The Jerusalem syndrome


October 31, 2014
Richard Kuper

glickRight-wing activist Yehuda Glick holding a book depicting the Jewish Temple while standing in front of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, May 21, 2009. (Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

 

Larry Derfner, 972 Magazine, 31 October 2014

The fraud that is the Temple Mount movement

[followed by Avraham Burg The Jerusalem paradox in the heart of Israel]

Following the murder attempt on Yehuda Glick, the claim is being made – and getting a more sympathetic hearing than usual – that he and his colleagues have been leading a civil rights movement for Jews. Don’t believe it.

 

Ten years ago I interviewed Likud Knesset member Moshe Feiglin in his office in the West Bank settlement Karnei Shomron. On his wall was a framed aerial photograph of the Temple Mount – but the Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock didn’t appear. In their place stood an illustrated, rebuilt Jewish Temple. I’ve heard that this photo and others like it are big sellers in Jerusalem.

Feiglin was at the Wednesday night conference in Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center where Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick was shot and critically wounded by a Palestinian. Also present was Yehuda Etzion, who was imprisoned in the early 1980s for leading a plot within the “Jewish Terror Underground” to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Feiglin wasn’t the only extreme anti-Arab Likud MK at the gathering; Miri Regev and others were there too. The conference was titled “Israel Returns to the Temple Mount.”

Following the murder attempt on Glick, the claim is being made – and getting a more sympathetic hearing than usual (here and here) – that he and his colleagues have been leading a “civil rights” movement for Jews, one whose aim is simply to gain for Jews the same right Muslims have to pray on the Temple Mount, which Muslims worship as the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif in Arabic). I heard Housing Minister Uri Ariel fuming on the radio about the injustice of the Israeli-enforced status quo on the Mount (which allows Jews to visit with police permission, but bars them from praying so as not to incite Muslim fears of a Jewish takeover, and in line with rabbinical rulings). The radio interviewer was at a loss to challenge him; no doubt Ariel convinced many listeners that he and the other Temple Mount activists are a bunch of Martin Luther Kings.

This is a great fraud. I’m sure there are some Jews who really only want to be allowed to pray on the Mount without having any intention of bothering the Muslims and their holy places, who genuinely want religious coexistence up there. But they are incidental to the movement. The Temple Mount movement is and always has been a movement not for religious equality, but for Jewish religious domination and contempt for Muslims and Islam. That’s what Feiglin’s about, that’s what Etzion is obviously all about, and anybody who thinks Miri Regev and Yariv Levin and these other nonstop Arab-bashers in the Knesset who want to let Jews pray freely on the Temple Mount are looking for peaceful coexistence, dream on.

The best known of the Temple Mount NGOs, the Temple Mount Faithful, headed by Gershon Salomon, makes no bones about its intentions. On its website, the first of the group’s “Long Term Objectives” is: 

Liberating the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque were placed on this Jewish or biblical holy site as a specific sign of Islamic conquest and domination. The Temple Mount can never be consecrated to the Name of G‑d without removing these pagan shrines. It has been suggested that they be removed, transferred to, and rebuilt at Mecca.

Glick appears to be a somewhat different story. Despite many media reports, he is not an activist in the Temple Mount Faithful, or at any rate not mainly in the Temple Mount Faithful; he heads an organization called the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation, and formerly led the Temple Mount Institute. Both of these groups express the hope of rebuilding the Temple alongside the Muslim holy sites, not in their place. But here is a brief video Glick made for the Temple Institute in which he makes what sounds like a veiled threat of what will happen to the Dome of the Rock if Muslim religious leaders do not cooperate peacefully with this project:

The decision of what will happen to that building, which today represents the Muslim religion – if the Muslim religious leadership decides to choose a path of peace, that building can remain and be part of the house of prayer for all nations, and it can be used as a center of monotheistic religions. If, unfortunately, the Muslim leadership continues the path they are leading today – [Islamic Movement leader] Ra’ed Salah and other Muslim leaders today – it will bring to a very dangerous … [here Glick pauses, searching for words, then continues in a barely audible voice] to a great threat to the world and to the peace of the world.

I’m calling upon the leadership of the Muslim religion: join, cooperate with those who want peace. Join with those who believe that the Temple Mount belongs to all those who believe in God, and then the Dome of the Rock, built by Abdel Malek, will be part of the house of prayer of all nations, the holy temple.

Glick did not deserve to be shot. From all reports, he is not a man of violence at all; he could be described as the friendly face of the Temple Mount movement. But he works alongside men of the most violent possible intent. He is the window-dressing of a movement with a psychotic, apocalyptic goal, one that goes back to the Six Day War conquest of the Mount when IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, later to become Israel’s chief rabbi, implored Moshe Dayan to destroy the Dome of the Rock.

