Gershom Gorenberg
The Jerusalem Report, August 14, 2000
For 33 years, Israel has enjoyed the ambiguity of claiming that the Temple Mount is "in our hands" without wanting to exercise that claim. In this essay, Jerusalem Report Senior Editor Gershom Gorenberg, author of a forthcoming book on the struggle for the Temple Mount, explains that Israel is agonizing so deeply now about the Mount's status because to formally relinquish any control - even if it paved the way to peace - would be to reverse the triumphant sense of victory that marked the capture of the Old City in 1967. And for many Orthodox Israelis, it would also mean acknowledging that redemption is not at hand.
STAND JUST INSIDE ST. Stephen's Gate on a sun-soaked day, and the calm simply scorns history. How, you wonder, does this place dare be so languid? A dust-beige car slides slowly up the narrow road from the valley to the east of the Old City, grumbles through the arched gate, and crawls into the Muslim Quarter. At St. Anne's Church, a guide lectures in half-audible Italian to a flock of tourists. Another guide leads a dozen muscular young men, apparently cadets of some security agency, and tells them tiredly in Hebrew about "our heroic paratroopers who entered here in June 67."
You have to strain your imagination to its limit to see the same spot on a morning just over 33 years ago: An Israeli army half-track rumbles up the road at the head of an advancing column; it jerks through smoke and ash and gunfire from the Jordanian Legionnaires on the walls and swerves around a burning bus that half blocks the gate while brigade commander Motta Gur, leading the attack himself, wonders if his own fuel tank will burst into flames. And then the half-track is safely through the gate, inside the Old City, and Gur yells at his driver to turn, his men firing in all directions, and moments later they burst through another gate, onto a path between trees and into a plaza at the center of which stands the glowing Dome of the Rock and the men are off the vehicle and running toward it. And Gur is on the radio to major general Uzi Narkiss, head of the Central Command, who is racing toward the Old City in a jeep because his own half-track is too slow, and Gur tells him, "The Temple Mount is in our hands."
In Hebrew that took three words - "Har habayit beyadenu" - which summed up the mythic triumph of the Six-Day War. Jews, no longer weak, indeed apparently unlimited in strength, had repossessed the sacred center of Jerusalem, the locus of Jewish history, the place that meant redemption.
Except that from the first days of the conquest, the meaning of "the Temple Mount is in our hands" has been ambiguous. Within weeks, Israel annexed the Mount, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, to create its united capital. But the Mount was also Al-Haram al-Sharif, the third-holiest spot in Islam - and Israel let Muslim religious authorities, appointed by an Arab ruler elsewhere, continue to administer the site. Almost without exception, rabbis ruled that Jews should not set foot on the Mount, precisely because of its sanctity. In principle, Israeli law applied to the spot. In practice, the Mount has enjoyed an undefined extraterritorial status.
Meanwhile, for Palestinians and other Muslims, the Mount has become the icon of what they lost in 1967 and aspire to regain. If Jerusalem is where Israeli and Palestinian demands have seemed most irreconcilable, the Temple Mount is the place in Jerusalem where agreement has appeared most essential for reaching peace, and most difficult to achieve.
This summer's peace talks have forced Israelis to face the questions: Is the Mount really in our hands? What does that mean, and what is it worth? After 33 years, ambiguity no longer works.
THE TEMPLE MOUNT was a set of contradictions long before 1967. It is the historical location of the First and Second Temples, the place where Jews worshiped in the long centuries when Judaism was a religion of priests and sacrifices. It is an imposing physical reality: a 35-acre plaza that took its current, entirely unmountainlike form when Herod the Great decided to expand the Temple courtyards in the first century BCE and ordered his builders to erect an immense platform around the original hill. One piece of the retaining walls they put up is today's Western Wall.
But the Mount is also myth. Jewish tradition says Adam was formed here. A reasonable reading of the Bible says it is where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac. After the Romans destroyed Herod's Temple in 70 CE, Jews burnished the memory of the sanctuary with nostalgia; the era of the Temple became an ideal, unhistorical past, a second Eden. Its destruction represented the loss of innocence, so that a Talmudic rabbi could state, "The day the Temple was destroyed, the pleasure of sex was taken (from marriage) and given to sinners."
Though Jews had lost political independence before the destruction and remained in their land after it, the event came to symbolize both the loss of power and the beginning of the exile. Meanwhile, the rabbis transformed Judaism into an intellectual faith of study and prayer. So rebuilding the Temple could be assigned to the time of the messiah, the ideal future beyond history. The Temple Mount became a physical place embodying the unattainable.
Moreover, the Mount had other tenants besides Judaism. Archaeologists suggest that the site was holy to local pagans for a thousand years before King David conquered Jerusalem. A generation after they razed the Second Temple, the Romans built a temple to Jupiter on the spot. The Mount was no different than holy places elsewhere in the world: Conquerors evicted the old religion and moved their own in. When the Islamic armies of the caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem in 638, it was natural to build a mosque there, forerunner of today's Al-Aqsa at the south end of the Mount.
