Holy Site Paramount Among Obstacles to Mideast Peace

To Arabs, it is Haram al Sharif, the “noble sanctuary” from which Muhammad ascended to heaven on a horse. To Jews, it is the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, the ground under which lie the remains of the First and Second Temples.

As President Clinton prepares for critical meetings with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in New York this week, 100 years of struggle between Arab and Jew over the land that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River have come down to this: Who will claim sovereignty over this 36-acre compound?

Revered by both peoples, crowned by mosques whose magnificent domes dominate the Jerusalem skyline, the holy site has been the scene of some of the bloodiest confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians.

It may yet prove an insurmountable impediment to a final Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

“This is a mosque. It is not subject to any negotiations,” said Adnan Husseini, director of the Waqf, or Islamic Trust. Although Israel has claimed sovereignty over the Temple Mount since the 1967 Middle East War, the Waqf continues to run the compound. “We can’t deal in details in such a place. This is God’s will, that there be a mosque here. We can’t say, ‘Let’s change God’s will.’ ”

With equal fervor, Israel’s acting foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, told reporters recently that the Palestinians must understand and acknowledge the importance of the Temple Mount to Jews everywhere.

“I am not a religious man,” Ben-Ami said. “But on Tisha b’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the temple, when I found myself in Turkey, I told my hosts that I could not partake of food or drink because this is a day when Jews fast.”

The Camp David summit this summer collapsed, Israeli and Palestinians agree, when Arafat insisted on Palestinian sovereignty over the site. Arafat walked away from offers of international recognition of a Palestinian state, of Palestinian control over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and massive aid for the state he has spent his life fighting to create--rather than compromise on Haram al Sharif.

“To tell me that I have to admit that there is a temple below the mosque? I will never do that,” Arafat told Clinton during his final meeting with the president at Camp David, Md., according to Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator who was present.

Since that moment in July, thousands of hours of diplomatic activity have been devoted to the search for a solution. There have been proposals for dividing sovereignty that would give Palestinians control over the mosques and Israelis control over the ground beneath them. There have been proposals for both sides deferring to God, saying only he has sovereignty over the site. That solution, recently endorsed by Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, would leave the Waqf running the compound.

The Egyptians have proposed putting off resolving the issue for five to 10 years after the signing of a peace accord that would end the other disputes between Israelis and Palestinians. But a compromise seems as elusive as ever.

Of course, the fate of the Temple Mount is not the only issue remaining, said Menachem Klein, a professor at Bar Ilan University who has been advising Barak’s government in negotiations with the Palestinians. The parties must still bridge gaps on such questions as the fate of Palestinians who fled in 1948, when the Jewish state was created. And the question of sovereignty regarding the Old City and West and East Jerusalem is still unresolved.

“But the Temple Mount stands by itself as the jewel in the crown for both peoples,” Klein said. “This is a very difficult case where each side feels connected to the whole territory. It is the historical and religious core of Jerusalem.”

Area Is Steeped in Historical Importance

Jews believe that Mt. Moriah, where the First and Second Temples stood and where the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques stand today, is the site where Abraham offered his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice to God. Muslims believe that Al Aqsa, the most religiously significant mosque in the compound, is the “furthermost place,” where the Koran says Muhammad rode his horse on a nighttime journey from Mecca. From the site, Muhammad rose to heaven and met God face to face before returning to Mecca the same night.

Steeped in such historical importance, the Temple Mount has served as the stage for clashes, time and again, between Israelis and Palestinians.

In the 1980s, Israeli security forces uncovered a plot by Jewish extremists to blow up the Dome of the Rock. In 1990, about 3,000 Palestinians, fearing that Jewish extremists were planning to lay the foundation stone for a new temple inside the mosque compound, gathered there and began raining stones on Jewish worshipers who were praying at the Western Wall. That structure, a retaining wall for the Temple Mount compound, is the last remnant of the Second Temple.

Before the rioting ended, Israeli police had shot and killed 17 Palestinians and wounded 150 others. In 1996, at least 75 people died in Israeli-Palestinian clashes after the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened a new door to a tourist tunnel just outside the Temple Mount. Riots erupted because Muslims feared that the tunnel would undermine the foundations of the mosques above.

Soon after, the Waqf began construction on a vast new mosque under Al Aqsa, raising cries of protests from Israeli archeologists and the government. Bulldozers used in the excavations, the Israelis said, had destroyed a priceless archeological site. Last winter, the Waqf infuriated the Israelis by opening a new entrance to the underground mosque, bulldozing a 200-foot-long, 75-foot-wide trench.

Since Camp David, Klein said, the Israelis, Americans and Egyptians have offered various proposals to resolve the fate of the holy site. But Arafat, he said, hasn’t responded. Publicly, Arafat continues to take a hard line, saying the Palestinians must have sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Temple Mount.

As the diplomats haggle, day-to-day life at the compound continues as it has since Israel captured it from Jordan during the 1967 war. Within hours of Israeli troops’ reaching the Western Wall, then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan decided that Israel would leave Muslims in charge of the compound.

“It was one of the wisest decisions ever made by an Israeli politician,” said Gideon Avni, head of the Jerusalem division of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “When Israel captured the Temple Mount, Dayan took the keys to the gates from the Waqf. The next day, he gave the keys back. To this day, the Waqf has the ability to close the Temple Mount to the public.”

Dayan’s decision, Avni said, made it possible for the Islamic world to grudgingly tolerate Israeli rule over East Jerusalem, because the sites holy to Islam remained under Muslim control.

Israel is responsible for the compound’s overall security. It is Israeli police who keep a watchful eye over tourists who walk up a ramp from the Western Wall plaza to the Temple Mount to visit the compound. Jews wearing yarmulkes are routinely taken aside and questioned by officers who warn them of the site’s sensitivity and ask that they not pray while inside the compound.

Many observant Jews respect the ruling of mainstream rabbis that Jews should not ascend to the Temple Mount because they may tread on the site where the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum of the temple, once stood. But some nationalist observant Jews have long maintained that it is possible to know precisely where the temple stood. Therefore, they say, Jews should feel free to pray on the Temple Mount because they can avoid stepping anywhere near the Holy of Holies.

‘Under a Constant State of Siege’

Periodically, groups lobby the chief rabbinate to approve the building of a synagogue on the outskirts of the compound. The rabbinate recently appointed a committee to study one such request.

Such proposals, said Waqf director Husseini, only add to the tensions surrounding the site. “We are under a constant state of siege,” he complained during an interview in Waqf offices just outside the compound. “You close your eyes, and something is taken from you.”

Inside the compound itself, however, the struggle seems remote.

Every day, hundreds of Palestinian families come here to pray and picnic. The compound commands a breathtaking view of the Mount of Olives and catches breezes on all but the most sweltering summer days.

Children run freely across the vast limestone plaza, playing tag on the lawns or lounging under cypress trees. Inside the mosques, groups of tourists from around the world pick their way through praying Muslims and children tumbling happily across plush carpets.

But Avni said tensions are mounting as Israeli and Palestinian media air their proposals and counterproposals for dividing sovereignty over the site.

“There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “Everyone understands that this is D-day.”