Arise, go up to Zion - by Nadav Shragai

...In recent years, a miracle of sorts has taken place: A handful of passionate activists have managed to reignite the Israeli interest in the area. This has led to the Israel Police lifting some of the restrictions placed on Jewish presence on the site. Although we cannot hear the shofar being blown there, as the famous verse in "Jerusalem of Gold" says, and there is no menorah, the Jews are finally exercising their sovereignty by visiting the site – the only thing Dayan agreed to preserve. By the end of 2017, the number of Jews who will have visited the compound is expected to number 25,000.

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
11 December '17..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/arise-go-up-to-zion/

The 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev 2,181 years ago was both a sad day and a happy one on the Temple Mount. The events that day, which ultimately became the foundation for the holiday we call Hanukkah, began with humiliation and insult but were followed by great jubilation and high spirits.

The books of the Maccabees tell us how the Hasmoneans, having arrived in a liberated Jerusalem, tore their clothes and wept as they saw the desolate and desecrated Temple. But they also tell us about the "harps, lutes and cymbals" (1 Maccabees 4:52) that were used to celebrate the relighting of the menorah.

Fifty years ago, the same day also brought two diametrically opposed feelings: joy and sadness. While Israel had recently liberated the ruins of the Temple, the prevailing spirit on the Temple Mount was dictated by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Under his instructions, the Israeli flag had been taken down from the mountain, and the Israeli visitors were told they were to limit their worship to the site below, the Western Wall.

Dayan effectively gave control of the compound to the Muslims, preventing the Jews from praying there. He wrongly assumed that by doing this he could take out the religious component of the conflict. The decision had the support of rabbis, who said it was forbidden for Jews to enter the area for prayer. They were too focused on their halachic interpretation to seize the moment. For all their talk, they forgot that having virtual Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount without actually exercising it is just make-believe. They had decided to relegate our role to that of the famous superhero who can see but cannot be seen.

This alliance of state and religion survived for three decades and had the effect of suppressing the bond between the Jews and holy compound. It also created the impression that the Western Wall, which is also holy, is a suitable alternative that could serve as a stand-in for the original. As a result, the Muslims got the false impression that the Jews who went to the Temple Mount were just "visitors," like all other tourists.

Recovering from Israel’s two greatest strategic mistakes

...I am sure that the Arabs were surprised when Moshe Dayan offered them control of the Temple Mount. After all, Israel had conquered Jerusalem. Many of them were probably expecting to be kicked out of their homes, as the Jordanians had done to the Jews in 1948. But instead of teaching them that they had been defeated, Dayan gave them hope that by continued struggle they could prevail. And if they do, you had better believe they will not be magnanimous.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
18 September '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/09/israels-two-greatest-strategic-mistakes/

The murder of Alexander Levlovitz in Jerusalem when he was driving home from a Rosh Hashana dinner, is the latest in a series of cases of Jews killed or seriously injured by rocks and firebombs thrown by Arabs. The daily attacks in Judea/Samaria and Jerusalem rarely make the news outside of Israel, and even here we seem to accept them as natural phenomena, like large hailstones or volcanic eruptions, until someone dies or is maimed for life.

Right now this kind of terrorism is particularly prevalent, while at the same time a battle between police and rioting Arabs continues on the Temple Mount. The Arabs are upset because Israel’s government has decided that it is not acceptable for screaming mobs of Muslims to accost Jews trying to visit the Mount, where they are nevertheless not allowed to pray. There is continuous incitement on social media and in mosques calling on Muslims to “defend al-Aqsa,” which they can do on the Temple Mount or on highway 443.

Ever since the riots orchestrated by al-Husseini in the 1920s, the accusation that Israel plans to replace the al-Aqsa mosque with a Jewish temple has been effective in producing violent behavior among Muslims, despite its almost comical falsehood. Anything that Israel does in connection with the Mount is used as a pretext to make this accusation. The reason it works has to do with the first of two ideological principles that serve as foundations for Arab violence against Jews in Israel. Failure to take these principles into account led to the two greatest strategic errors made by Israel’s leaders since the founding of the state.