Another caliph, Abd al-Malik, ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691. The rock beneath the dome also has multiple meanings. In the accepted interpretation of the Koran, Muhammad had flown on a winged steed from Mecca to Jerusalem, then leapt to heaven from that rock. Nearly all archaeologists say the rock more or less marks where the Temple stood. That may well be the real reason the Dome was built there: to proclaim Islam's supersession of Judaism, just as the inscriptions inside announced Islam's superiority over Christianity.
In 1948, Jews regained political independence but lost the battle for the Old City; barbed wire cut Jerusalem in two. Not only was the Mount beyond reach, but also the Western Wall, which for several centuries had been the most sacred spot for Jewish prayer. The loss was painful, and a bit sobering: The new state was not quite the redemption, whether one thought of redemption in classic religious terms or in the new terms of secular Zionism.
THEN CAME THE CONQUEST. One of Gur's paratroopers put an Israeli flag on the Dome of the Rock. Some of the soldiers ran on to find the Western Wall, which had become the actual focus of longing in the years since 1948.
Shlomo Goren, the army's chief rabbi, arrived on the Mount minutes after Gur and Narkiss. He came on foot, a Torah scroll in one arm, a shofar in the other hand, blasting the horn and roaring out Biblical verses. That day Goren asked Narkiss to demolish the Dome. "If you don't stop," Narkiss later recalled telling him, "I'm taking you from here to jail." For Goren, it seems, taking the Mount was how redemption began; the next step was clearing the ground for the Temple. That also fit the old brutal logic of conquerors evicting the faith of the defeated.
Narkiss wasn't alone in rejecting both kinds of reasoning. That afternoon, defense minister Moshe Dayan visited the Mount, saw the flag on the Dome, and ordered it removed. A week and a half later, Dayan returned, entered Al-Aqsa, and sat down cross-legged on the carpets with Muslim clerics. Israeli troops would leave the Haram, he told them; Israel would maintain security, but from outside. Muslims would set the rules in the Dome and Al-Aqsa. Dayan had decreed the new status quo: The Haram would remain a Muslim site. Jews could visit - but the de facto policy, from then till this day, was that they wouldn't turn it into a place of Jewish worship.
But the policy had a second piece. The night after the war ended, army bulldozers leveled the Mughrabi Quarter, a warren of tumbledown Arab houses around the narrow courtyard at the Western Wall. At first the residents refused to evacuate - until a bulldozer knocked down one house anyway. While medics treated the wounded, the neighbors quickly packed. By morning, the big machines had doubled the exposed length of the Wall and carved out a plaza. Three days later, on Shavuot, 200,000 Israelis came to the Wall, in a festival of longing realized and amazed victory.
According to Zorach Warhaftig, then minister of religious affairs, Dayan initiated the razing of the Mughrabi Quarter. Warhaftig, in his 90s, shrunken, impatient, incisive, told me last year that he didn't approve of the hasty, illegal way it was done. That could have been Dayan's style, unconcerned with legal niceties. But it might have been that he wanted to act before the Shavuot crowd arrived, and overflowed the old courtyard, and myriads of Israelis turned to the open esplanade of the Mount.
The result has been territorial compromise, a de facto division of holy space. Seen as moral choice, the policy defied the old logic of history in the interest of coexistence. Seen as pragmatic, it accepted that Israel's power had limits, albeit undefined. Soon after the war, in a Knesset speech that still angers religious rightists, Warhaftig spoke of the sanctity of the Western Wall, rather than the Mount. Warhaftig was a leader of the then-moderate National Religious Party. And as he later explained, "The Temple Mount belongs to us but isn't in our hands. It's in the hands of millions of Muslims," and he saw no reason to turn a conflict with the Arabs into a battle with all Muslims, "all the way to Indonesia." Israel proudly possessed the Mount, and didn't quite.
The policy has held because religious authorities have backed it. A statement issued in 1967 by the country's chief rabbis, and signed by dozens of other prominent sages, celebrated the Mount being under Jewish control - and warned Jews not to set foot there. The reasons given were technical, such as rules of ritual purity. But in a legal system, technicalities hide deeper principles. For 2,000 years, the Temple had been a place to go when the messiah came, and he hadn't yet - even if for some people, conquest of the Mount was the clearest sign he was on his way.
Among the signatories, for instance, was Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual father of Gush Emunim. Kook taught that the state's creation and the 1967 victory were certain signs of redemption. He urged followers to settle the land in order to hurry the messiah. But he assigned Temple-building to the very end of the process. Kook both aroused messianism and delayed its consummation, a tension his most radical followers failed to accept.
Yet it has not only been religious Jews who have heard, in the words "The Temple Mount is in our hands," a whisper of redemption, or fulfillment of history, or a longing even less articulated. Even on the political left, many insist that Israel must retain the Mount - while accepting that the waqf, the Islamic trust, runs the place.
SO FOR 33 YEARS, ISRAEL'S policy has been contradictions. By law, the Mount is part of sovereign Israel. Yet it is administered by the waqf, for years an arm of the Jordanian government. After the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority succeeded in pushing out Jordanian officials in favor of its own. To do business at the Mount, Israel engages in diplomacy.
