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RAMP RAGE
by Rabbi Joel Schwartzman, delivered February 16, 2007 (29th of Sh'vat,
5767)
For the most part, I try
to link what I sermonize about to the parasha
for the week. Tonight I am going to depart from that custom. I do so
because something occurred over the past few days in Israel
that I want
to address. There were riots that took place over Israel’s
beginning to
repair a ramp into the Temple Mount.
Just as with the start of the
Second Intifada, there was a “perceived indiscretion”…which, in realty,
was little more than a trumped up incident. Crowds were exhorted to
violence and stone throwing ensued. Hysteria was the order of the day.
If you’ll remember, the trigger for the Second Intifada was a visit that
Ariel Sharon made to the Temple Mount, a visit which had been announced
well advance and over which the Waqf, the organization designated to
oversee the Islamic institutions, especially the mosques of Omar and Al
Aqsa on the Temple Mount, made the most it could…even to the point of
instigating a level of violence which hammered the final nails into the
coffin marked “Oslo Accords.”
This week’s carryings-on were evidence of a similar exercise in Muslim
psychology which has plagued Israeli-Arab relations for decades if not a
whole century.
While I am no engineer, I have eyes and a brain. I have been to the
Western Wall and have actually walked on the access ramp, which is now
closed to non-Muslims, that leads to the court yard of the Temple
Mount.
Any fool can see that repairs to that ramp will in no way effect the Al
Aqsa Mosque. And yet, fears, obviously exacerbated by the Waqf led naïve
and voluble Muslims to riot in such a belief.
It cannot be, I reasoned, that the Waqf thinks that Israel
could be that
stupid. Israel’s
fidelity to the safety of all religious sites in both
Israel proper
and in captured territory is her bond. Say what anyone
might about how Israel
administers the territories, the one thing she is
most sensitive to and judicious about is preserving the sacred sites of
the three major faiths. The Arabs, themselves, should be so concerned
about Jewish holy places like Rachel’s, Joseph’s and Hezekiah’s tombs!
Were the Israeli government to want to appear hypocritical as well as
stupid, all it would need to do is go back on decades of concern for
these places. But Israelis are far from being Taliban. They don’t
blatantly destroy the religious sites or relics of any other faith as
did the Afghani Taliban those magnificent, giant sculptured Buddhas.
I want to repeat what is essential here. Anyone with a pair of eyes can
see that the ramp is too far, (actually 60 or more meters!) from the Al
Aqsa mosque to have any impact on that structure. So, what is really
going on here? Why are Arabs rioting over seemingly nothing?
There may be several explanations for what is transpiring. The first may
be a struggle over who really has authority over the Temple
Mount. There
also are those who claim that the riots were an expression of something
far wider in scope. I quote here Nadav Shragai who wrote in Ha’aretz:
“The Mughrabi bridge plan exposes the great Muslim denial –the denial of
the Jewish bond (emphasis mine) to
Jerusalem, the Temple
Mount and
the Temple. Thousands of
Islamic rulings, publications and sources deny
the Jewish roots in Jerusalem
and its holy places. They claim that the
Temple didn’t even exist in Jerusalem
but was located in Nablus or
Yemen. Many
Muslim adjudicators attach the word “so-called” to the word
“temple.”
Thus it is that the fracas over the ramp is a metaphoric symbol for the
entire Palestinian-Arab-Israeli conflict. The Jews, accordingly, have no
right to live in the Middle East because they came
under what now is
claimed to be false pretences…a trumped up Holocaust which occurred in
Europe. The Jewish state has no roots in Muslim territory
and has no
right to remain there.
I used to think that the riots and the stone throwing were merely an
attempt to win sympathy for the downtrodden Palestinian refugees. But it
far more that that. It is an expression of outrage, of the Jewish slight
to Allah.
You see, this week I attended the showing of a film called *The
Forgotten Refugees*. It was part of the Jewish film festival held at the
Shwayder Theater at the J.C.C. This documentary was about the 850,000
Sephardic Jews who fled or were threatened into fleeing their homelands
around the year, 1948, the year of the Israeli War of Independence. In
their native lands of Algeria,
Morocco, Tunisia,
Egypt, Libya,
Iraq,
Syria and Yemen,
Jews and other non-Muslims were known as Dhimmi.
