‘The real bosses are the Palestinians of Jerusalem’


July 21, 2017
Sarah Benton


Muslims praying in front of metal detectors outside the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, July 16, 2017. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi

Israel, Muslim Temple Mount Authority Up a Tree Without a Ladder – and No American Safety Net

The Trump administration doesn’t seem capable of, or even interested in, delving into the nitty-gritty of the Temple Mount’s status quo

By Nir Hasson, Haaretz premium
July 17, 2017

Workers from the Jerusalem municipality entered the Temple Mount on Sunday morning and conducted a comprehensive clean-up, whose goal was to return the Mount in good condition to the Waqf employees who had been kept away from it since Friday’s fatal shooting of two Border Police officers. But to the Waqf, even this simple act was a violation of the status quo.

At the same time, police set up metal detectors at both entrances to the Mount. But in the afternoon, trouble began.

At 12:45 P.M., police announced that the gates were open. A few dozen people were waiting to enter at the Gate of the Tribes. Waqf officials arrived, but after negotiations that lasted a minute, they withdrew, refusing to enter.

“There are changes, as you see, but we need you to cooperate with us,” Jerusalem Police Chief Yoram Halevy told Sheikh Omar Al-Kiswani, who manages the Mount’s Al-Aqsa mosque, via a translator. But Al-Kiswani said people should be let in without going through metal detectors, and when police refused, he returned to the waiting crowd, which cried, “Allah is great!”

Within moments, it became clear that both sides were up a tree without a ladder. The police couldn’t remove the metal detectors, while the Waqf couldn’t waive its demand for their removal.

Later police disseminated footage of people entering the mosque, but as of Sunday evening it was the merest trickle, far from the masses that usually enter it every day. In the afternoon, clashes began at the entrance to the Mount. A funeral procession was blocked, and several Palestinians were wounded or arrested.

That evening a senior Palestinian official in Jerusalem warned that weakening the Waqf would weaken Jordan, and also Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ status in Jerusalem. “There is no vacuum; others will fill his place,” the official said, hinting at Turkey in the best case and radical Salafis in the worst. Meanwhile, more clashes between Palestinians and the security forces are likely in both East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

On Monday a few dozen Palestinians assembled at Jerusalem’s Lions’ Gate where they shouted slogans against Israel’s decision to close the mosque and called for its opening without security checks and magnometers. The group is planning to pray the afternoon prayer there. A large police force has been deployed on the scene and are keeping the protesters away from the gates leading up to the Temple Mount. Exept for a few Muslim tourists, the boycott on visiting the site is been kept and hardly any Muslims came to worship at the site this morning.

Israel no longer has a safety net in the form of an energetic and judicious American administration

Since 2014, two major crises have erupted over the Temple Mount. Both were resolved thanks to mediation by then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who shuttled between Amman and Jerusalem. Twice he obtained agreements to preserve the status quo. Under the latest agreement, reached in autumn 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced that the Mount isn’t a place for Jewish prayer.


Israeli border police clash with Palestinian men during scuffles that erupted after Palestinians held evening prayers outside the Lion’s Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City July 18, 2017. Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters

The problem is that Israel no longer has a safety net in the form of an energetic and judicious American administration. The Trump administration doesn’t seem capable of, or even interested in, delving into the nitty-gritty of the Mount’s status quo.

Palestinians’ refusal to obey Israeli dictates in East Jerusalem has a place of honour in their history of resistance to the occupation. In September 1967 they refused to accept the Israeli curriculum in their schools. After a prolonged strike, Israel capitulated and left the Jordanian curriculum in place. And since 1969, Palestinians have refused to vote in Jerusalem’s municipal elections (the only elections they can vote in) so as not to recognize Israeli rule over East Jerusalem.

This refusal proved to Israel, and no less importantly to the Palestinians themselves, that despite Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, it wouldn’t be able to impose its sovereignty there as it did in areas it captured in 1948.

This is especially evident on the Temple Mount, where Israel has repeatedly failed to assert its sovereignty. For instance, it wasn’t able to build a permanent access ramp to the Mount’s Mughrabi Gate; it had to make do with a temporary one that had been declared unsafe. Moreover, despite the right wing’s efforts, there’s no chance Israel will expand visiting hours for non-Muslims, much less allow Jews to pray there. As noted, in 2015, Netanyahu was even forced to declare the Mount a religious site for Muslims only.

