Itamar Ben Gvir caused a furor when he visited the Temple
Mount back in January. But not really. All the umbrage regarding his “provocation”—walking
while Jewish—was manufactured by bored
reporters who have nothing else to write about; by left-wing reporters who lust
to smear Israel in print; by Hamas, the PA, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and
yes, the United States of America. The latter, of course, demanded that Israel
maintain the “status quo” at holy sites, which means that the Jordanian Waqf
remains in charge; Arabs get the full run of the Temple Mount; but Jews are
rushed through the compound under guard and may not linger or pray. The thrust
of all this is that Jews are somehow intruders in their own land, in their
holiest city, on their holiest spot, and that they are stealing them from the
Arabs.
It’s not a new accusation. As Alex Sternberg noted in a
recent piece, ‘Al-Aqsa
is in danger’ The history of a 100-year-old lie, the libel that Jews are
taking over the Al-Aqsa Mosque is old. The falsehood, motivated by politics,
originates with Haj Amin El-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem:
An early enemy of Zionism, Husseini regularly engaged in incitement against the Jews of then-Palestine. In 1920, this resulted in five deaths and 211 injured. In 1929, Husseini used the occasion of Tisha B’Av to tell an Arab crowd that the Jews were coming to destroy Al-Aqsa and rebuild the Temple in its place. “Al-Aqsa is in danger!” he shouted, pointing to throngs of Jews squeezing into the narrow alleyway at the Western Wall to commemorate the Temple’s destruction.
Angry mobs surged through the Jewish communities of then-Palestine, attacking peaceful Jews and raping, killing and looting. Hundreds were killed in Hebron, Safed and Jerusalem.
Husseini was jailed by the British, released shortly after and then appointed Mufti of Jerusalem. This new title gave him a coveted position within the Arab community.
Dr. Sternberg goes on to discuss Ariel Sharon’s infamous
visit to the Mount which has long been said to be the catalyst for the Second
Intifada, also known as the “Al-Aqsa Intifada”:
Following [Sharon’s] visit, the Palestinians launched a terrorist war that resulted in thousands of Israeli and Palestinian deaths.
Despite the claim that Sharon started the intifada, the truth was revealed years later and confirmed by Arafat’s wife and Nabil Shaath, a Fatah Central Committee member.
Sternberg’s otherwise
excellent account of the events here falters. The truth was not revealed later, but
immediately after the peace talks. Or at least to the Israeli army, who sent IDF representatives to brief the members of the small Judean hilltop settlement
where I resided at the time, Metzad.
Sternberg description of events taking place at that time offers us the background for that briefing:
In July of 2000, Arafat returned from peace talks at Camp David with then-President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak had offered Arafat 97% of Judea and Samaria, which Arafat refused.
One of the sticking points was sharing the Temple Mount with the Jews. While Clinton considered this reasonable, it was a condition Arafat was unwilling to accept. Clinton was furious and blamed Arafat for the breakdown of the talks. Needing a diversion to deflect Clinton’s anger, Arafat ordered his underlings to plan the new intifada. Sharon’s trip to the Temple Mount took place two months later, providing a convenient excuse to launch the wave of terror.
Here too, Sternberg’s account appears to miss a crucial point: that
Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was an annual
visit. This fact was well known to all, up to and including “Arafat and his
underlings.” Sharon went up to the Temple Mount every year before the High Holidays—and that yearly visit was
factored into the planning of the intifada from its very inception.
I know this because the same July that Arafat returned from
Camp David in a tizzy, I sat among the other 30-some residents of Metzad,
waiting to hear why we had been assembled. We soon learned that the army had
come to warn us of a large and serious wave of Arab terror planned for
September, around the time of the High Holidays (and my due date). The IDF not
only had intelligence that the intifada would occur, but they had that
intelligence already in July, when the intifada would have been in the earliest
stages of its planning.
Already then, the Israeli army knew the Arabs would justify their
unbridled slaughter of the Jews by blaming it on Ariel Sharon’s visit to the
Temple Mount. This was alluded to by the IDF at that meeting of July 2000 on
Metzad. You might have called it a guess—the prediction that terrorists would use the
annual Sharon Temple Mount visit as a pretext for violence. It wouldn’t have
been a difficult guess, considering it was Sharon’s custom to visit the Temple
Mount every year before the
holidays. But the army didn’t need to guess, because they had cold, hard intelligence.
Right from the very beginning, as things were going down.
For argument’s sake however, let’s stipulate that my memory
is faulty. Let’s say the army did not know and did not actually tell us that
Ariel Sharon’s impending, regularly scheduled visit to the Mount would be used
to justify the slaughter. It would still have come as no surprise: El-Husseini
did it 100 years ago when he incited the mobs to slaughter Jews by telling them
that the “Yahud” were taking over Al-Quds. That same 100-year-old excuse was
still going strong in 2000 when Sharon dared walk on the Temple
Mount and it is still strong now in 2023, when Ben Gvir does the same.
Terrorists like to accuse Jews of taking over the Mount and the
mosque. As much as many Jews wish that were true, the reality is that the Temple
Mount is administrated by the Jordanian Waqf; and Jews aren’t even allowed to
pray on the Mount, let alone enter or even go near the mosque.
Ariel Sharon, for example, did not enter the mosque or even
approach it. Yet this is how his visit—the planned excuse for the intifada—was reported
by the Guardian (emphasis added
wherever the Guardian fudged the truth, outright lied, engaged in hyperbole, or omitted salient facts—the
“people” are JEWS, the “riots” are TERROR, the “West Bank” is Judea and
Samaria, the “Haram” is the Jewish Temple Mount, and so on and so forth):
Dozens of people were injured in rioting on the West Bank and in Jerusalem yesterday as the hawkish Likud party leader, Ariel Sharon, staged a provocative visit to a Muslim shrine at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Surrounded by hundreds of Israeli riot police, Mr Sharon and a handful of Likud politicians marched up to the Haram al-Sharif, the site of the gold Dome of the Rock that is the third holiest shrine in Islam.
He came down 45 minutes later, leaving a trail of fury. Young Palestinians heaved chairs, stones, rubbish bins, and whatever missiles came to hand at the Israeli forces. Riot police retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets, shooting one protester in the face.
The symbolism of the visit to the Haram by Mr Sharon - reviled for his role in the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in a refugee camp in Lebanon - and its timing was unmistakable. "This is a dangerous process conducted by Sharon against Islamic sacred places," Yasser Arafat told Palestinian television.
All of this was and remains a lie. There was no provocation
resulting in a “riot.” The intifada and its pretend catalyst had all been meticulously planned two months earlier.
You might even say 100 years earlier, when El-Husseini launched the
time-honored tradition of Arab terrorists blaming their Jewish victims for
getting dead, a popular sport for more than 100 years.
Ben Gvir should have sold tickets.
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