One principle is that of Muslim supremacy, according to which it is absolutely unacceptable that non-Muslims should in any way govern or control Muslims. A corollary is that a non-Muslim presence in what Muslims consider a holy place pollutes it. The so-called ‘status quo’ that has existed on the Temple Mount since it came under Jewish control in 1967 is a compromise – and you know compromises never fly with Muslims – to try to get around this. The status quo places the Mount under civil control of the Jordanian waqf, and allows non-Muslims to visit on a limited basis, but not to pray there.

Making this deal was the first great strategic error, because it should have been obvious that the Arabs would never be satisfied with anything less than full sovereignty over the Mount. Over the years, it has been a flash point for violence; and Israel has usually bowed to the threat of violence and little by little allowed its hard-won sovereignty to erode. For example, on several occasions the waqf has carried out construction projects while ignoring Israeli laws about safeguarding archaeologically sensitive areas; in fact, Jewish artifacts have been deliberately destroyed and Israel did nothing.

Sculpting idols, smiting idols

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
21 October '10

Although we gave the world monotheism, we are a nation obsessively searching for idols. We sculpt some, raise them on pedestals, confer sanctity upon them and declare their worship mandatory. In other idols we seek imperfections, poke at them, dig at the surface and deepen the blemishes so we may be justified in smiting the ghastliness.

We make our obsessions personal, even long after the idols’ mortal models are deceased, long after they are really relevant.

Even Bar Kochba isn’t invulnerable, presumably because his fight for liberty and rebellion against ancient Rome was revered by Zionism’s founding fathers. That renders him permissible prey for zealous post-Zionists.

Hence posthumously Bar Kochba – another era’s son – is recurrently judged with arrogant hindsight according to postmodern precepts.

Moshe Dayan is hardly as antiquated, but he too is zealously seized upon by ardent left-wingers, who project the conclusions they purport to draw from his 1973 tactical bungles onto the country’s current predicaments.

Thrashing Dayan presumably buys aspiring scribblers the approval of leftist media and academia overlords. The annual Yom Kippur rite was exacerbated this year with the release of 37-year-old protocols, which contain little previously unknown. Yet the passion of the well-orchestrated “beat Dayan” fest would surely lead a just-landed Martian to assume that said Dayan is still a forceful mover and shaker.

As assiduously as we smite some idols, so we aggrandize others. To underpin compulsory veneration, our thought police scrutinizes calendars to apprehend the firm, publication or school, which – heaven help them – omitted highlighting Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination anniversary as a national day of mourning. Each year the personality cult is revived via public ceremonies, politicized vigils and manipulative melodramatic mantras. We’re all a captive audience of kitschy commissars.

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Faked Photograph Shows How The Middle East Hasn't Changed Much

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
26 July '10

Ah, the good old days. It's March 1958. In Egypt, President Gamal Abdel Nasser is mobilizing the Arab street to overthrow more traditional or moderate regimes, spouting anti-Western demagoguery.

One of the main such is in Iraq, the government of Nuri al-Said.

How can the Iraqis compete with Nasser, knowing that they have to counter his propaganda or die? Simple! The Israeli boogy-man. (How things have--not--changed!) So an Iraqi newspaper publishes the photo below, a clumsy forgery to "prove" Nasser is really a Zionist agent who just held a meeting with Israeli General Moshe Dayan.



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Intolerance on the Temple Mount

David Kirshenbaum
JPost Opinion
27 September 09

(Erev Yom Kippur all Jewish visitors were turned away as Arabs rioted on Har HaBayit to prevent their ascent)

Last week, our synagogue in Beit Shemesh made its annual High Holy Day week visit to the Temple Mount. We began the tradition six years ago when the site was reopened to non-Muslims. During the first three years following the start of the September 2000 war launched against Israel by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Hizbullah, the government decided to reward Arab terror by barring all non-Muslims from even setting foot on the Temple Mount.

