Come sunrise, a deceptive calm blankets the small, hallowed chunk of land pinched up against the yellowed, craggy stone walls that rise up from within Jerusalem’s Old City.
Jews know this piece of land as Temple Mount, the site of two long-vanished temples. To Muslims, it is the Haram al Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. Bathed in sunlight and quiet, the image is one of peace. This, after all, is a place of seemingly divine inspiration for Jews and Muslims alike.
But the reality is that it has been a gathering place time and again for sacred hatreds, fears, and violence. It was here that the visit of right-wing Israeli politician Ariel Sharon on Sept. 28 ignited a wave of rioting and violence that has raced through Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the past 10 days, scorching already-damaged hopes for peace and leaving behind a mounting toll of dead and injured Arabs and Jews.
Sharon is reviled by Palestinians for his role as military archtitect of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when a Christian milita group killed hundreds of Palestine refugees in their camps.
Like a cruel omen, the competing claims for these sacred sites that date to before the birth of Christ seem to have preordained the violence.
As the sun climbs higher in the sky, its rays glint off the large gold-colored cupola of the Dome of the Rock. One of Islam’s first shrines, built in 691 AD, it is the place to where the prophet Muhammad is said to have traveled from Mecca, and then ascended to heaven with the guidance of the Angel Gabriel to receive God’s final revelations.
Just to the east of the Old City and Haram ash Sharif is the Mt. of Olives, its cemeteries full of Jewswho it is said will rise up on Judgment Day.
On the far south end of the Haram ash Sharif, beyond ancient fountains and smaller domed buildings, beyond willowy cypress and eucalyptus trees and quiet walkways, sits the silver-domed Al Aqsa Mosque.
Finished in 715 AD, Al Aqsa has served almost from its inception as a major site for Muslims to worship in Jerusalem, or Al Quds, as Arabs call “the Sacred City.”
If you walk to the western side of the Haram ash Sharif, and peer down over the edge, you are looking at the Western Wall and a large adjacent plaza, where Jews gather to pray.
It doesn’t require much effort to heave a stone downward onto the large square where the Jews pray. Nor is it very hard for a careful Israeli sharpshooter poised in one of the buildings that surround the Haram ash Sharif to zero in on Arab demonstrators.
Jews say the 60-foot-highwall is all that remains today of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. For Jews, the site has great significance, and it extends beneath where the plaza of the Haram ash Sharif stands today.
Here, Jews believe Abraham built an altar on which to sacrifice his son Isaac. Here, too, they say the First Temple was built by Solomon in 957 B.C. and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. At one point, it housed the Ark of the Covenant, the gold-plated wooden chest that protected the tablets of law Moses had received from God.
In modern times, the Western Wall has been a place of pilgrimage and worship for Jews, who mourn the loss and destruction of Temple Mount. And Haram ash Sharif has been a site of devotion for Muslims, who revere it for its religious and historic significance.
Because of their respective devotion and commitment to these sacred sites, the two sides have clashed repeatedly, often spurred on by little more than rumors and long-held fears.
One of the worst explosions of distrust between the two sides came in 1929, when Arab rioters surged throughout the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. They were driven by fears that Jews were plotting to take control of the Al Aqsa Mosque.
After the 1948 War of Independence, Jews lost access to the Western Wall under Jordan’s rule of the Old City. They regained it after the 1967 war, when Israel defeated the armies of Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The Israelis eventually cleared away Arab houses and stores that had clustered in front of the wall, creating the vast plaza where Jews now pray.
From the day that Israeli soldiers reached the Western Wall in 1967 and took control of the Old City, Arabs were assured that they would have access to Haram ash Sharif and Al Aqsa and that their religious leaders would continue to administer their sacred site.
Jews were permitted to visit Haram ash Sharif only as tourists, not as worshippers. It was a gesture that Israeli officials said was largely meant to assure peace.
But peace has never really reigned at the Noble Sanctuary.
In 1990, rumors that a small extremist group of Jews known as the “Temple Mount Faithful” were plotting to hold religious services on Haram ash Sharif sent several thousand Arabs into a full-blown riot. Eighteen Arabs were killed in clashes with Israelis.
In retaliation, within weeks Arabs had killed a number of Israelis in random attacks.
In 1996, nearly 80 people, most Arabs, died in three days of rioting. The cause? A decision by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to open a tourist tunnel along the western side of the Temple Mount complex, with an exit in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter.
The Palestinians, who had warned the Israelis against opening a tunnel exit in the heart of the Muslim Quarter, were stirred by fears that the Israelis’ underground digging would harm the foundation of Haram ash Sharif and its structures.
While Netanyahu claimed that he had only authorized the opening of an exit that had been under construction for some time, Palestinians accused him of provoking the ensuing violence by failing to publicly prepare the way for such a move.
When Ariel Sharon visited Haram ash Sharif on Sept. 28, angry Palestinians cried that, once again, an Israeli leader had provoked the outburst of fury that followed.
Many of Sharon’s political foes within Israel agreed, pointing to his history of making bold gestures to buoy his political stature, but giving no thought to the consequences of his actions.
The burly 72-year-old former general and leader of the right-wing Likud opposition party had to know that Palestinians would be outraged at a gesture that could easily be interpreted as brandishing Israel’s control over Haram ash Sharif.
Sharon’s response afterward was that he was sorry about the injuries caused by the rioting, but he was only exercising his right as a Jew to visit Temple Mount.
Given Temple Mount’s place in Israel’s current political thinking, as bargaining chip in the peace talks, Sharon more likely had other messages on his mind. At least one of them was that Israel could not bargain away any of its current control over the Temple Mount area, as Israel’s peace negotiators had suggested during the failed Camp David talks in the U.S. this summer.
But the Israelis’ offers and hopes were stillborn in Camp David. After scoring progress on most of the issues that separate them, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians could find the formula for sharing control over Jerusalem and its sacred sites.
Such setbacks go hand in hand with extremists’ apocalyptic vision that says peace will not come until one side gains ultimate control of their most sacred site.
To Jews, it is Temple Mount. To the Muslims, it is Haram ash Sharif–shrines only heartbeats away from each other.
