TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Unearthing earthly Jerusalem (Ha'aretz)
By Meron Rapoport

In Jerusalem's Old City, as in Hiroshima, everything is measured by the distance from the center of the cataclysm. In Hiroshima it is the distance from the site where the atom bomb fell; in the Old City they speak of the distance from the Temple Mount.Sometimes they measure this distance in meters, sometimes even in centimeters. The walls of the Temple Mount are a red line which is not touched, says veteran archaeologist Meir Ben Dov. A conflagration there would be a death certificate for this country. Ben Dov is a controversial figure, but everyone agrees with his view rabbis and archaeologists, policemen and Muslim clerics.

A man who was involved in law enforcement in the Old City says that occasionally he would visit the excavations around the Temple Mount in order to see how close they were getting to the walls of the mount. "That was my greatest fear that someone would try to get close to the Temple Mount," he says. Everyone is afraid, each for his own reason, and tries to keep his distance from these walls. And at the same time people are attracted to them as to a magnet.

This magnet is now being approached by the members of Ateret Cohanim, the best known among the organizations of Jews who have settled in the Old City. Through the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Ateret Cohanim is at the moment conducting a dig at a depth of 12 meters beneath the building belonging to it, which is 80 meters away from the walls of the Temple Mount. But members of the organization are not satisfied with digging deep down, in one of the most sensitive places in the world. They are also digging along width-wise, to the east, in the direction of the Temple Mount, beneath the houses of Palestinian residents. The excavators have already advanced 20 meters eastward, while "clearing away earth" from subterranean spaces. Only 60 meters separate now them from the walls of the mount, says Jon Seligman, the IAA Jerusalem district director, who is supervising the dig.

[...]

All this in the context of Byzantine political complexities in Israeli society, not to speak of the larger context of Israeli-Palestinian/Muslim relations.