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The Big Problem in Jerusalem Isn't the Jews
(Commentary) Jonathan S. Tobin - The New York Times tells us that troublemaking Jews are breaking the rules on Jerusalem's Temple Mount where they are making coexistence, if not peace, that much more difficult. With increasing numbers of Jews wanting to visit the site and perhaps even surreptitiously utter a prayer, the conceit of the Times piece appears to be that this is just one more instance in which Israelis are giving their Arab neighbors a hard time. However, the Jews are not the problem in Jerusalem. The dispute isn't really about who controls the Temple Mount but about the Muslim effort to deny the Jewish history that is literally under their feet. Were it just a question of sharing sacred space, reasonable compromises that would give full Muslim autonomy over their holy sites while allowing Jewish prayer at the spiritual center of Judaism would be possible. Yet as long as the official position of both the Muslim Wakf religious authority, which has been allowed by Israel to govern the place since the 1967 Six-Day War, and the Palestinian Authority is that the Temples never existed and that Jews have no rights to their ancient capital, that will constitute the real obstacle to peace. As with other sacred sites to which Muslims lay claim, their position is not one in which they are prepared to share or guarantee equal access. The Muslim view of the Temple Mount is that they want it Jew-free, the same way they envision a Palestinian state. It is in that same spirit that the Wakf has committed what many respected Israeli archeologists consider a program of vandalism on the Mount with unknown quantities of antiquities being trashed. In the face of their intransigence and the fact that such intolerance is mainstream Palestinian opinion rather than the view of a few extremists, the desire of many Jews to visit a place that is the historic center of their faith (the Western Wall is, after all, merely the vestige of the Temple's outer enclosure) doesn't seem quite so crazy.