Under the vaulted ceiling of a whitewashed monastery room in central Jerusalem, a coroner`s inquest hears testimony on the killing of 17 Palestinians-or perhaps as many as 21.
The death toll is a statistic no one is entirely sure of, yet no one attends this public hearing. The people affected already are so convinced of what they believe that they consider it a mere legal exercise.
On one wall hangs a map of the Temple Mount. Witnesses, both Arab and Jew, occasionally point to it to describe the morning in October when Palestinians ran in panic and threw stones in anger, and when Israeli police, in their own fear and anger, shot down Arabs young and old.
Passions have escalated since Oct. 8, when the Temple Mount Faithful, an ultranationalist Jewish group, planned to lay a ”cornerstone” for the Third Temple at one of the holiest sites of the Moslem world.
An Israeli court had prohibited them from approaching the Temple Mount. But some of them still tried, and before they were detoured by police, thousands of young Palestinians had already turned out to repulse them.
And on that sunlit morning in October, the heart of Jerusalem again became a battlefield.
The Temple Mount mass killings are already enshrined in the Israeli-Palestinian folklore of hatred; the deaths added to this century`s long litany of grievances.
In one sense, the inquest in the tiny room, where the thin winter light plays on empty wooden benches and the court reporter silently tape-records testimony in Hebrew, Arabic and occasionally in English, is about the very limited issue of blame in one specific violent incident.
But it is also about the larger questions of Palestinian nationalism and Jewish identity, and about religious fervor and hatred.
It is about responsibility, about finding the truth in a region where the truth and facts often do not matter. For Avigdor Feldman, the advocate for the family of one of the victims-and a man with the weary shrug of someone who has spent much time in criminal courts-”It is for our heart`s sake, for our sake, for our consciences` sake.”
In the weeks following the tragedy, Israeli officials made a strenuous effort to influence world public opinion about what had happened. Deputy Foreign Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, whose near-perfect American accent makes him a much sought-after analyst for American television, theatrically hefted a large rock in front of TV cameras in an effort to justify the slayings.
But many of the statements Netanyahu and others made were unfounded. And the version of events that he and others described was misleading, exaggerated or utterly false.
They condoned the actions of Israeli police, contending that thousands of innocent Jewish worshipers were in mortal danger. That was not true. Their explanations also served to obscure and shift the focus away from the fact that at least 17 unarmed people were killed and as many as 150 people were wounded.
”Israel has the power to re-create reality to suit its own purposes,”
said Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, a Palestinian poet and professor of English literature.
Like most other activist Palestinians, she does not believe the coroner`s inquest will establish anything. ”They stick to the forms, but there is no substance,” she said. ”They go through the motions. You don`t get punished if you kill a Palestinian. This is part of the devaluation of Palestinian life.”
Israel summarily rejected an investigation of the Temple Mount slayings by the United Nations. Last Thursday, the UN Security Council, with the U.S. agreeing, passed a resolution deploring Israel`s deportation of Palestinian leaders and expressed ”grave concern” at Israeli`s rejection of two previous UN resolutions to send an investigative team.
The Temple Mount is a plateau in a corner of the Old City of Jerusalem. It is there that the First and Second Temples, central to Judaism, were destroyed millenia ago. The Western or ”Wailing” Wall is a retaining wall-all that remains of the Second Temple. But it is also the third-holiest shrine in Islam, for atop the plateau are the large limestone al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock, a building on the spot from which the prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended to heaven. They have been central to Islam since its founding 1,300 years ago.
Even the terminology generally used to describe the slayings in October is offensive to Muslims. The standard reference to the Temple Mount ignores their term: Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary.
Israel has carefully refrained from establishing a presence on the Temple Mount.
Yet the Palestinians who gathered there that October morning feared an imminent effort to create a Jewish foothold. Such fears are not far-fetched for a generation that has seen hundreds of new Israeli settlements mushroom in Arab towns and neighborhoods.
Subsequent investigations by Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have corrected many of the distortions that attempted to justify the actions of police that morning. Even a government-appointed commission headed by Zvi Zamir, a former head of Israel`s Mossad intelligence service, while justifying the shootings, faulted the police for having been unprepared for a virtually certain confrontation.
But more is being revealed in the tiny hearing room, where the only purpose is to investigate the causes of death and, as deputy Dist. Atty. Eran Shendar remarked, ”the ultimate question of whether someone is guilty.”
There will never be agreement on that; the disputants have become too polarized.
By midmorning on Oct. 8, two large crowds had gathered. In the plaza facing the Western Wall were up to 20,000 Jews celebrating the Feast of Sukkot. Above, on the Temple Mount, were 3,000 to 5,000 mostly young Palestinians. Only 45 police officers were on duty on the plateau; authorities had decided that would be sufficient because of the earlier court order barring the Temple Mount Faithful from approaching.