Officially, Israeli building and planning regulations apply to the Haram. In practice, the government has defended its right not to enforce them. At first glance, the law on antiquities applies to the Mount. But a loophole exempts holy places from the Israel Antiquities Authority's jurisdiction over archaeological sites. Instead, the IAA can only report what the waqf is doing on the Mount; decisions are up to the government.
Government sources and archaeologists generally say the Islamic authorities stopped talking to antiquities officials after the Netanyahu government opened the Hasmonean tunnel next to the Mount in 1996. Since Ehud Barak was elected prime minister, a delicate dialogue between the Israeli government and the waqf has resumed. But in their own insistence on a myth, waqf officials deny the dialogue exists, deny that they seek and receive approval for construction work on the Mount.
Most troubling, Israel has never found a way to turn the division of holy space - Jews at the Wall, Muslims in the Haram - into a positive policy, based on the value of coexistence.
Over the years, a small but growing minority on the radical edge of the Orthodox right has demanded the right to pray on the Mount. A tangled religious ruling by rabbis of West Bank settlements encourages Jews to visit the Mount. For most Temple Mount activists, such visits are only a first step - the goal is building the Temple and hurrying redemption. In court, the state has argued that allowing Jewish prayer on the Mount would spark Muslim violence. That's true, but it's lousy law; it rewards the willingness to riot. Yet writing the division of holy sites into legislation would mean admitting that the Mount is not entirely in our hands, and no government has been willing to own up to that.
The ambiguity feeds anxiety and instability. For Muslims, enjoying an autonomy that has no guarantees, it cultivates the fear that Israel will one day try to seize the Haram. The fear is wildly exaggerated, but it has a seed of truth: Especially on the radical right, there are Jews who want to build the Temple, or at least take a corner of the Mount. They are not pariahs: In 1995, then-prime ministerial candidate Benjamin Netanyahu wrote to Yehudah Etzion, an ex-terrorist who'd served time for plotting to blow up the Dome, and promised that if elected, he'd arrange for Jewish prayer on the Mount. Once elected, Netanyahu forgot that promise.
In recent years, the radical wing of the Islamic Movement among Israeli Arabs has dedicated itself to developing the Haram. Its first project was turning the unused underground vaults known as Solomon's Stables into a mosque. One reason, a movement activist explained to me: They'd heard that Jews planned to turn the vaults into a synagogue. Such a plan did, in fact, exist among Temple activists, though they never gained government or rabbinic approval.
Cultivating their own myths, Palestinians deny any Jewish tie to the Mount. A waqf pamphlet for tourists asserts that "no documented historical or archaeological evidence exists" for the Haram being the location of the Temples. "This is an Islamic holy site. It never has been related to anything else," says Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, director of Al-Aqsa.
Yet denial of history, like construction work, boomerangs: It enrages the Israeli right; it can upset even moderates. Last winter, when the waqf carved a deep pit in the Mount to build an entrance to Solomon's Stables, an unsigned editorial in the National Religious Party's daily Hatzofeh responded in the tone of barroom shouts a moment before a brawl. The paper - echoing some archaeologists - accused Muslims of "systematic destruction of Jewish remains" at the Mount, and complained that the judicial system refused to enforce the law out of fear of Arab violence. So the courts, the editorial said, should know that "there are more and more Jews who also know how to be violent ... there's very high certainty of an insane Jewish outburst of violence" over the Mount.
There's another spark for right-wing protests over the Mount, though: They seem to flare up when peace and territorial concessions are in the air. The shouting about the mosque entrance last winter came when a breakthrough with Syria seemed likely. New accusations of Muslim damage to antiquities exploded a few weeks before the Camp David summit. Tap the Golan, and someone will kick at the Mount. Tap the Mount itself, as this summer's negotiations have, and more people will kick harder.
We have reached the point, perhaps, of negotiating peace not only with the Palestinians but with our own dreams. Real coexistence of Judaism and Islam in Jerusalem, it's true, requires that the other side acknowledges the Jewish past and stake in the city. At the same time, for Israel to recognize Palestinian status at the Haram, in a written agreement, means admitting that the Temple Mount is not in our hands, at least not only our hands. It would mean giving up myths, the stories we tell about what we'd like to be. It would require admitting that the State of Israel is not the first stage of redemption, but a normal country inside history. It would also mean admitting that modern Israel is not a return to an idyllic ancient past.
OUTSIDE ST. STEPHEN'S GATE - Lions' Gate as it's known in Hebrew - sit two far-right Jewish protesters, today's volunteers in a long-running vigil. They pass me a handbill with a reprinted news item about Barak's offer to give the Palestinians de jure autonomy on the Mount and control of a road linking the holy site to Palestinian territory. The handbill contains no slogans; the naked news is presumed sufficient to provoke fury. "First thing in the Six-Day War, Motta Gur declared, 'The Temple Mount is in our hands,'" one protester tells me. "Now they want to give it up."
"But the Muslims have had autonomy on the Mount ever since 67," I point out.
"Yes," he says, "yes, but now it would be signed, sealed, legislated."
The protest, in other words, is against admitting to what's been true for years.