity
like any other nation, or whether it is a vehicle for accomplishing the
Jews' biblical destiny of spreading God's message to the world and
hastening the coming of the Messiah.

"I don't believe that the great redemptional step the God of Israel started
52 years ago was intended to be just a short episode in history," Salomon
says. "It is the fulfillment of prophecy, part of the great dream of the
God of Israel Himself, to see His nation redeemed."

THE ROOTS of the current standoff, it would appear, lie in decisions made
by defense minister Moshe Dayan immediately after the Six Day War. A few
days after the message "the Temple Mount is in our hands" crackled through
his earpiece, Dayan met with Moslem leaders at al-Aksa and promised, to the
astonishment of the defeated Arabs, not to interfere in their
administration of the site.

Dayan's motives appear to have been twofold: to demonstrate the Jews'
respect for freedom of religion, and to avoid provoking the immense Moslem
world, thereby immortalizing a conflict that many Jews believed would end
shortly after Israel's decisive victory on the battlefield.

Yet Dayan set two conditions. Rabble-rousing sermons against the Jews would
be forbidden, he wrote in his autobiography, or "we would of course take
appropriate action."

In addition, Dayan wrote, "the one thing we would introduce was freedom of
Jewish access without limitation or payment. This compound, as my hosts
well knew, was our Temple Mount. Here stood our Temple during ancient
times, and it would be inconceivable for Jews not to be able freely to
visit this holy place now that Jerusalem was under our rule."

Both of these conditions were quickly abandoned by Israeli authorities.

Later that summer, after IDF chaplain Rabbi Shlomo Goren led prayers on the
mount during Tisha Be'av, authorities backtracked and reinstated the
previous ban on Jewish worship on the mount.

"It was evident that if we did not prevent Jews from praying in what was
now a mosque compound, matters would get out of hand and lead to a
religious clash," Dayan wrote.

What ensued was a tenuous modus vivendi that lasted for most of the next
three decades. The Wakf was allowed to continue running affairs on top of
the Temple Mount in coordination, to one extent or another, with Israeli
police, while Jews prayed only at the Western Wall at the mount's base.
Jews were allowed to enter the mount like any other tourists, but
"suspicious" individuals - known activists or anyone who looked like an
Orthodox Jew - could enter only under Wakf and police guard, and were
evicted if they appeared to be moving their lips in prayer.

That arrangement began to unravel with the Palestinian Authority's quiet
takeover of the Wakf from Jordan after the 1994 Oslo Agreements, and
especially after the riots that followed the opening of a new exit to a
Western Wall tourist tunnel in September 1996.

The deterioration has accelerated in the past year, as the Wakf, aided by
Israeli Arab activists from the Islamic Movement, has flouted Israel's
antiquities law and removed tons of artifact-laden dirt while building a
third, subterranean mosque on the mount. Recent newspaper reports have
cited plans to build a fourth, above-ground, mosque as well.

Fearing a confrontation, the government has refused to stop the earthworks,
but Temple Mount activists see the development as the logical consequence
of decades of timid Israeli policy.

"The Moslems see that they're able to strike at what is supposed to be the
holiest site to us and we don't react," Richman says. "It's like we put a
sign saying 'Shoot Me' on our foreheads. If we show that we have no
self-respect, what do we expect from them?"

IT WAS precisely that loss of "self-respect" that led Salomon and a group
of 15 friends to form the Temple Mount Faithful at the same time as Dayan
was making his historic concessions.

"At that very moment, we felt our nation starting the march back to exile,"
Salomon says. "We were living in a moment of redemption but our leadership
missed the opportunities, one after another. Since the Six Day War, Israel
has been led by leadership that is too small to understand the importance
of the times we are living in."

Such rhetoric is commonplace among Temple Mount activists, and offers clues
as to their worldview. Leaders like Barak have misunderstood the true
import of the struggle for the Temple Mount by approaching it from the
standpoint of realpolitik, Feiglin says.

