Israel’s Honor and Soul Should Not Be Up for Grabs

I just returned from Israel, where almost everyone I asked--taxi drivers in Tel Aviv, the man selling relishes in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, the concierge at my hotel--believes it is a terrible idea for Israel to cede sovereignty of the Temple Mount to the Palestinians. They share the opinion of Elyakim Rubinstein, Israel’s attorney general, that since Prime Minister Ehud Barak tendered his resignation, he now lacks the authority to make monumental decisions, especially when they are being made to accommodate an outgoing American president.

However, one prominent Barak supporter I spoke with thinks Israel should cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount. As he put it: “Do you think our children should go to war over that hill, a hill that [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat controls anyway?” A powerful argument, but one I am convinced undermines the very legitimacy of the state of Israel and its raison d’etre in the first place.

The Temple Mount is not just an ordinary hill; it is Israel’s national symbol of honor. It is symbolically what Notre Dame means to France or Westminster Abbey to England or Arlington National Cemetery to the United States.

But it is much more than that. It is the place to which Jews all over the world direct their prayers. Muslims direct their prayers to their holiest site, which is Mecca, located in Saudi Arabia.

Our justification for returning to the Promised Land was never based on our ability to make the desert bloom. If that were the case, we could have done that in British East Africa, had Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, accepted Britain’s suggestion that Jews locate there in the early part of the 20th century.

In fact, the cornerstone of our return to Zion was always based on the fact that it was a return to our historic biblical roots. The place where Abraham first encountered his God, where Moses promised to lead his people, where the prophets first introduced their concepts of social justice and freedom, and the hilltop where Solomon built his majestic temple. That was the claim that Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, made to the British government in an attempt to end their rule in Palestine in 1947. The very same claim that David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir repeated before every international forum.

At the Camp David summit, President Clinton tried to get Arafat to make some concessions over Jerusalem in order to accommodate Barak’s offer to cede 95% of the West Bank. But Arafat looked Clinton in the eye and said that those religious sites were not his to concede, that he had to consult with his brother Muslims around the world. And then off he went on a whirlwind tour to seek their counsel.

The truth is that Barak should have borrowed that line. The Temple Mount doesn’t belong to the government of Israel. It belongs to the Jewish people--those no longer here and those yet to be born. By giving up the Temple Mount, we are diminishing our right to any other part of the state of Israel. If the Temple Mount, with which we’ve had a continuous history for 3,500 years, is not ours, how legitimate is our claim to Jaffa, Tel Aviv or Haifa?

Of course, there is no question that the Temple Mount is sacred to Muslims as well. Their Al Aqsa mosque occupies the central site on the hill. But we should remember that when the Arabs controlled all of East Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967, Jews had no rights at all there--either to the Temple Mount or the Western Wall. When Jerusalem was reunited after the 1967 Middle East War, Israel made a decision to allow Muslims to administer the day-to-day religious functions on the Temple Mount. A very generous offer.

It seems incredulous now that just to satisfy Arafat, Jews are now being asked to give away all rights to the Temple Mount. What other government in the world would do that?

Such an act dishonors Jewish history. It is an act paramount to Christians ceding all their rights to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Peace is indeed the noblest of causes, but never at the expense of asking a nation to betray itself by giving away its national symbol of honor.