Passively described aggression

In some ways there’s little to quibble with in Howard Schneider’s To two faiths, a holy patch of land; to the world, a powder keg in the Washington Post. It begins:

It is one of the most watched pieces of real estate in the world, 35 acres where an under-the-breath prayer or a whiff of a rumor can rouse warnings of war.

In both Judaism and Islam, the area known respectively as the Temple Mount and the Noble Sanctuary is considered a formative location. Jews believe it to be the site of Solomon’s Temple and key biblical events. Muslims regard it as the spot where Muhammad was brought by the angel Gabriel before embarking on a trip to heaven to visit the other prophets.

It also remains a flash point, and a series of disturbances there this fall showed just how difficult it will be for Israelis and Palestinians to reach agreement on an area over which they negotiate not just as political entities but also as representatives of two faiths with an often-troubled relationship.

I wish he were stronger in terms of the Jewish claim. Archaeology has confirmed the Temple. It’s more than just a Jewish “belief.”

However later on there are a few things that bother me.

If the Palestinians “want to let go of an area in the West Bank, no one from the outside is going to say anything,” said Abdul Fattah Salah, Jordan’s minister of religious affairs. “But when it comes to Jerusalem, they can’t. It is tied to all Muslims.” The Jordanian ministry employs 500 people who staff the Jerusalem compound.
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Salah said the hope is that if part of Jerusalem becomes the capital of a Palestinian state, Muslims from any country will be able to begin visiting a site where it is considered a special blessing to pray — access that he said Israel is unlikely to grant if it maintains sole sovereignty over the city.

First of all, Schneider lets stand the exaggerated claim of the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem. Yes Jerusalem is holy to Muslims, but for much of Islamic history Jerusalem was ignored. Even the Crusades aroused little interest at first. This leads Daniel Pipes to conclude:

First, Jerusalem will never be more than a secondary city for Muslims; “belief in the sanctity of Jerusalem,” Sivan rightly concludes, “cannot be said to have been widely diffused nor deeply rooted in Islam.” Second, the Muslim interest lies not so much in controlling Jerusalem as it does in denying control over the city to anyone else. Third, the Islamic connection to the city is weaker than the Jewish one because it arises as much from transitory and mundane considerations as from the immutable claims of faith.

The other point Schneider should have challenged Salah on was his claim that until Jerusalem becomes part of a Palestinian state, Muslims from around the world won’t be able to visit it. I expect that Muslims from Arab countries that are hostile to Israel won’t be able to visit Jerusalem easily. So there is a solution. Make peace with Israel. (And of course the Jordanian doesn’t acknowledge that when his country ruled the Old City, Jews were forbidden from visiting their holy site!)

And then at the end of the article Schneider writes:

Given recent history, the fall riots were viewed by some here as a cause for optimism. They were on a comparatively small scale, led to no deaths on either side and, after a tense period from Yom Kippur through late October, appear to have dissipated without consequence.

Far worse has happened: Dozens of people died in 1996 in clashes that erupted after access was opened for tourists to a tunnel that ran on an ancient street alongside the wall. And a visit to the area by former prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2000 helped trigger the multi-year uprising known as the al-Aqsa Intifada.

Let’s give a little more detail as to what happened in 1996 and 2000. Barry Rubin recently recalled:

In 1996, the Israeli government opened a tunnel which tourists could walk through and see certain features of the ancient wall and Jerusalem. Rumors that the Jews were trying to destroy the mosques were orchestrated by the Palestinian leadership with many lives lost and the peace process placed in jeopardy. As a result, too, 85 Palestinians and 16 Israelis were killed, and more than 1,300 people–mostly Palestinians–were wounded, a terrible bloodshed for no rational reason whatsoever.

In 2000, a brief tour of the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon—he merely walked through for about an hour, looked around, and then left—was the rationale used to set off an intifada that lasted for about five years and cost several thousand lives.

Afterward, Marwan Barghouti, leader of Fatah on the West Bank, described in detail how he used this as an excuse to set off the uprising. This violence took place about the time that President Bill Clinton, with Israeli agreement, proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state which would, among other things, control most of east Jerusalem.

Schneider uses “erupted” and “triggered” to describe how the violence started in those circumstances. But in both cases as Prof. Rubin observed, the violence was incited. Worse in 2000, the Arafat-PA orchestrated violence came after rejecting a peace offer that would have given the Palestinians significant control over the Temple Mount.

Left unsaid by Schneider and unfortunately not even implicit in his article is that there’s no peace in the Middle East, because the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically, refuse to make peace with Israel. Jerusalem might well be a sticking point, but it’s because the Arab world has chosen to make it one, rejecting any compromises with Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.