The Quintessence of the Middle East Conflict

Who Owns Jerusalem's Holy Sites?

The unsuccessful search for a peaceful settlement has spotlighted irreconcilable claims by Israel and the Palestinians, that is, Jews and Muslims, to the holy sites on al-Aqsa/Moriah (the Temple Mount). Faced with Israel's forcible expansion, the Palestinians are refusing any compromise on the issue.

"The Haram ash-Sharif is the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." This laconic observation in a Hamas document on the importance of the mosques on the al-Aqsa plateau and the suspected ruins of Jewish temples in the ground beneath the sacred Muslim precinct must serve as a guideline for future efforts to achieve a political settlement for East Jerusalem. It explains the essence of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims to sovereignty over and access to the holy sites. Seen in this light, a profound point of weakness is revealed in the otherwise highly successful creation of a modern Jewish state: by political and military means, Israel has succeeded in bringing a large part of the Holy Land under its control, but not the historic Temple in Jerusalem. That is why it seems persuasive that, during the negotiations at Camp David and Taba, former Prime Minister Barak tried to achieve a final settlement which would include some manner of Jewish shrine on what Jews call the Temple Mount. In his mediation proposals prior to the Taba meeting, President Clinton offered the Israelis the temple's "Holy of Holies" – that is, an as yet undefined piece of the Mount – and assigned the remainder to the Palestinians.

Restricted Access

The administration and prayer services throughout the 14-hectare plateau are under the jurisdiction of the Awqaf authorities, which administer Muslim religious institutions (awqaf, which is the plural form of the more familiar term waqf). The Awqaf in turn are under Jordanian sovereignty, although in 1988 Jordan relinquished all other administrative relations with the West Bank territories it had lost to Israel in 1967. The Awqaf have their own security forces, which supervise prayers and tourist visits on the plateau; Israel, which has annexed East Jerusalem, reserves to itself the right to maintain armed security and has used that right to bloody effect on a number of occasions when Arab demonstrations have gotten out of hand. Though it is not always exercised directly at the gateways to the Aqsa precinct, the Israeli army indirectly controls access to the holy sites through its road blocks between the city boundaries and the rest of the West Bank.

In the wake of the blockades and security precautions which have been imposed by Israel since the outbreak of the second Intifada, access to the Haram ash-Sharif is frequently blocked to non-Jerusalemites. And the Awqaf have banned all tourist circuits of the Aqsa precinct since the fateful visit there of Ariel Sharon in September 2000. This means that Jews, too, are now blocked from visiting their Temple Mount. Organized Jewish prayers in the Aqsa precinct have never been permitted by the Awqaf. The Israeli government has respected that ban, basing its stance on the rabbinic injunction that Jews should not step upon the precinct's grounds before the precise location of the ancient Holy of Holies has been determined, in order not to inadvertently defile it.

On the other hand, immediately after its 1967 victory Israel made the Western (or Wailing) Wall accessible to Jews. To do so, the authorities demolished part of the Old City's Maghariba Quarter in order to create access from the south and a huge plaza in front of the Wall. The al-Aqsa Mosque is situated on the plateau or terrace above the Wall. Archeologists have so far been unable to find any definitive remnants of Solomon's Temple (also known as the First Temple), which many Jews suspect was also located on this site, and some prominent researchers now maintain that no such finds are to be expected in future. In Jerusalem's Israel Museum, an inscription declares that similarly, nothing remains of the Second (Herodian) Temple since its destruction by the Romans, except for the (western) supporting wall of the Temple Mount. Opposite the Western Wall, near the Porat Yosef Synagogue, stand models of the Israelite temples, at which Orthodox Jews come to pray. In the Israel Museum, too, there is a sketch of the destroyed Temple showing two large structures where today the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Mosque of Omar (or Dome of the Rock) are situated, the latter containing the stone on which, according to scriptures, Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Fears of an Organized Disaster

