Thursday, October 15, 2009

It Is Actually Fairly Simple

My good friend Israel Harel of Ofra (we once shared a double bed in Madrid at the Peace Conference there in 1991 but that's a whole different story), suggests: Share the Temple Mount

Excerpts:-

Sheikh Ra'ad Salah's calls for a jihad against Israel worked. At the last minute, the government was deterred from executing its plan to demolish the mosques on the Temple Mount and from exploiting the Sukkot pilgrimage to Jerusalem to lay the cornerstone of the Third Temple. For fear of Intifada III, the transfer of East Jerusalem Arabs to Umm al-Fahm was also put on hold.

When Jews are accused of harboring the most absurd intentions, the world media chorus, joined by a few Israeli soloists, fans the flames without bothering to check the facts. And though inflammatory nonsense about diabolical plans has been repeated every few months over the past 40 years, it is of course Israel that is accused of playing with fire that can only lead to war between Islam and Judaism...
[in June 1967 right after the war] defense minister Moshe Dayan ordered that it be handed over to the Waqf, the religious endowment entrusted with looking after Muslim property. And when the Waqf saw that the Jews were not aware of the historical, religious and political significance of this concession, it transformed the Jewish people's holiest site into an autonomous Palestinian religious-governmental center and kept the Jews out. The rabbinic establishment then reinforced Dayan's historic folly by forbidding Jews from entering the Temple Mount compound for religious reasons...

Even at this late date, it is essential to equalize Jews' status on the Temple Mount with that of Muslims (excepting, of course, the right to enter the mosques). The Arabs will threaten a jihad and condemnations will pour in from all sides. But in time, Jewish determination will make the Muslims and their Jewish backers get used to the new reality. And the police, thousands of whom are currently plagued by Salah's habit of stirring up trouble during the Jewish holidays, will be able to spend these festivals with their families, just like other Israelis do.


And remember this novel, The Last Ember?

Well, the author has published this:-

The campaign to erase the Mount’s Jewish history, however, goes beyond mere rhetoric and has included actual destruction of Jewish antiquities. In recent years, the Waqf, the land trust that administers the Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount, has used bulldozers to excavate vast underground mosques beneath the Mount’s surface, systematically removing thousands of tons of archaeologically rich soil, and dumping them in the adjacent Kidron Valley.

All too often, the international community has treated this aggressive physical revisionism on the Temple Mount as little more than a dispute over ancient history. But Palestinian efforts to erase the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount have great contemporary significance. They are the centerpiece of a decades-long campaign to deny historic Jewish ties to the Land of Israel and thus call into question the State of Israel’s legitimacy.

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