Digging In at the Temple Mount
Gershom Gorenberg
The Jerusalem Report
March 26, 2001
IN MID-MARCH, ONE ISRAELI COURT WILL BEGIN hearing a case involving archaeology, alleged destruction of immensely important finds, and official refusal to protect the past. In early April, another court will hold a separate hearing on archaeology, alleged damage to antiquities, and official indifference.
The first case will be heard in a bottom-rung court in the outlying town of Tiberias. In it, the Kinneret Drainage Authority - an Israeli government agency - and its director stand charged with damaging remains three-quarters of a million years old, remains that shine bright light on the history of the entire human race. In the second, the Supreme Court will deal with a petition demanding that the government enforce Israeli law to prevent construction by Muslims that is allegedly damaging the record of the past at the Temple Mount. Judging from experience, the case regarding humanity's origins will receive virtually no attention. But reports about just what the Islamic religious trust, the Waqf, is doing at the Temple Mount will stay front-page news, and the debate will inevitably slip from ruins and trenches to who owns Jerusalem.
The lesson is that concern for science plays a very small part in the argument over archaeology at the Temple Mount. Stick a shovel in the ground at that sanctity-afflicted site, and the shouting that follows has to do with politics, faith, psychology and national identity - with the same passions that beckoned Ariel Sharon to the Mount last September, and that ignited the Al-Aqsa Intifada…
Case 2 concerns, immediately, a petition to the Supreme Court by the Temple Mount Faithful, demanding the government enforce Israeli law at the site - which in practice means stopping construction. But the extremist group's suit is just the latest chapter in the long legal and public shouting match over the de facto extra-territorial status Muslims enjoy at Al-Haram al-Sharif. The shouting has gotten much louder since the Waqf began renovation efforts several years ago - starting with turning the underground vaults known as Solomon's Stables into a prayer hall, followed by reconditioning another pair of vaults, which archaeologists say date to the Second Temple and Palestinians say couldn't possibly be Jewish, as a mosque.
In December 1999, the Waqf slashed a deep triangular pit for steps to Solomon's Stables. Archaeologists protested that antiquities were being destroyed - though Meir Ben-Dov and Dan Bahat, prominent excavators of Jerusalem, insisted the work did no damage. The earth the Waqf had removed, they said, was land fill, not the level-on-level deposits that scholars read. They were the minority. That the Barak government approved the work has only made voices shriller.
This winter the controversy has caught fire again, with the Public Committee charging that the Waqf is carving a tunnel below the Mount's surface. Amos Kloner, an Israeli archaeologist who visited the site of the alleged tunnel, found no evidence of it. The government's response to the Supreme Court contains officials' affidavits that the tunnel doesn't exist. Perhaps they've been fooled. Perhaps this tunnel, like the one Muslims once claimed that Jews were digging under Al-Aqsa to destroy it, is a figment of anxiety and anger. At the Mount, the subterranean and the subconscious are easily confused.
For the Waqf, as for Palestinian political leaders, Al-Haram al-Sharif is purely Islamic. Whatever the Waqf has done to antiquities, it would certainly like the world to repress all memory of a Jewish presence at the site. For Israelis, on the other hand, archaeology has always been more than digging into the ground. As a way of restoring lost memory, of establishing that Jews belong here, it is essential to Israeli identity, a national sacrament. If some archaeologists seem to regard the Temple Mount as the mother lode of national history, on top of which a living Islamic place of worship has uncomfortably been imposed, they are hardly alone. Dig a centimeter beneath the debate over antiquities, and you hit the debate over whom the Mount belongs to; a centimeter beneath that is the war over whom the entire country belongs to.
It's no accident that the Waqf work, an anxious effort to reinforce Muslim ownership, has taken place in the shadow of negotiations over the land and the holy place. It's no accident that Sharon claims he visited the Mount to see if antiquities were being damaged. At the Mount, every shovel is a prop in a psychodrama. If the issue were mere science, no one would care.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount."