There has been a lot of inflammatory discussion in recent weeks about what the status of various monuments and places of worship in Jerusalem is and should be. An Op-Ed in Haaretz today, by Dr. Lorenzo Kamel Is it too late to defuse a Third Intifada in Jerusalem? is the most reasonable point of view I've seen so far.
A Little History
The status of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is intertwined with the history of Zionism in Palestine/Israel. This history includes the establishment of the original Zionist settlements (driven by a desire to return to the ancient homeland), the UN partition plan (which envisaged Jerusalem as an international city shared by two nations), the Six-Day war of 1967 (when Israeli forces wrested Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordanian control) and too many more ancient events to recount.
For those of you who think the place provokes extreme religious fanaticism and should be razed to the ground, let me point out that the Roman Empire beat you to the punch by almost 2,000 years. But by then, as Gibbon reportedly said of Roman attempts to suppress Christianity, it was already too little too late.
The Temple Mount is where the first and second Jewish temples reportedly stood. After Vespasian was done destroying the second temple, what remained was a raised platform that is about the size of seven NYC blocks. That raised platform is called the Temple Mount.
Today's status quo
The complex today has a couple of seventh century Islamic buildings, the gold "Dome of the Rock", and the silver domed al-Aqsa mosque which features prominently in the Quran. The site has been administered by an Islamic charitable trust (a Waqf) for almost 900 years. The precise location where the second temple stood is unknown and its inner sanctum is considered so holy that the Israeli Chief Rabbinate says no person should ascend to the Temple Mount for fear of defiling it. That's one of the reasons most orthodox Jews pray at the Western Wall.
The complex is open to visitors most days, but Israeli police prevent Jews and Christians from praying there. Palestinian/Israeli Muslims are allowed to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque.
A Personal Story
Every time I hear of a conflict in Jerusalem, I think back to an event twenty years ago in India. In 1992, a mob of over 100,000 people led by right-wing Hindu nationalists demolished the 16th century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The mosque may have been built on the ruins of a Hindu temple that may have marked the birthplace of Ram (the hero of the epic Ramayan). Many Hindu temples in India were built over the ruins of Buddhist/Jain structures, but that was probably too inconvenient a fact for the mob to appreciate. There are Jain claims that a Jain temple once stood on the site.
The rally in Ayodhya and the demolition were televised. As fantastic rumors swirled, there were widespread riots across India. The worst were in my home city of Bombay, which had avoided virtually all sectarian violence till this point (including the pogroms that affected most of Northern India during the partition). Almost a thousand people, most of them Muslim, virtually all of them poor, were murdered in Bombay and entire neighborhoods were destroyed. As an aside, this is the riot depicted in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire. Three months later, a series of coordinated bombings killed over 300 people. A store my parents owned was damaged by a mob. We watched it happen from our apartment.
Up until 1992, everyone in Bombay knew, just knew that communal riots were something that happened elsewhere in India. Our city was too diverse, too integrated, too hard-working, too liberal, too cosmopolitan and too pragmatic to engage in that sort of communal rioting. I don't think anyone believed that after 1992. For my part, I now recognize that far too many places in the world are fractured tinderboxes.
The people who're inflaming religious sentiments in Israel and Palestine are playing with fire.
Sadly, they are part of a long tradition of rogues who use religion to drum up tribal and sectarian feeling to further their own political ends.
To those who're susceptible to sectarian feeling, facts aren't going to make much difference. Nevertheless, I'll quote a couple of excerpts from Dr. Kamel's article in Haaretz on the situation at the Temple Mount:
it’s important to note that the restrictions imposed on Jews accessing the Western Wall in that period did not have any "Islamic connotation." Jews, in fact, have had free access to the area during the previous twelve centuries of Islamic domination, while they were prevented from doing so under the Christian Byzantines and the Crusaders. The issue of the Western Wall can only be understood in the context of the history of the last century and in particular as a consequence of the War of 1948, when about 400 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground and, often, renamed. And while Jews were prevented from accessing the Western Wall for twenty years, Palestinian refugees and their descendants were and still are prevented to access their erstwhile lands within Israel.
In such a looming scenario only two options can avoid the further strengthening of extremist elements. The first one is the maintenance of the current precarious yet effective (until today) status quo in Jerusalem’s Old City. To require a change in the equilibrium achieved in these last few centuries within Suleiman’s walls, while maintaining the status quo in the Palestinian territories and continuing to turn a blind eye to the policies carried out by right-wing groups such as Elad –
often using the controversial Absentee Property Law to takeover apartments in densely-populated Arab quarters – would be a recipe for more violence.
The second alternative is the internationalization of the Old City and its holy places, a solution in line with the original international consensus when the State of Israel was established. It is noteworthy that Israel’s admission to the United Nations (May 11, 1949) was not unconditional but bound up with the full acceptance of the UN Charter and provisions regarding Jerusalem (Israel’s original application for admission was, not by chance, rejected by the UNSC): "Negotiations," assured Abba Eban (1915-2002) in front of the UNGA on May 5, 1949, "would not, however, affect the juridical status of Jerusalem, to be defined by international consent." None of the historical events of the last 65 years have the legal power to erase these assurances.
a solution must be found through sharing or internationalizing Jerusalem’s Old City and in striving to trigger a radical political change in the status of the Palestinian territories. If none of these scenarios can be achieved, the status quo in the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa complex remains – at least for now – the least worst alternative.