From a Narrow Tunnel, Controversy Bursts Forth

Not far from the entrance to the tunnel whose opening has pushed the Middle East peace process to the brink of collapse, Mary Hamill stood Monday, shading her eyes and looking bemused. “So that’s it?” the British tourist asked, sounding vaguely disappointed as she gazed across at a door in the stone wall. “That’s all?”

As Israeli and Arab leaders headed to Washington to try to salvage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, observant Jews crowded onto the plaza near the Western Wall, marking the holiday of Sukkot by waving palm fronds and asking for God’s mercy and protection.

Thousands of others, ranging from reverent, religious Jews to curious, talkative tourists, squeezed into the narrow passage that helped spark the worst explosion of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in years.

Many analysts have warned here that unless the U.S.-sponsored talks show quick, concrete progress, the fighting that left more than 70 dead and a thousand others injured last week could erupt again.

But if fear kept some away from Jerusalem’s Old City and its many holy sites, it was not apparent Monday near the Western Wall, where the controversial 534-yard tunnel begins. A sign above the entrance warned that the demand to view the path--with its medieval cistern, Herodian street and other ancient artifacts--is so great that no one without a reservation would be allowed in. “People are waiting eight months already,” said a breathless employee of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. “Everyone wants to come in.”

Not everyone. Palestinian and Muslim leaders, as well as thousands of demonstrators in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, reacted with outrage to the news of the ancient tunnel’s opening last week.

Israel, in a predawn excavation, had gone ahead with completion of the passage, an action that was considered and rejected by previous Israeli governments because of its sensitivity for the Palestinians. The tunnel work has been almost finished for several years, and it had been open to tourists by appointment since 1991.

But in the early morning last Tuesday, Israeli workers, under police guard, used heavy equipment to cut through the last few feet of stone to install a metal door that opens onto the Via Dolorosa, where Christian tradition maintains that Jesus took his final steps.

Palestinians argue that the tunnel, which hugs the western foundation of the area known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, could weaken the underpinnings of the two mosques that rise above the mount--Al Aqsa and the gold-topped Dome of the Rock.

Israeli officials dismiss the claims and point out that the tunnel runs alongside but not under the Islamic sites.

Still, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who personally authorized the work on the tunnel’s final section, could not have chosen a more sensitive spot in this most disputed of cities, where moving a few stones can provoke years-long disputes.

Further, the Temple Mount--with both the mosques and the Western Wall, revered because it is the last vestige of Judaism’s Second Temple--stands at the convergence of the religious and national aspirations of Muslims and Jews.

Israeli officials said the main reason for completing the tunnel was to allow thousands more tourists each year to view its wonders. In some sections, the passage is barely a yard wide; before the new opening was cut, visitors had to squeeze past one another to exit the way they had come.

But their underlying message was also clear: The Israelis hold sway over Jerusalem, which Israel views as its undivided, eternal capital, and where Palestinians hope one day to place the capital of their own independent state.

“We will not agree that everything that happens in Jerusalem will be subject to negotiation, because we are the sovereign of the city,” Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, a hard-line member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said after overseeing the excavation.

Adnan Husseini, executive director of the Waqf, the Islamic Religious Council in charge of the Old City’s Islamic sites, said Muslims fear that the tunnel excavations also are intended to give a religious pretext for a future Israeli claim to those shrines. “This action really is very provocative to us on many levels, and we will never accept it,” Husseini said.

Israeli officials have denied such a motivation. But the suspicions remain, fueled by periodic threats from Jewish extremists to destroy the Temple Mount’s mosques so that the Jewish temple can be rebuilt.

Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was defeated by Netanyahu in May elections, hastened to stress after the deadly clashes last week that he had never given final approval to completing the tunnel. Instead, he noted that his government, unlike Netanyahu’s, had “succeeded in keeping Jerusalem out of the disputed matters of confrontation” in peace talks with the Palestinians. The status of Jerusalem, along with others of the most difficult issues between the two sides, is to be discussed in the final stages of the peace negotiations.