In fact, he says, it is a religious struggle between Islam - aided by
Christianity, which for years has called for the Old City to be
internationalized and lately has called for sovereignty on the Temple Mount
to be left "to God," that is to say, undecided - and Judaism.

And what of al-Aksa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, that currently
occupies the mount? Most Temple Mount activists ridicule the notion that a
rebuilt temple will miraculously descend from the sky in a ball of fire.
Yet they accept the equally fatalistic idea that Christian and Moslem
leaders - either recognizing the Jews' astonishing spiritual purity or
their unbendable will - will beg the Jews to build a Third Temple and put
the mount to its intended use.

Salomon, in fact, says that after the coming cataclysm a revitalized
Israeli leadership will dismantle al-Aksa and the Dome of the Rock and
rebuild them brick by brick "in their rightful place" - Mecca - and that
the Moslem world will accept this. The rebuilt Temple, in this view, will
be accepted by the entire world, fulfilling biblical prophecies that it
will be a place of worship not just for the Jews but for all mankind.

In the meantime, many activists say they will accept a small synagogue on
the periphery of the mount, an idea raised earlier this month by Haifa
Chief Rabbi She'ar Yashuv Cohen. The nation's top Rabbinical Council
postponed discussion of the proposal last week.

Richman sees the idea of a small synagogue as something of an insult.

"It's the old ghetto mentality: Give us this little corner and we won't get
in your way, thank you very much," he says. "There's no way-station on the
road to building the Temple. Even a 50 percent desecration of God's name is
still a desecration of God's name."

Though they question his motives, many activists compliment Barak for
insisting on Jewish access to the Temple Mount in a final peace agreement.
Others, however, say it is cold comfort, like having someone steal your
wife and then allowing you to visit her from time to time, in Feiglin's
words.

Medad does not believe that Arafat will sign an agreement that allows Jews
to pray on the Temple Mount - or, citing the behavior of the Jordanians
when they controlled the Jewish Quarter between 1948 and 1967, that Arafat
would honor such clauses even if he did agree.

Still, he says, accepting the synagogue idea is a smart tactical move -
because the expected Palestinian opposition would show the world that
Islam, unlike Judaism, is opposed to sharing holy sites.

"Even [a small synagogue] would be problematic for the Arabs," Medad says.
"But I want to make a statement that we're not out to destroy [Moslem holy
sites]; we want to share. By showing that they're not willing to do even
that, we can show their true face and the nature of their partnership. It
would make my job as a Temple Mount activist easier to gain more empathy
and support."

BEFORE gaining international support, however, Temple Mount activists will
have to shore up their base inside Israel. Even though Arafat rejected
Barak's suggested compromises - Richman compares it to the biblical story
of God hardening Pharaoh's heart - many analysts here have noted that the
government's willingness to discuss a practical division of Jerusalem
sparked little domestic unrest.

Medad, who advocates stressing the national, as opposed to the religious,
import of the site, doesn't find this surprising.

"There has been no mainstream Temple Mount activist group that has
succeeded in talking to the majority of the people, because they have
refused to adopt legitimate messages that could be understood by the
majority of the population," he says. "When they hear people talking about
mikva'ot [ritual baths] and ritual purity, it sounds like mumbo-jumbo."

Already, Richman says, there has been a dramatic rise in consciousness
about the significance of the Temple Mount over the last decade, especially
since the Wakf's destruction of archaeological remains over the last year.
And Feiglin says the pressure for a final peace agreement, which may result
in a second summit next month, will also help force the Temple Mount issue
onto the national agenda.

Salomon, too, doesn't think that raising support in the hour of need will
be a problem. Though the majority's silence over the Camp David proposals
is a mark of the low spiritual state to which the nation has sunk, he says,
Jews have a tradition of rising to the occasion.

"This nation at least has one wonderful characteristic," he says. "When it
feels that the knife is lying on its throat, then it awakes."