Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Pages 69-70

Israel and Judaism

However Difficult, Israelis and Palestinians Must Return to Question of Final Status of Temple Mount

By Allan C. Brownfeld

What the future holds for the Middle East peace process remains unclear. Sadly, there are many Israelis and many Palestinians who prefer continued conflict to the kind of compromises which a genuine agreement involves. It remains to be seen whether those who seek peace or those who refuse to make such compromises will prevail.

What we do know, however, is that both Israelis and Palestinians are destined to live in the same neighborhood. The Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, notes that, “The new Israeli-Palestinian war is unnecessary and in vain. Everyone both in Israel and in Palestine knows that when it is over, there will be a two-state solution. Even people who hate this solution know that it is the only one, the unavoidable one…Neither the Jews nor the Palestinians are going anywhere. They cannot live together like one happy family, because they are not one, because they are not happy and because they are hardly a family.”

The best that can be hoped for at the present time, in Oz’s view, is an agreement that will let Israelis and Palestinians live together, not as “brothers or sisters, just civilized neighbors.”

However difficult, the parties will have to return to what became the main sticking point at Camp David, which remains the final status of the Temple Mount, known to Arabs as Haram al-Sharif.

At Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak tentatively agreed to the idea that the Palestinians should be granted religious sovereignty over the Mount, with the Israelis retaining political sovereignty. But in September, while visiting New York for the United Nations Millennium Summit, Barak, who had come under fire at home for conceding too much at Camp David, reiterated that Jerusalem and the Temple Mount “are the cornerstone of Jewish identity.” “No Israeli prime minister, he said, “will ever be able to sign a document that gives up sovereignty to the Temple Mount to the Palestinians.”

Menachem Klein, author of Doves in the Jerusalem Sky, says that, “If Arafat wants exclusive sovereignty over the Temple Mount, there will not be an agreement. Otherwise, anything else can be discussed.”

A variety of solutions have been suggested: sharing sovereignty, deferring sovereignty, or even declaring that sovereignty over the Temple Mount belongs to God and therefore a treaty will deal merely with day-to-day authority.

Rabbis ruled that Jews should not set foot on the Mount, precisely because of its sanctity.

Since its 1967 capture of Jerusalem’s Old City, Israel has enjoyed the ambiguity of claiming that the Temple Mount “is in our hands,” while it continues to be administered by the waqf, a Muslim religious endowment. To do business at the Mount, Israel engages in diplomacy.

Right-wing Jewish fundamentalists in Israel and their Jewish and fundamentalist Protestant supporters in the U.S., however, are intensifying their opposition to any concessions over Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

Members of the Temple Mount Faithful and similar organizations have been holding daily demonstrations at the Old City’s Lion Gate against the kinds of arrangements reportedly suggested by Prime Minister Barak at the Camp David summit in July.

The Temple Mount Faithful’s leader, Gershon Salomon, said the crucial moment will come if Barak signs off on an agreement transferring sovereignty over the Mount, in practical or legal terms, to the Palestinians.

“This is not the first time that foreigners are coming and want to take the Temple Mount and Jerusalem from us, but this is the first time a Jewish government is giving the Temple Mount away of its own free will,” Salomon said. “The moment such an agreement is signed, we will force our way into the Temple Mount to pray, and we will refuse to move.”

These threats are not taken lightly by Israeli security forces. In 1993, Israel’s High Court of Justice denied Salomon’s petition asking that he be allowed on the Mount to observe the Jewish holy day of Tisha b’Av. At the same time, the state noted that security forces held Salomon partially responsible for the riots which broke out on the Temple Mount in 1990, in which 17 people were killed and hundreds injured.

Sharon’s Provocative Visit

In the most recent conflagration at the Temple Mount, it was Ariel Sharon, a long-time opponent of the peace process, who made his provocative visit accompanied by more than 1,000 Israeli troops. He apparently achieved his goal by setting off a chain of events which has damaged prospects for peace. Writing in The Forward of Oct. 6, Leonard Fein declares that, “Mr. Sharon’s entire career, including his career as a general, is an ode to recklessness…The timing of this latest episode necessarily calls to mind Mr. Sharon’s last intrusion, during the High Holy Days. That was during Israel’s misbegotten invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982, an invasion urged by Mr. Sharon, then Israel’s defense minister. The invasion reached its climax with a massacre by Christian Phalangist militiamen in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, just outside Beirut. An official Israeli commission of inquiry held that Mr. Sharon was ‘indirectly responsible’ for the massacre, during which Israeli troops sat mutely by…But Mr. Sharon is like the anti-phoenix, always falling into the ashes from some new malevolent incarnation…”

The history of the Temple Mount is a long and tangled one. Within weeks of its 1967 victory, Israel annexed the Mount, along with the rest of East Jerusalem. But the Mount was also al-Haram al-Sharif—and Israel let Muslim religious authorities, appointed by an Arab ruler elsewhere, continue to administer the site. Almost without exception, rabbis ruled that Jews should not set foot on the Mount, precisely because of its sanctity. In principle, Israeli law applied to the spot. In practice, the Mount has enjoyed an undefined extra-territorial status.

The Temple Mount is the first historical location of the First and Second Temples, the place where Jews worshipped when Judaism was a religion of priests and sacrifices. Early cartographers saw Jerusalem as the center of the world and the Temple Mount as the center of that center. Jewish tradition holds that the patriarch Abraham raised the knife to slay his son Isaac there; some believe the patriarch Jacob rested his head there during his prophetic dream. King Solomon built the temple there.