After all this, one would have expected the government and police to understand the need for caution on anything related to the Mount, take the wishes of Jordan and the Waqf into account and realize that unilateral steps would prompt opposition that could engender escalation. The Mount has already proven its power to ignite violence countless times before.


A Palestinian man is arrested during clashes with Israeli police outside Lion’s Gate. Photo by Reuters

On Sunday, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation backed a bill requiring any division of Jerusalem to be approved by 80 of the 120 Knesset members, making Jerusalem’s unity the most entrenched provision in Israel’s law books. But while the committee was meeting, East Jerusalem’s streets were full of people and its shops were closed for the third straight day, making the gap between this empty declaration and Jerusalem’s reality glaringly apparent.

The fact that neither the government nor Israelis in general see any problem with the police shutting down a neighbourhood of 35,000 people – not one of whom is suspected of involvement in Friday’s attack – for three days proves better than anything else just how abnormal, divided and disunited the city is.


Temple Mount Crisis Shows Who’s Really Calling the Shots at the Site

Jerusalem’s Palestinians have achieved something unprecedented through nonviolent protest, and now the clock is ticking on Israel’s decision of how to proceed

By Nir Hasson, Analysis, Ha’aretz
July 21, 2017

As of this writing it’s hard to know how the crisis over the Temple Mount will end. But recent days have shown that the real sovereign on the Temple Mount is not Israel, Jordan or the Waqf, the site’s Muslim custodial trust. The real bosses are the Palestinians of Jerusalem.

Jerusalemite Palestinian society is usually characterized by its weaknesses: the poverty, the lack of leadership, the hardships of the occupation, house demolitions and land confiscations. But over the past several days, Jerusalem’s Palestinians have achieved something unprecedented. Through a nonviolent protest that included an exceptional boycott on entering the Al-Aqsa compound, they have forced Israel into a corner from which the government is seriously considering giving in and removing the metal detectors it installed at the Mount’s entrances.


Israeli police attack a Palestinian protester during clashes following the closure of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif to worshippers, in the wake of a deadly attack on Israeli security forces by Palestinian citizens the week before, July 16, 2017, Jerusalem. Photo by Activestills.org

The decision, if reached, will be made before the weekly prayers on Friday afternoon. If the Friday prayers are canceled again this week, it would be a historic precedent. The last time such a thing happened was apparently during the Crusader era nearly a thousand years ago.

Defending Al-Aqsa is the raison d’être of Jerusalem’s Palestinians as a political community. In their eyes, Al-Aqsa is far more than a national or religious symbol; the Temple Mount is also a private place where they feel somewhat free of the occupation. Most of the day there is no Israeli presence there. It’s the largest open green area in East Jerusalem, yet at the same time it’s a busy central square. Any threat to the arrangements there is perceived as a real threat to their identity and their daily lives. “People today aren’t asking, ‘how’re you doing’ or ‘how are your kids,’ they’re asking what’s going on at the mosque,” a resident of Silwan said on Wednesday.

On the first day of the boycott, the Waqf conveyed a mixed message. According to Palestinian sources in the city, the civilian management of the Waqf, which is subordinate to the Jordanian kingdom, told its employees to enter the Temple Mount compound, even though it meant passing through the metal detectors. But at the same time, the Waqf’s religious leadership of Jerusalem sheikhs ordered the masses not to go through the metal detectors. Waqf employees chose to listen to the religious leaders and the pressure rising from the street, and stayed away from the compound.

Since then, the Temple Mount has been practically empty.

The police have been trying to make it look as if the Palestinians have become reconciled to the metal detectors by posting videos of Muslims ascending to the Mount, but it’s easy to see that it’s only a handful of people who actually look more like tourists from Muslim countries than Palestinians.

The boycott is holding and even intensifying as the time for the muezzin to call the faithful to Friday prayers is getting closer. On Wednesday night the mufti of Jerusalem called on the city’s mosques to close on Friday and send everyone to the Temple Mount instead. One can assume that Israeli Arabs will also attempt to arrive, even though the police will try to stop them.


Israeli border guards detain a young protester during a demonstration outside the Lion’s Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City on July 17, 2017. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP

 

The potential for a violent clash on Friday is perhaps the greatest it’s been since Ariel Sharon went up to the Temple Mount in 2000, two days before the second intifada broke out. Even if the grave scenarios don’t play out and the prayers go off more or less peacefully, the next wave of violence is almost inevitable.

