The third destruction of the Temple

Tuesday, 13th November 2007

Further to Ahad Ha'amoratzim’s excellent and most pertinent comment on my post below (8:09pm) in which he accurately describes how, when the Jordanians illegally occupied Jerusalem until 1967, they desecrated Jewish holy sites and barred all Jews from the Old City -- all while it was supposedly under ‘international’ protection -- a review by Emmanuel Navon in the current issue of Azure describes something no less horrifying: the indifference of the Israeli government to the vandalism of the Temple Mount which is currently being perpetrated by its Arab custodians.

What many don’t realise is that Temple Mount, the site of the original Jewish holy of holies on top of which the conquering Arabs built the al Aqsa mosque, is under Arab control even though Israel re-conquered Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War. As the review of How Dreadful Is This Place! by Shmuel Berkovits relates, this was because the victorious Israelis, resolutely secular as they were, did not want to be burdened with a sensitive religious artefact in addition to the headache of staving off Arab attacks which were bad enough anyway.

As a result, the irony is that under overall Israeli rule over Jerusalem, Jews have significantly less freedom of access to the Temple Mount than do the Arabs. Far worse that that, successive Israeli governments have simply turned a blind eye to the appalling and wilful desecration and vandalism of the Jewish foundations of the Temple Mount by the Arab Waqf -- a deliberate attempt to erase the historical proof of the Temple and with it the truth about the origins of Israel as a Jewish state and the heart of the Jewish religion long before the Arabs ever got there. As Navon records of the failed Camp David/Tabah proposals of 2000:

Israel suggested a division of sovereignty over the Temple Mount whereby a future Palestinian state would control the upper level, and Israel the lower one. Berkovits reveals that then–foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told him that, in December 2000, he had offered the Palestinians full and exclusive sovereignty over the Temple Mount (including the lower level), provided merely that the Palestinians recognize the site’s holiness to the Jewish people and prevent the destruction of Jewish remnants on the Mount.
Yet even that proposal was rejected by the Palestinians, who have, to this day, refused to concede the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, and are reluctant even to allow Jews to pray in front of a small section of the Western Wall. Why are the Palestinians so determined not to share sovereignty over the site with Israel? According to Berkovits, one of the main reasons is that ‘nothing scares [the Palestinians] more than the discovery of remnants of the Jerusalem Temple underneath the Temple Mount.’

The outcome has been the destruction of countless Jewish relics from the First and Second Temple periods.

As a result of the Israeli government’s inaction, vindicated by the High Court of Justice, the Waqf was able, in November 1999, to open a ‘small emergency exit’ for the enormous mosque built in Solomon’s Stables that required the digging of a 1,600-square meter, fifteen-meter deep pit at the site, and the removal of more than ten thousand tons of archaeological rubble containing artifacts dating back to the First Temple period. Decorations and inscriptions were polished away from ancient stones, and stones with Hebrew writings and Hasmonean stars were thrown into Jerusalem’s municipal garbage dump. The ‘small emergency exit’ became a new mosque named Al Aksa Al-Qadim.

Berkovits relates that he visited the Al Aksa Al-Qadim mosque in November 2004 together with his students:

On the ceiling were four domes. Two of them still bore rare artistic inscriptions, which are the work of Jewish artists from the Second Temple period. I noticed that those inscriptions had been covered with plaster, and reported this to the Antiquities Authority after the tour. A senior representative of the Antiquities Authority told me that he was aware of the plaster that had been used to cover the Jewish inscriptions. When I asked him why he didn’t send workers with a ladder to remove the plaster, he replied that whoever climbs up the ladder will never be able to climb it down.

Thus do the Palestinians publicly deny the Temple’s existence even as they actively erase proofs to the contrary; thus does Israel’s High Court of Justice acquiesce to the destruction of evidence of the Temple’s Jewish past for fear of upsetting Muslim sensitivities. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Waqf has succeeded over the past decade in building, illegally, two enormous mosques underneath the Temple Mount (the Solomon’s Stables mosque and the Al Aksa Al-Qadim mosque), and plans to connect them with underground tunnels, thus effectively turning the Temple Mount into an exclusively Muslim site. Should this state of affairs continue unimpeded, in the near future the last remnants of the Jerusalem Temple will effectively disappear, and the Palestinians will be able to deny its existence without having to be burdened by new archaeological counterevidence.

If anyone wants to know what would happen to religious freedom and respect for holy sites under any scheme of ‘international’ protection for Jerusalem that some believe would solve the problem posed by that city – and if anyone believes that Israel currently robustly defends its own heritage -- this review furnishes a most dismaying correction to both illusions.