Again, I’m sure there are Jews who honestly just want to be allowed to pray on the Mount, nothing more, and who see this as an issue of religious equality. I would ask them if they favor introducing the same sort of religious equality for Muslims at the Western Wall, which Muslims worship as the Buraq Wall, the site where Mohammed mounted his winged horse Buraq and ascended to heaven:

Should Muslims, accompanied by Muslim police, be allowed to conduct Muslim prayer in the Western Wall plaza?

For that matter, should the police of a Muslim country be allowed to station themselves in the Western Wall plaza as the enforcer of law and order? Should the police of a Muslim country be allowed to decide which Jews can come pray at the Western Wall and which cannot?

That would be the mirror image of the current, Israeli-enforced status quo for Muslims on the Noble Sanctuary, which Jews worship as the Temple Mount. That status quo is not a violation of Jews’ civil rights, but a violation of Muslims’ religious rights and Palestinians’ national rights. That status quo is bad enough as it is; Glick, Feiglin, Etzion, Ariel, Regev and the movement they represent would make it out-and-out catastrophic.


The Jerusalem paradox in the heart of Israel

Jerusalem is not only Israel’s vibrant capital, it’s also the precise hub of the internal contradiction and self-deception of the political formulas pushing Israel firmly toward strategic non-existence.

| Haaretz | 31 October 2014

The Jerusalem syndrome erupted again this week. Apparently a religious Muslim fanatic tried to assassinate a religious Jewish fanatic. Both were religious, fired by similar fanaticism and divided by a controversial mountain. Many are familiar with the Jerusalem syndrome, that mental disorder that strikes Jerusalemites or visitors to the city. Its victims are suddenly possessed by a deep spiritual conviction that they have divine or messianic powers. The result is usually serious damage to themselves and anyone who comes into contact with them.

In recent years I sometimes have the feeling that the Jerusalem syndrome has become a mainstream Israeli party, whose people occupy the most sensitive positions in the country – in the government, the army and the Jerusalem municipality.

Jerusalem is an insane city, in which three eras exist simultaneously – the old era, the middle ages and the new era – in an impossible confusion. Primitives and innovators, inventors and conservatives, quacks and sane people move in it in constant collision, giving the city its special brand of lunacy.

Jerusalem is not only Israel’s vibrant capital. It’s also the precise hub of the internal contradiction and self-deception of the political formulas pushing Israel firmly toward strategic non-existence. Israel’s strategic and political formulas are an embarrassing logical paradox.

Israeli statesmanship has been accompanied for decades by two very catchy formulas “two states for two peoples” and “No to the division of Jerusalem.” On the face of it, all is well and good. It reflects a positive aspiration for peace as well as a great patriotic love for the holy city, our eternal city. So what’s bad? It’s bad that they both represent a complete failure. The ‘two states’ time is running out and the city is torn and ruptured as it has never been before. Why?

Before discussing the city’s future it is necessary to note that a discussion about what Jerusalem really is or where it is even located has never been held. It’s a strange city. We still pray for its construction and still fast to mourn its destruction, although it is densely over-built, stretches from Jericho to Netanya and is much, much bigger than David and Solomon, who erected it, could ever have imagined.

Back to realpolitik. Those committed to the two-state formula and think it through to its implementation, understand that the capital of the second state – Palestine – will also be in Jerusalem. Because the Jews have no monopoly on the city’s symbolism, much to their regret. Hence, the formula of dividing the land between its two peoples goes hand in hand with the formula of dividing Jerusalem into two capitals.

The same logic works in reverse on the other side. The ranting, enthusiastic formula of not dividing Jerusalem totally denies the principle of establishing another capital in its jurisdiction. The immediate significance of this is a clear no to any plan of dividing the land into two states. This is because the same religious and ideological sources that forbid and prevent dividing the urban monster, are the very ones that totally deny – for the same reasons – the partition of the rest of the land.

However, since 1967 official Israel has been trying to flee from a formula and laboring to integrate the paradox of the two formulas at the same time. Israel speaks of two states for two peoples and at the same time swears in the name of undivided Jerusalem. This doesn’t work. On the contrary, the reciprocation between the two formulas is the key to understanding the city’s wretched situation.

These days provide a refined insight into the morbid link between the city’s madness and the political despair. Following Netanyahu – the leader of the Jerusalem syndrome party – proves as much. When the strategic aspect of the peace negotiations scares him and threatens to advance toward some arrangement, the urban pyromaniacs immediately rally to his side. They throw a lot of construction twigs and provocations to the “undivided” bonfire. When the urban flames threaten to burn everything and it’s clear the city won’t be divided, the strategic move dies and Netanyahu calms down.

Jerusalem has always been Netanyahu’s device to destroy any chance of an agreement with the Palestinians. He invests all his efforts in the Jerusalem construction provocations. As the city grows tenser and the despair and violence spread between the Jordan and the sea, the tiny hope for peace that was born here with the war in Gaza dies in its crib. Can there be a better strategy for the reelection of the leader of the Jerusalem syndrome party?

© Copyright JFJFP 2024