Visiting the Temple Mount is a schizophrenic experience. When standing there, it is impossible not to be awestruck by the magnitude of where you are and the enormity of the colossal events that took place there. It is on the Temple Mount that both the First and Second Temple stood for nearly 1,000 years, where millions of Jews from all over the Land of Israel and the Diaspora made the three festival pilgrimages and where, according to Jewish belief, the Third Temple, ushering in the days of the messiah, is destined to be built. Throughout history, whenever and wherever Jews were engaged in prayer, they faced Jerusalem. And when in Jerusalem, they pray in the direction of the Temple Mount.

It boggles the mind to imagine your family tree and to consider when the last time anybody in the family line had been on the Temple Mount. Might that ancestor have been one of the survivors of the fighting that took place there prior to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE? Might it have been on Shavuot of that year, the final pilgrimage festival celebrated by the Jewish people prior to the destruction?

But now that I was standing in that holiest of places, which generations of Jews for 2,000 years could only dream of visiting, I was forbidden to pray. Simply moving my lips in whispered prayer could be grounds for removal. Why? Because I am a Jew. And only a Muslim can pray on the holiest site in Judaism. A Jew may not.

DURING THE War of Independence in 1948, the Old City of Jerusalem fell to the Jordanians. Nearly 1,500 Jews, including many women and children, were killed. While it was under Jordanian control, dozens of Jewish synagogues, many centuries old, were destroyed and the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, where Jews have been buried for 2,500 years, was desecrated. For 19 years, no Jew was allowed to set foot in the Old City or pray at the Western Wall, the retaining wall of the Temple Mount closest to where the Temples stood.

In June 1967, when Egypt, Syria and Jordan embarked on a war to annihilate the Jewish state, Israel recaptured Jerusalem's Old City. One of the most stirring announcements in Jewish history was the message transmitted from the front during the Six Day War: "The Temple Mount is in our hands."

But then, in a mind-boggling display of attempted appeasement of an enemy that just days before had sought Israel's destruction, defense minister Moshe Dayan decided to allow the Muslim religious council, the Wakf, to retain administrative authority over the Temple Mount. Thus, a truly bizarre and unacceptable situation developed.

Israel has scrupulously upheld Muslim worship at the Aksa Mosque, which was built just off the supposed site of the Temples, even when the site has been used to stone Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall and sermons are delivered calling for the demise of Israel and the US. Nor have Muslim prayer services been banned even in the worst periods of Arab terror attacks. During the just-completed Ramadan, hundreds of thousands of Arabs prayed at al-Aksa and held nighttime picnics on the Temple Mount breaking their fast. The garbage and leftover food items we saw strewn over the Temple Mount during our visit was appalling.

But in glaring contrast, Israel has, for the past 43 years, failed to challenge the Muslim ban on Jewish worship on the Temple Mount. On our visit, the number of Jews allowed up at one time was severely limited, we were checked for any religious items, which cannot be brought onto the Temple Mount by a Jew, and we were warned by the police not to even whisper a prayer.

THE STATUS quo is woefully offensive and intolerable. Never mind that at no time during the lengthy Muslim control over much of the Middle East did the Muslims ever designate Jerusalem as an imperial capital or even as a provincial or subprovincial capital. Even if we choose to overlook this very relevant history, the pattern of Islamic religious imperialism, exemplified by the Wakf's contemptible conduct on the Temple Mount, must not be ignored.

The problem is not simply that the Arabs have attempted to take as their own every site in Israel holy to Judaism, whether it be the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem or Joseph's Tomb in Nablus. But in doing so, they have consistently attempted to obliterate the historic Jewish connection and claim to each of those sites.

In the same manner, in the years following the Oslo Accords and Israel's withdrawal from Bethlehem, a concerted policy by the Palestinian Authority to Islamicize the city and terrorize the Christian population resulted in a reduction in the percentage of Christians living there from 60 percent to less than 15% today.

We pay a terrible price when we close our eyes to the trampling of human rights and religious freedom out of fear of enraging the Muslim world. The Temple Mount is a huge area. It is the length of nearly five football fields north to south, and nearly three football fields east to west. It is certainly large enough to accommodate the ancient call of the prophet Isaiah recited in fervent prayer by Jews on Yom Kippur: "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations."

The sooner we take action to help bring this about, the better.
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