Israel’s temple of conspiracy

A historic compound fuels controversy at the center of the Mideast's ''insane psychodrama.''

By FLORE DE PRENEUF

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 27, 2001

Map: Disputed ground

JERUSALEM -- On most days, the peace there is almost celestial. The stone-paved platform known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary sits high above the noise and tension of earthbound Jerusalem. It holds an ancient mosque, a gold-topped shrine and fountains gurgling in the shade of cypress trees.

"But in a moment it can turn into hell," says Isam Awwad, the chief architect in charge of the sacred space.

Since Palestinians and Israeli police clashed there last fall at the start of the current uprising, or intifada, the compound has been off limits to non-Muslims and shrouded in rumor. Some Jews insist "archaeological terrorism" is being done behind closed gates. Muslims, who administer the site, are convinced Israelis are plotting to take over.

"This is where we act out our myths," says Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli author. "The insane psychodrama of the Middle East is played on the stage of the Temple Mount."

Reigniting the conflict

It was a September visit by Ariel Sharon -- then an opposition politician, now Israel's prime minister -- that reignited the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The disputed site returned to the spotlight in July when Muslim worshipers protested a symbolic attempt by the Temple Mount Faithful, a small extremist group, to rid the compound of its mosque and rebuild a Jewish Temple.

For the past few years, however, the main drama up there has focused not on people but on dirt -- big piles of dirt, excavated from the compound with a bulldozer by the Muslim authorities, dumped into a nearby valley and methodically surveyed by anxious Israelis.

According to Jon Seligman, the Jerusalem regional archaeologist for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, the rubble contains "bits of buildings, ceramics, coins. Nothing spectacular."

Most of the debris belonged to the period that followed the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century when the site, in ruins since the Romans destroyed King Herod's Temple in 70 A.D., was transformed into a Muslim sanctuary.

Despite Seligman's assessment and numerous police reports that minimize the importance of the work carried out, many Israelis are convinced Muslims are deliberately destroying significant artifacts from the periods of the First and Second Jewish Temples in order to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history -- and, by extension, Israel's connection to the land.

The rumors are difficult to check. Even before Muslims barred non-Muslims from visiting the esplanade, observant Jews heeded the rabbinical ban on setting foot on the mount for fear of treading near the Temple's inner sanctum. And although Israel claims Jerusalem as its eternal and indivisible capital, Israeli archaeologists have no authority to control or prevent work on the site. Inaccessible and majestic, the mount is a natural habitat for conspiracy theories.

Cause for worry

Some Jews are fatalistic about the damage. "For thousands of years, they've tried to get rid of us and they haven't managed to," says Devorah Fastag, an ultra-Orthodox woman on her way to pray at the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple's retaining wall. While her 8-year-old niece, Esther, peered through binoculars at the mount's closed compound, Fastag adds: "When God wants, the Temple will be rebuilt."

But many religious and secular Zionists find cause for worry. "If anything is sacred to secular Zionists, it's archaeology," explains Gorenberg. "It provides an essential link between today's Israelis and the ancient Jews."

The most controversial deed, from an archaeological point of view, was committed in 1999, when the Waqf, the Muslim trust that administers the holy site, decided to dig a staircase leading from the esplanade to a vaulted underground room known since Crusader times as the Solomon Stables. The Waqf had decided three years earlier to convert the unused structure into a prayer room large enough to shelter roughly 6,000 worshipers from winter rain and summer's beating sun. During holidays such as Ramadan, as many as 100,000 Muslims press into the compound at prayer time, according to Adnan Husseini, head of the Waqf. The staircase, finished in March 2001, was designed as an emergency exit.

When news surfaced that major excavations were taking place, the non-partisan Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount was formed by prominent Israelis, including lawyers, archaeologists and prestigious left-wing authors like Amos Oz. Articles about "what is really going on," complete with sketches and clandestine pictures, still appear regularly in the Israeli press. And a bill to preserve the site from alleged Palestinian desecration was introduced in the U.S. House last month.

Eilat Mazar, an archaeologist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and a founding member of the committee to preserve the Temple Mount, compared the damage done by the Waqf to the acts of vandalism committed by the Taleban, Islamic fundamentalists, against ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. "Here you also have Islamic fundamentalists destroying the antiquities of other religions and recognizing just Islam," says Mazar.

Whether construction work in the southeastern corner of the 35-acre compound amounts to a real loss for historical understanding is hotly debated. The Waqf, of course, denies any harm was done. Pointing to photographs of his work, Awwad said that the dirt removed to accommodate a staircase was simply filling, mixed up over the centuries and impossible to analyze layer by layer. Meir Ben-Dov, an Israeli archaeologist familiar with the area of the mount, also thinks the accusations made by the committee are "a big lie." But dissenting voices have been lost in the brouhaha.