Dhimmi refers to a class
of people who were seen as inferiors. Dhimmi could ot
not build their houses of worship higher than a mosque; they could not ride
a horse or walk on a part of a street that put them above any Muslim.
They always had to be lower than and pay obeisance to their Muslim
rulers and neighbors. Think, then, of the enormous blow to Muslim
pride…to the Muslim world view...when this down-trodden, over matched
and poorly armed people beat back the Arab armies of six Arab nations in
the war for its independence and survival. And, think now of the
humiliation the Arabs must feel that the disputed Temple
Mount is not
entirely in their hands, that the Jews still retain access to their holy
sites.
It is a critical fact that excavations around the site of the ramp are
ongoing, even as I write this sermon. After years of destructive work on
the part of the Waqf to remove any signs of a Jewish presence on the
Temple Mount,
after tons of soil and artifacts have been carried off in
an effort to obfuscate the historical record, the Israeli government has
asserted that the archeological digging will not stop. Indeed, Yaniv
Salama Scheer reported in the Jerusalem Post: “Archeologists working
near the Mughrabi Gate to the Temple Mount have already uncovered finds
from the medieval period and early Islamic era that shed new light on
Jerusalem’s history. ‘We have dug three meters down and discovered
massive walls which we believe are from the early Islamic Umayyad
period,’ Jerusalem’s chief archeologist Yuval Baruch said. ‘We have
found evidence which suggests that right under the Umayyad ruins are
Byzantine ruins, and under these, we believe there are Herodian roads
and other ruins from the Second Temple
period.”
It would not surprise me to hear that coins and pottery dating back to
the Second and perhaps the First temple period are found in this dig;
but the truly important thing, as with the Holocaust and the film, *The
Forgotten Refugees*, is to document the histories for a world in which
there are too many nay-sayers and deniers intent on either ignoring or
destroying the record.
In the face of an all-too-eager world press and the expected partisan
responses from other capitols, the Israeli government needed to take
decisive action. I am certain that there were those who argued against
stopping the construction of a new ramp. Doing so would be to send a
signal of encouragement to the inspirers of riots and mayhem…that they
had won and that Israel
would once again back down. After all, it had
been Moshe Dayan himself who had declared this ramp under Israeli
jurisdiction in order to prevent the Waqf from being able to close off
the entire Temple Mount
altogether. Indeed, an Egyptian MP from Hosni
Mubarak’s own National Democratic Party cursed Israel
for trying to
destroy the Al Aqsa mosque. He went so far as to say: “Nothing will work
with Israel
except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence.”
This, from Israel’s
partner in peace!
Indeed, Jerusalem mayor, Uri
Lupolianski announced Sunday that he has
decided to postpone the construction of the walkway at the Mughrabi Gate
to the Temple Mount
until zoning authorities complete plans for the
area. The mayor acknowledged that there was an issue when he said, “the
plan to construct the walkway engendered a wave of rumor and speculation
about Israeli intentions regarding the (Al-Aqsa) mosque. We therefore
decided to be totally transparent with all residents about the walkway
construction plan, so they will know clearly where it is to be built and
to allow members of the public to express their positions to the zoning
board…..The move is slated to help people understand that the walkway is
in no way injurious and does not enter the Temple Mount.” (Daily Alert,
12 Feb, 2007).
And so it goes. The levels of paranoia and hatred have once again been
stoked. But we now better understand what actually underlies the
hostility and tension. As the Palestinians make the effort to stop their
fratricide and unify their government, we prayer for their successful
cessation of the violence. Yet, all the while, we must understand that
the fracas over the Mughrabi bridge is but a smoke screen, an
anti-Israeli diversion to deflect attention from the fact that Hamas has
not accepted Israel’s right to exist, and Fatah continues down the self
destructive road that sees Israel’s destruction as more important than
the establishment of a Palestinian state. Seen in this context, the ramp
rage is but a tempest in a teapot.
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