At a particular moment, the police and the Palestinians began to clash. No one can prove exactly what happened first. Some claim the police, alarmed at the size of the crowd they faced, fired tear gas first. The police insist that stones were thrown first.
Everyone agrees that the police then fired more tear gas, rubber bullets and some live ammunition. Some witnesses said three Palestinians fell dead. But the police, feeling overwhelmed, retreated behind a door at the edge of the plateau overlooking the Western Wall. A barrage of stones followed them through the door and over it, across the top of the thick wall and down on to the plaza, out of view below. The plaza already had quickly emptied in reaction to the noisy tumult on the Mount.
In response to a plea for help, scores of tough paramilitary Border Police arrived within minutes and charged back in to the plateau, laying down a deadly blanket of gunfire. Within 30 minutes or so, many more Palestinians lay dead and wounded.
In the weeks since then, the details of what actually happened have been obscured in a fog of political and emotional bombast. Some examples:
– Israeli spokesmen insisted that Palestinian leaders used loudspeakers in minarets on the plateau to incite the crowd to attack the police. In fact, all the recorded evidence indicates that they did the opposite. The cries and calls from the minarets beseeched the police to stop shooting and ordered the young people to get inside Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, out of harm`s way. This can easily be heard on the soundtrack of a videotape taken by a tourist.
”I am asking you to stop shooting,” an almost hysterical cry came from one of the towers. ”Stop shooting. This is the mosque. This is the Noble Sanctuary. Go back to where you belong. You are responsible for this massacre. God is Great. This is the mosque for Muslims.”
– Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and others suggested that the motive for the incident was the crisis in the Persian Gulf. ”Somebody tried to exploit the fundamentalist, fanatical hysteria being broadcast from Baghdad and ignite an unholy fire in Jerusalem. The conspiracy did not suceed,” Shamir said on the night of Oct. 8.
A week ago, Israeli government spokesman Yosef Olmert said: ”We are not saying there was any specific connection. But in a general sense, the Iraqis and the PLO wanted something to happen.”
And a highly colored account of the slayings appears in an advertisement in the January 1991 issue of Atlantic magazine placed by a group called Facts and Logic about the Middle East, or FLAME. ”There is no question in anybody`s mind,” it says, ”that the bloody incident was engineered and organized by Saddam Hussein, the `Butcher of Baghdad,` and Yasser Arafat, the master terrorist and `president` of the non-existent state of `Palestine,` ”
There was no foundation for such statements then, nor is there now. Even the police testified at the inquest that the only motive they saw for the Palestinian crowd gathering on the plateau was the perceived threat from the Temple Mount Faithful.
– More than 15 police officers testified that there was no automatic weapons fire-that is, that they squeezed off one round at a time, not bursts of gunfire. Videotape soundtracks make it abundantly clear that police were shooting with their guns on automatic. The pattern of multiple bullet wounds in some of the corpses also reflect rapid fire, according to Palestinian physicians.
Israeli reports claimed justification for the shootings because the Palestinians were armed with knives, chains and even swords. No such weapons were ever discovered, according to police files.
The stones were not smuggled in, as widely charged; they came from a construction site on the Temple Mount.
But the most emotional issue of all concerns whether police-as the government still asserts-were protecting the Jewish worshipers celebrating Sukkot in the plaza facing the Western Wall. Israeli newspapers reported that eight people at the Wall had been injured. But Yaron Kedar, one of Feldman`s legal assistants, said: ”None have come forward (in the coroner`s inquest) to say they were hit and none were injured enough to be hospitalized.” About 20 police were hit by stones.
In a CBS ”60 Minutes” documentary broadcast Dec. 2, Rabbi Yehuda Getz, the rabbi of the Western Wall, gave one explanation of how so many people could escape injury if they were being bombarded with rocks from 40 feet above. ”A miracle,” he answered.
This one solitary element of the clash is already part of the folklore.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the government`s chief spokesman, Olmert, still clings to earlier government depictions of what happened and describes the incident as a ”large-scale organized attack on a holy place.”
In official eyes, then, it has already grown from a sudden confrontation between police and Palestinians to an organized attack.
That view suggests one of the factors underlying the Temple Mount killings: Religious fervor and intolerance in Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are growing stronger.
Nationalism and the desire for land leave open the possibility, no matter how remote, of compromise. Religious passion, however, is uncompromising and unrepentant. The Temple Mount Faithful continue to seek to establish themselves on the Mount. Last Monday, still barred from demonstrating on the Mount, they paraded through the Arab sector of Jerusalem`s Old City.
The power of the religious parties in Israel`s coalition government has reached its highest point since the founding of the state in 1948. They have become the fulcrum of Israeli political life. The governing coalition must accept most of their demands or risk collapse.