"In any event, archeological damage as such doesn't create this kind of storm," emphasizes Gorenberg, who published a book last year on the Temple Mount. "The reason such a storm erupted is that (the Palestinians) were asserting that the site is exclusively Muslim and that Jewish history doesn't exist there."

Question of sovereignty

At stake is the question of sovereignty over Jerusalem and its holy sites, a question that diplomats have yet to answer in a satisfactory manner. It has been left dangling since 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem, stormed onto the mount and then handed over the daily administration of the site to the Waqf. Attempts to modify this ambiguous status quo at a U.S.-led summit at Camp David last summer failed when Palestinians rejected the idea of shared sovereignty over the holy precinct.

Even raising the issue proved explosive. Ehud Barak, then Israel's prime minister, came under fire for bargaining over a site many Jews consider central to their faith and to their right to the land of Israel. He later lost his job to Sharon, who styled himself as the fearless defender of Jewish sovereignty on the mount.

For Muslims, the whole compound is one mosque, the "Farthest Mosque"(al-Masjid al-Aqsa), described in the Koran as the place where Mohammed alighted after a miraculous night flight from Mecca and from which he ascended to Heaven.

Minarets on the high walls of the compound call Muslims to prayer. Clerics deliver their addresses from within a silver-domed building that has stood there in one form or another for nearly 1,400 years. And worshipers pray on carpets indoors or outdoors, depending on weather and space. Muslims consider the Dome of the Rock, the famous golden dome that covers an outcrop of rock where Abraham is believed to have offered his son in sacrifice, a shrine -- not a separate mosque -- and the Waqf calls the converted Solomon Stables "a prayer hall."

Muslims have long been wary of Israeli intentions toward the mount. In fact, fear was one of the reasons the Waqf worked on the Solomon Stables in the first place. When Muslims heard in 1996 that some Israelis were drafting plans to transform the room into a synagogue, they acted first, in a pre-emptive strike known in the region as "establishing facts on the ground."

"The whole compound is an Islamic site. We're not in a position to give parts of it away," says Husseini, the head of the Waqf. Awwad, the architect, does not hide that part of the impetus for developing and renovating the Noble Sanctuary is to solidify the Islamic claim to the site. "It means that we are closing the chance for Israel to get anything up there. That's why they are opposed to our work and say we are destroying antiquities," says Awwad.

Fanning flames of anger

Fear of a takeover is not entirely baseless: there have been repeated attempts by Jewish and Christian extremists to blow up or burn down al-Aqsa. Muslim paranoia also seizes on small details: posters, sold in the Jewish quarter, show an aerial view of the Old City in which the mosques have been airbrushed and a Jewish temple sketched in; a golden menorah, recently displayed by the Temple Institute in anticipation of the building of the Third Temple; a cornerstone ceremony organized near the mount year after year by the Temple Mount Faithful.

Most of the "temple mania" is either religious kitsch or symbolic of long-term Jewish aspirations. Jews who want to rebuild the Temple without waiting for the Messiah are a tiny minority and have no official support. But as Husseini says, "Under this symbolic stone, there is a bomb. Muslims will not accept this plan even if it's a dream."

Politicians are in large part responsible for fanning the flames of righteous anger. Israeli leaders have used archaeology to justify Israeli conquests, from the hills of Hebron in the West Bank to the Golan Heights. Palestinian nationalists, for their part, have used the slogan "Al-Aqsa is in danger" as a rallying cry since the 1920s. It is no accident that the current violence has been baptized the "al-Aqsa uprising."

The day after Sharon's controversial visit to the mount, Sheik Hian Al-Adrisi whipped up the crowds at al-Aqsa, saying: "Today the Jews recruit the world against the Muslims and use all kinds of weapons. They are plundering the dearest place to the Muslims, after Mecca and Medina. They want to erect their temple on that place. The Muslims are ready to sacrifice their lives and blood to protect the Islamic nature of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa!"

And blood indeed was spilled: Some 700 people have been killed since last September, three-quarters of them Arabs.

It's unclear how much Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a secular nationalist, manipulated his people's religious passion and appetite for martyrdom to advance his political goals. Arafat begged Barak to prevent Sharon's visit to avert a catastrophe. On the other hand, Voice of Palestine, his official radio, exhorted people to go defend al-Aqsa. Mayhem was easy to foresee: The hot spot has caused riots since 1929 and most recently in 1996, after Israel opened a tunnel beneath the Muslim quarter along the compound walls. Militant Islamic groups like Hamas have successfully championed the al-Aqsa issue for years. And it has become mainstream for Arabs from Cairo to Damascus to deny Jewish history on the Temple Mount.

Asked whether he thinks Solomon's Temple once stood where the Dome of the Rock now shines, Husseini responded evasively. "I've been working there 31 years and I never saw the temple. But every day I see the mosque. Our agenda is taking care of what exists."

Awwad, the architect, promised to help Jews build their next temple if the Messiah comes. "We'll help you put up scaffolding," he said. "But until then, keep out."

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