However this crisis ends, it revealed a serious problem with the way decisions are made on the Israeli side. You didn’t have to be an expert on the history of the Temple Mount to foresee the result.

“There have been a lot of instances in which Israel sought to impose its sovereignty on the Mount unilaterally, and it always ended with less sovereignty than there had been before,” said Prof. Yitzhak Reiter of the Ashkelon Academic College and the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. “That’s how it was with Sharon in 2000, after which the Temple Mount was closed to Jews for three years.”

That’s also what happened when Israel attempted to repair the Mughrabi Bridge, which connects the Western Wall plaza with the Mount, or tried to open an exit to the Western Wall Tunnels. Apparently whoever made the decision about the metal detectors wasn’t familiar with this history or didn’t think it was relevant to this decision. That’s probably the most worrisome aspect of all.


Palestinian women demonstrate in Jerusalem’s Old City on July 20, 2017, against new Israeli security measures at the Temple Mount. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/ AFP

Temple Mount Protests Could Turn Into an Intifada in the Blink of an Eye

Hundreds of worshippers stayed the night in Jerusalem’s Old City; it all comes down to how Israeli police handle the violence during Friday prayers

By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Analysis
July 21, 2017

The Palestinian protest at the Gate of the Tribes, the main entrance to the Temple Mount, is deceptive. For brief moments on Thursday, it looked like an intifada, with stones and bottles flying from one side and stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets from the other. But for most of the day, it looked more like the 2011 social justice protests in Tel Aviv.

Hundreds of people have been praying at the site round the clock, including many women who were apparently bussed in from around the country. On Thursday, they came with backpacks, preparing to sleep in the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City to make sure they are there for Friday’s prayers. Rumors had circulated among the Palestinians that the police would prevent people from coming on Friday, so many, including West Bank Palestinians, rushed to Jerusalem on Thursday.

A kind of civic infrastructure has already sprung up at the site. There’s a group that hands out food and another that distributes water. The Red Crescent has set up stations to treat the wounded, and volunteer guards keep order, though it’s not clear on whose behalf they are acting. Waqf guards, who had been prominent at the protests in previous days, were barely visible on Thursday.

Surrounding them all are scores of policemen, whose tension is visible in their stern faces and aggressive behaviour toward residents and journalists alike.

Shortly before each prayer service – especially the noon prayer at 12:45 P.M. and the evening prayer at 7:45 P.M. – the hundreds of protesters turn into thousands. These mass prayers have become an endless string of protest chants and shouted oaths of fealty to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

“Takbir,” someone shouts, and the masses answer, “Allahu akbar.” That call and response is heard over and over, interspersed with chants such as “With blood and spirit we’ll redeem Al-Aqsa.”

Usually, after an hour or two of chants and sermons, tempers cool until the next prayer. Wednesday was completely calm; barely a stone was thrown throughout the Old City and the Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

Thursday was also fairly calm until evening. But in the blink of an eye, one of the rounds of chanting and whipping up emotion that followed the evening prayer deteriorated into violence.

Even from a few metres away, it was impossible to tell who started it. Was a stone or bottle thrown at the police, or did someone merely imagine seeing a stone or bottle?

Either way, it all blew up in an instant. The police rushed in, firing dozens of stun grenades. The Palestinians responded with stones, and the policemen replied with sponge-tipped bullets. Within seconds, at least two Palestinians were down on the ground, unconscious.

The speed and intensity of the flare-up are worrying omens of what could happen at Friday’s noon prayer. Jerusalem police chief Yoram Halevy said Thursday that the police can cope with Friday’s expected violence. The question is what the cost will be, and what will happen after Friday prayers.

“We aren’t violent, we just want to pray,”

It’s also worth recalling that at the beginning of the week, Halevy predicted the Palestinians would ultimately accept the metal detectors at the gateways to the mount and end their boycott. So far, there’s no sign of that happening.

Though Arabs from the north are also present, most of the worshippers and protesters at the entrances to the Mount are Palestinians from Jerusalem. They are leading this protest, and they are also its big winners (so far). A Haaretz report on Thursday that crowned the Jerusalem street as the true sovereign on the Temple Mount has been translated and disseminated on social media.

The protesters insist over and over that their protest is nonviolent. “We aren’t violent, we just want to pray,” said Murad, an East Jerusalem resident who came to the Mount after finishing his day job as an air conditioner repairman in Tel Aviv.

“Everyone says these gates are metal detectors, because they’ve found the steel and gold within Jerusalem’s residents,” he added.

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