On the Palestinian side, such radical religious groups as Hamas and the Islamic-Palestinian Jihad have become more and more influential in the three years since the beginning of the Arab intifada, or uprising, to protest the occupation.
An increase in random anti-Israeli personal violence-stabbings, mostly-is attributed to their virulent message. More generally, militant Islamic fundamentalism has become a driving factor in a new quest for Palestinian identity.
”There is a tendency toward the transformation of the conflict from being a political conflict over territory to being a racial, religious conflict that does not know boundaries except race and religion,” said Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian nationalist and professor at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. ”You become enemies not because you are a settler or a soldier but because you`re a Jew.”
The brief investigation by the commission headed by Zamir, the former Mossad chief, which determined that the police shootings were justified, is dismissed by many Israelis as well as Palestinians. Feldman, the attorney, dismissed it as ”a political investigation that came up with a conclusion that is an insult to common sense.”
Indeed, two of the three members of the Zamir commission appointed to investigate the massacre could not personally examine the site because of a rabbinical injunction against Jews setting foot on the Temple Mount for fear of inadvertent sacrilege by treading on the site of the ”Holy of Holies,”
the sanctuary where the Ark of the Covenant rested.
That is the site`s Jewish aspect. For Muslims, Jerusalem is the gateway to heaven and the divine presence, the only place where man ascended to God.
That is one reason that Jerusalem remains the core of the dispute. Just as Israelis describe it as the non-negotiable, eternal capital of the Jewish state, so, too, do the Palestinians insist that it is the non-negotiable heart and soul of Palestinian nationalism as well as Islam.
Just as the memory of the large blocks of stone in the Western Wall sustain the Jews, those same blocks support the plateau upon which Muslims find spiritual nourishment.
In the past three years of the intifada, the politics of occupation has moved deeply into the city. Like a cell that can be seen dividing under a microscope, Jerusalem is again becoming two cities. Each side is afraid to walk the other`s ground. The ground is easily marked, and Palestinian youths have spray-painted slogans across the rose-tinted stones of the ancient city`s buildings. Just as quickly, Israeli troops blot out the slogans with black spray paint.
Before the 1967 Six-Day War, when Jerusalem was a divided city, the Mandelbaum Gate was the only passage between Arab east and Jewish west. They were separated by rusted barbed wire and a makeshift wall in a no man`s land. The dividing line was easy to see.
The gate was torn down after the war, but near where it stood there is a new dividing line that is just as easy to see. Workers just finished widening a road that connects the west side with French Hill, a Jewish development in the East. Instead of barbed wire, pavement is creating a new no man`s land, bypassing and encircling islands of Arab homes and neighborhoods.
Religious passion and a divided city form the environment for the coroner`s inquest into whether there was wrongful death at the Temple Mount and if so, who is to blame.
The official police report listed 21 deaths. The Israeli human rights organization Betselem said there were 20 victims. The Palestinian human rights organization counted 17, and there are 17 photos in a large frame on the wall of the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Zamir commission could account for only 17 dead.
But nearly three months after the shootings, some people still insist that as many as 25 were killed. The very vagueness of the number already has become part of the folklore surrounding the tragedy.
No one knows what the coroner`s inquest will determine when it is finished in the next few weeks. No other inquiry is planned.
”It is almost impossible in this case because the Arabs kidnapped the bodies,” said Yair Golan, an eighth-generation Jerusalemite and a criminal lawyer hired to represent the Border Police. He was referring to the longstanding Palestinian practice of not allowing the Israeli authorities to perform autopsies.
That will make it nearly impossible to establish a forensic link between the guns of individual police officer and the Palestinian victims.
So why participate at all?
Many Palestinians refuse to testify at any Israeli proceeding because they think it would only serve to legitimize a whitewash. Dr. Shaker Risheque, a doctor at Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives, does not share that view.
Risheque believes 21 Arabs were killed at the Temple Mount and his testimony graphically described the multiple wounds of the six bodies he saw. He said his reason for testifying was to let the world know what happened.
”If I killed someone with a knife in a criminal way, then I am a criminal,” he said. ”But if you kill 21 people with bullets, it is still a criminal thing . . . If I refuse to come here, what will happen is that they will change the facts.”
”In terms of mutual trust there is none . . . They feel very cynical, and they have a right to feel cynical,” said Feldman, the advocate. The son of Holocaust survivors from Poland, Feldman says he wants to ”build the puzzle” of the tragedy so there will be a record of what happened that day.
It is for the record, said Feldman, ”so it could in a certain way be a rich source for anyone who is trying to reconstruct what happened.”
”There is a Palestinian narrative, but Israeli diction always transforms the reality and the perception of it,” said Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, the activist teacher who voices the same frustration and outrage that young Palestinians try to articulate with spray paint. ”We cannot always be seen through the other person`s narrative.”
