Israel foreign minister: Peace deal impossible now

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's foreign minister says there's no chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says efforts to reach a final peace deal have failed since the first accord between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993.

Lieberman says it's unrealistic to think a long-term agreement on ending the conflict can be reached at this time and that whoever thinks an agreement can be reached soon just doesn't understand the situation.

Heard the palestians are now trying to rewrite history again and claiming the jews have no historical link to the holy temple at the western wall. All summed up nicely here:

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.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/352246/the-third-destruction-of-the-temple.thtml

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