MIDEAST: Tensions Rise on Temple Mount

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

JERUSALEM, Sep 1 2003 (IPS) - The Temple Mount, the Haram al Sharif to Muslims, has been reopened to non-Muslim visitors after remaining mostly closed to them since the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifadah in September 2000. For more than a week now, tourists have again been posing for photographs before the gold-plated dome.

But a visit to this shrine is more than a matter of tourism. "We just don’t want Jews to come here, they want to destroy our mosques," says Mohammed Mura’i, a Muslim worshipper at the Al-Aqsa mosque on the compound. "We don’t mind visitors, but no Jews and not during our praying times."

The Temple Mount is the most hotly disputed spot in this most of divided of cities. The Noble Sanctuary comprising the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock is the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

"It is twice as important to pray here as anywhere else," says Mura’i. The elderly man is resting in the shade of the Dome of the Rock. Since his retirement several years ago, he comes three times a week in a bus full of pilgrims from the north of the country to pray at the site.

For Jews the hill identified as Mount Zion on the edge of the old town of Jerusalem marks the location of their Temple that formed the core of their religious and cultural life for centuries. It became a potent symbol of their yearning for return to the land of Zion, meaning literally the mount captured by David, the second king of the Israelites.

"This is the living core of our people, that is why I came to visit," says Gabi Botbol, a Jewish Israeli who has paid an early morning visit to the Temple Mount together with his wife. He is a lecturer in philosophy at a new Jewish religious university in the Old City.

"I came from Morocco years ago to live here in Jerusalem, not in Tel Aviv or anywhere else in Israel," says Botbol. "Our control over the Temple Mount, more than anything else, symbolises the renaissance of the Jewish people. It is our most holy site, but we don’t have any designs on the mosques."

Israel annexed the city after it conquered East Jerusalem along with the rest of the West Bank in 1967. The international community did not recognise the move. The future of Jerusalem and the holy places is now one of the most sensitive issues to be determined in any future peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Intifadah broke out after a visit to the compound of Temple Mount by then opposition leader Ariel Sharon. Any step, symbolic or otherwise, that affects authority over the site is hotly disputed by both sides.

Despite the Israeli annexation of the old City and the Temple Mount, authority over the Haram al Sharif remains nominally in the hands of the Muslim Waqf religious institution.

"If anybody decides on allowing visitors back in, it’s us not the police," says Adnan Husseini in the tiny Waqf office in an old Ottoman building on the site. He is the director of Waqf and a scion of the Al-Husseini family that has influenced Jerusalem politics for centuries.

"The opening of the Haram Al Sharif to tourists is just an umbrella for the Israelis to let in extreme settlers and other fanatics to come and pray here," he says. "Of course Jews should not be allowed to pray at the site. The whole compound is one big mosque. They don’t allow us to pray in their synagogues, do they?"

Husseini does not want to hear the phrase ‘Temple Mount’. "What temple? We know that the mosques have been here since the 10th century but we don’t know anything about a temple."

The police keep a heavy presence on the Mount. Visits are limited to two hours in the mornings on weekdays. Access to the mosques that was possible before the outbreak of the Intifadah is still prohibited.

"This reopening is just a way for them (the Israelis) to assert their authority over the compound, to claim sovereignty," says Husseini.

That remark draws a predictably derisive answer from an official at the Israeli ministry of public security. "We have sovereignty over the Temple Mount, we don’t feel the need to demonstrate anything," he says.

The official who does not want to be named says that the decision to reopen the spot to visitors was made after careful consultation with the security services. There had been a limited reopening to groups under heavy police escort in June but that was suspended after protests from the Palestinian side.

Earlier this month nationalist minister for public security Tzahi Hanegbi decided to reopen the Mount to tourists.

"We thought it was absurd that in Cairo, Turkey and other Islamic countries the great mosques were open to visitors but not the Temple Mount here," says the public security official. Security services also reportedly said that keeping the site off limits to tourists and Israelis was creating a bad precedent in which power was ceded to Waqf.

The public security ministry maintains that Waqf had been contacted, and that there has been a silent agreement to reopen the place to visitors.

"There was no agreement," says Husseini. "Would we resist the visits if there had been an agreement?" He refers to the arrest earlier this week of three Waqf officials who tried to block the entrance for tourists accompanying a group of worshippers.

At the public security ministry, the official is adamant. "There was an agreement, but the way it goes on the Palestinian side is that some extreme people got wind of it and then put pressure on Waqf to back out," he says.

Many find this statement plausible since Husseini had not opposed the reopening so strongly at first. Before the visits resumed, he said in an interview to a Palestinian newspaper that tourists would be good for hard-hit Palestinian merchants in the old city of Jerusalem.