TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH:

Calm Prevails in Jerusalem on Day After Excavation Clashes

By STEVEN ERLANGER (New York Times)
Published: February 11, 2007

JERUSALEM, Feb. 10 — A few stone-throwing incidents occurred Saturday, but Jerusalem streets were largely quiet a day after the police clashed with Palestinians protesting Israeli construction work near the religious compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Some tires were burned and rocks thrown at police officers in east Jerusalem, an area largely populated by Arabs, and some rocks were thrown at a bus full of Canadian tourists near the Mount of Olives, said a Jerusalem police spokesman, Inspector Micky Rosenfeld. “No one was injured, and as far as we are concerned, things are relatively calm and quiet,” Inspector Rosenfeld said. The police presence, he said, was down from 2,000 officers on Friday.

In Bethlehem, some 30 Palestinians were arrested Saturday after brief clashes with Israeli troops near Rachel’s Tomb, the police said.

[...]

“Whoever needed to be informed was informed,” Inspector Rosenfeld said. “Both security and Muslim leaders, the Waqf and Israeli Arabs leaders knew exactly what will take place and when.”

[...]

This in contrast to the claims that the Waqf had not been informed. The construction was suspended yesterday for the Sabbath, but is scheduled to continue today.

Also, Haaretz has a good editorial ("Digs, lies and the Mugrabi bridge") by Nadav Shragai connecting the current disturbances with the larger issue of Muslim Jewish-Temple denial, which PaleoJudaica has been covering for years. Excerpts (but read it all):

Still, one good thing did happen. The Mugrabi bridge plan exposes the great Muslim denial - the denial of the Jewish bond to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Temple. Dr. Yitzhak Reiter described the whole story in his study, From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back - a must for anyone wishing to understand the roots of Muslim behavior, even in the Mugrabi bridge affair - but his work remained, regrettably, an academic study, failing to prompt an appropriate public relations campaign on Israel's part. Now the public is receiving another demonstration.

Who among us knows, for example, that the al-Aqsa Mosque, which according to contemporary studies was built some 1,400 years ago, is now claimed to have been built at the time of the world's creation, during the days of Adam or Abraham? And who is aware of the fact that increasing numbers of Muslim academics and religious leaders claim it existed even before Jesus and Moses and that Islam preceded Judaism in Jerusalem?

Today, thousands of Islamic rulings, publications and sources deny the Jewish roots in Jerusalem and its holy places. They claim that the Temple didn't even exist in Jerusalem but was located in Nablus or Yemen. An Islamic legal pronouncement (fatwa) on the Jerusalem Waqf (Muslim religious trust) Web site says King Solomon and King Herod did not build the Temple at all, but merely refurbished an existing structure that had been there from the days of Adam. Today, many Muslims call the Temple "the greatest fraud crime in history" and many Muslim adjudicators attach the world "so-called" to the word "temple."

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It is therefore easy to understand why the Muslims are so afraid of archaeological digs, not only on the Temple Mount itself but also around it, although these digs also shed light on Jerusalem's Muslim history. Muslims fear these excavations, not because they physically endanger al-Aqsa's foundations, but because they undermine the tissue of lies proclaiming that the Jews have no valid historical roots in the city and its holy sites.

That is a very good point that needs to be made over and over again. (For the evidence for the existence of the First and Second Judean/Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount, see here and here.)

I find that analysis more persuasive than Uri Avnery's in Media Monitor's Network ("The Method in the Madness")

The Israeli government argues that the bridge is separate from the Temple Mount. The Muslims insist that the bridge is a part of it. Behind this tussle, there is a lurking Arab suspicion that the installation of the new bridge is just a cover for something else happening below the surface.

At the 2000 Camp David conference, the Israeli side made a weird-sounding proposal: to leave the area itself to the Muslims, but with Israeli sovereignty over everything beneath the surface. That reinforced the Muslim belief that the Israelis intended to dig beneath the Mount, in order to discover traces of the Jewish Temple that was destroyed by the Romans 1936 years ago. Some believed that the real intention was to cause the Islamic shrines to collapse, so a new Temple could be built in their place.

These suspicions are nurtured by the fact that most Israeli archaeologists have always been the loyal foot-soldiers of the official propaganda. Since the emergence of modern Zionism, they have been engaged in a desperate endeavor to "find" archaeological evidence for the historical truth of the stories of the Old Testament. Until now, they have gone empty-handed: there exists no archaeological proof for the exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan and the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon. But in their eagerness to prove the unprovable (because in the opinion of the vast majority of archaeologists and historians outside Israel - and also some in Israel - the Old Testament stories are but sacred myths), the archaeologists have destroyed many strata of other periods.

But that is not the most important side of the present affair. One can argue to the end of days about the responsibility for the Mugrabi walkway or what it might be that the archaeologists are looking for. But it is impossible to doubt that this is a provocation: it was carried out like a surprise military operation, without consultation with the other side.

The accusation that Israeli archaeologists "have destroyed many strata of other periods" is bizarre. Archaeological excavation involves the "destruction" of the excavated parts of the site, which is why it is always accompanied by careful documentation of any strata excavated. This is elementary.

Enough for now.