Archeologists suggest that the site was holy to local residents for a thousand years before King David conquered Jerusalem. A generation after they razed the Second Temple, the Romans built a temple to Jupiter on the spot. When the Islamic armies of the caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem in 638, a mosque was built, the forerunner of today’s Al-Aqsa at the south end of the Mount. Another caliph, Abd al-Malik, ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691. The rock beneath the dome also has multiple meanings. In the accepted interpretation of the Qur’an, Muhammad had flown in a winged steed from Mecca to Jerusalem, then leapt to heaven from that rock.

Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, to be published in December, notes that, “The Mount was no different than holy places elsewhere in the world: conquerors evicted the old religion and moved their own in.”

For religious fundamentalists, the Temple Mount holds an important theological position. Traditionally, Jews believed that the messiah could come only through the single meta-historical appearance of an individual redeemer. More recently, fundamentalists have given holy and redemptive status to the secular state of Israel. The Israeli victory in the Six-Day War led many to believe that they were living in a messianic age. In the summer of 1980, the “Jewish Underground,” created in reaction to the 1978 Camp David accords, engaged in a variety of terrorist acts, including blowing up the cars of several West Bank Arab mayors, maiming and killing some. Also planned, but never carried out, was the destruction of the Muslim Dome of the Rock. The reason: so the Third Temple could be constructed, ushering in the messiah.

Mr. Gorenberg writes that “a small but growing minority on the radical edge of the Orthodox right has demanded the right to pray on the Mount. A tangled religious ruling by rabbis of West Bank settlements encourages Jews to visit the Mount. For most Temple Mount activists, such visits are only a first step—the goal is building the Temple and hurrying redemption…Especially on the radical right, there are Jews who want to build the Temple, or at least take a corner of the Mount. They are not pariahs: In 1995, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote to Yehuda Etzion, an ex-terrorist who served time for plotting to blow up the Dome, and promised that if elected he would arrange for Jewish prayer on the Mount. Once elected, Netanyahu forgot that promise.

The goal of Jewish fundamentalists to build the Third Temple and usher in the messiah is shared by fundamentalist Protestants in the U.S. and elsewhere who believe that this is a precondition for the second coming of Christ. Terry Reisenhoover, a Christian fundamentalist leader, heads the Jerusalem Temple Foundation. As his international secretary, he chose Stanley Goldfoot, a member of the notorious Stern Gang who is reported to have been involved in the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946.

A Matter of Sovereignty

It is the foundation’s belief that God gave the Holy Land to Abraham and his son Jacob and not to Abraham’s other son, Ishmael. As Goldfoot deputy Yisrael Meida explains, “It’s all a matter of sovereignty. He who controls the Temple Mount controls Jerusalem. And he who controls Jerusalem, controls the Land of Israel. This is the land of Israel, not the land of Ishmael.”

Israelis committed to control over the Temple Mount are becoming increasingly vocal. Seven activist groups—all but the Temple Mount Faithful—recently merged in an umbrella organization called the United Association of Movements for the Holy Temple, under the direction of Bar-Ilan University professor Hillel Weiss.

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 places in the Jewish world to the expressed enemies of the Jewish people,” he declares, “I imagine there would be a lot of people who wouldn’t be able to live with themselves. To see the Palestinian flag 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. Indeed, some seem to welc ome the possibility, believing that from the ensuing chaos would emerge a new Israeli leadership not afraid to take bold steps to assert Jewish control over the Temple Mount—and, perhaps, even build the Third Temple.

It is not, needless to say, only Jewish fundamentalists who are unwilling to negotiate a compromise settlement over the Temple Mount. Waqf spokesman Adnan Husseini, for example, says: “This is a closed file. The issue has been settled by God, and there will be no negotiations on the Haram al-Sharif. Muslims can’t discuss it and can’t make any compromise. This is the stance that every Palestinian and Arab and Muslim will adopt, forever.”

In the past, Israeli leaders quite properly have stressed the importance of not transforming the Arab-Israeli conflict into a Muslim-Jewish one. The former, they seemed to understand, allows for a political resolution. The latter defies compromise.

In reality, solutions could be achieved without inordinate difficulty. Leonard Fein, expressing a view shared by many American Jewish observers, points out that the intimate juxtaposition of Jewish and Muslim traditions “renders the Temple Mount unique.” He argues that, “It is the place where the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem meet, a place where the sacred and the symbolic have a physical geography. Plainly, there can be no such thing as sovereignty over the heavenly Jerusalem—not, at any rate, sovereignty as understood conventionally. Plainly, however, our instinctive reaction to territory is that it must belong to someone, that territory not only invites, but requires sovereignty. However, insofar as the earthly Jerusalem is significant…was there ever a place so appropriately viewed as ‘No Man’s Land,’ that land that acknowledges no earthly owner at all? Make the Temple Mount this man’s land or that man’s land, Israel’s or the Palestinian’s, and you diminish—even demean—the sacred traditions that hover there…What is required is only that the religious imagination be nudged into a recognition that it is precisely the centrality of the Temple Mount that renders it a genuine corpus separatum, God’s little acre, that cannot, ought not, and need not, be owned by anyone…”

In reality, Muslims have had autonomy on the Mount since 1967 and Israelis have had sovereignty. Now that an arrangement for the Mount must be signed, sealed and legislated, both sides are reluctant. Given that reluctance, the voices of extremists on both sides—who engage in a form of idolatry by worshipping geography—have increased weight, making a settlement that much more difficult.

If there is a will for peace, the details can be worked out. But if no such will exists on one side or another—or both—the future will be bleak indeed. There is now a chance to step away from the precipice. Hopefully, it will be taken.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and asociate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.