In view of the Muslim holy sites now there, the Awqaf administration insists that public prayers in the Aqsa precinct must be in accordance with Muslim rites or else consist only of silent prayer. It points out that it would hardly be conceivable to permit heathen rites to be held in Christian churches again, just because those houses of worship are in many cases built on the foundations of ancient Roman temples. During the Camp David negotiations, one Israeli delegate posed the question: If an earthquake were to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque, could only Muslim houses of worship be built on the site? Islamic propaganda insists that Jewish extremists could synthetically cause such a catastrophe in order to make room for construction of a Third Temple. In 1967 there was an arson attack against al-Aqsa, and four attempted bombings there were frustrated between 1980 and 1985.

A Final Settlement with Room for Jews?

Various media carried reports of those closed-door negotiations based on statements by American officials and representatives of both parties to the conflict. According to an article in France's Le Monde dated December 29, 2000, and an article by a Palestinian author in Internationale Politik of August 2000, Israeli negotiators demanded the right to build a synagogue on the Temple Mount. An Israeli journalist writing in the New York Review of Books on October 18, 2001, reported that Barak had demanded space for Jewish prayers on the Haram ash-Sharif, and the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on September 18 and December 14 of last year that Barak at Camp David had called for a "Jewish religious presence," by which the journalist understood him to mean a synagogue. On another occasion, according to Haaretz, Barak actually promised Rabbi Itzhak Levy of the National Religious Party that a synagogue would be built on the Temple Mount. As a compromise – though itself somewhat explosive – President Clinton put forward for the Taba talks the idea of the Aqsa precinct under Palestinian sovereignty, but ceding the Holy of Holies located there to Israel.

Shared Holy Site in Hebron

Why can't Muslims and Jews both pray to the same God on the Haram of al-Quds? Experience in the shared sanctuary at the Grave of the Patriarchs in Hebron does not allow for much optimism over the idea. No Jews had been permitted inside what came to be known as the Ibrahim Mosque since the days of the 13th-century Mameluk Sultan Baibar, who wanted to eradicate everything non-Muslim along with the last of the Crusaders. Jews were compelled to say their prayers on the seventh step of the outdoor staircase, at the level of Abraham's Grotto. It was only with the occupation of 1967 that the Israeli army restored Jewish access to this shrine, reserving part of the prayer hall for Jewish worshippers. The shrine became a symbol of the city, in which the presence of Jewish settlers was enforced by armed might, and in the 1997 Wye Agreement Hebron was divided into an autonomous Palestinian section and an Israeli-occupied sector. Today people heading for the Islamic part of the shrine must pass through metal detectors and careful identity checks. During my own visit just a short time ago, a troop of fully armed Israeli soldiers tramped through the space as we, in keeping with custom, walked barefoot toward the graves of the Patriarchs.

During a subsequent conversation, the superintendant of the mosque emphasized that no structural remains of a synagogue are to be found there. Then he showed us the bullet holes made by the weapon of settler activist Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 30 defenseless Muslim worshippers as they were praying. The singsong of Jewish prayers penetrated the barrier separating the Muslim and Jewish sections. The shrine has a separate entrance for settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba who, unlike Palestinians, are permitted to park their cars directly below the staircase. The Muslim part of the shrine is generally empty; according to a local guide, Arab residents of Hebron now tend to do their praying at other mosques, because conditions here have become unpleasant. The Israeli security measures are also obstacles to important occasions, such as funerals.

These observations explain Palestinian rigidity with respect to Jerusalem's Haram ash-Sharif. The Awqaf and the Palestinian Authority are creating as many "facts on the ground" as possible in order to prevent a Jewish presence. Access for Jews seems unlikely just now, even behind thick walls or deep underground, because Israel's behavior to date has made the Palestinians suspect that it would only serve as a bridgehead for further expansion at Arab expense.

November 12, 2001 / First published in German, November 7, 2001