Now, on Jerusalem Day, marking the 57th anniversary of the reunification of the holy city, the unforgivable trivialization of the term "war crimes" by the Palestinians is coming face to face with an additional victim – the Western Wall. The Palestinian media are now recycling the false claim that the evacuation of the residents of the Mughrabi Quarter in the southeast corner of the Old City of Jerusalem, during the Six-Day War, its subsequent demolition and construction of the Western Wall Plaza to be used for Jewish prayers on that site, were a severe breach of the laws of war.
The Palestinians are also taking this story onto the international stage and in the process they are spreading more lies and disinformation regarding the Western Wall: "the Jews have no ties with the Western Wall"; "the fabricated link of the Jews to the Western Wall is a matter of no more than 400-500 years"; "the Muslims own the exclusive religious, historical and legal rights to the Western Wall, which is part of Al-Aqsa" (Mahmoud Abbas). The Palestinian Authority (PA) took this one step further, when it published that there is no documented record of the fact that the Jews designated the Western Wall as a site for ritual worship at any time, only doing so after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and on another occasion it even reported that the Mughrabi Quarter would be rebuilt on the Jews' prayer plaza.
The Palestinians are essentially turning history upside down, falsifying it and rewriting it. If that is the case, then we need some degree of order and precision in the Palestinian compendium of lies and falsehoods:
- The Western Wall did indeed only become the Jews' principal place of prayer in 1546, following the earthquake that rocked Jerusalem in that year. The earthquake caused the buildings adjacent to the Western Wall to collapse in the area we now know as the prayer plaza. It enabled the Turks to respond to the Jews' request and to allocate them an extremely narrow alleyway to be used for prayers. But, in contrast to the derisory remarks of those who seek to deny the importance of the Western Wall to the Jews, this is no invention of only a few hundred years. Historical testimony shows that from the moment the Muslim conquest of the land allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, one thousand years ago or even more (after the Christians had forced them out of the city), they prayed alongside the Western Wall, much of which was free of Muslim construction, unlike today. Jews prayed at the southern corner of the Western Wall as well as along its northern parts: in the vicinity of the Cotton Merchants' Gate, the Iron Gate and the Council Gate (known in Arabic as Bāb al-Majlis). Until Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099, a synagogue known as the "Cave" operated in an underground space beneath Warren's Gate in the Western Wall. The "Cave" was located exactly opposite where the Holy of Holies was believed to have stood, in the middle of the Dome of the Rock, where the Foundation Stone rests, the location where, according to Jewish tradition, the creation of the world began. The Western Wall became the preferred choice because it was closer to that place than any of the other walls of the Temple Mount. A series of midrashim dating back 1,500 years and more attributes continual sanctity to the Western Wall due to this proximity. Whoever seeks to take a more in-depth look at the less well-known Jewish presence at the foot of the Western Wall for more than a thousand years can read about this in the research work of Dr. Aryeh Kimelman, an extremely modest and almost anonymous individual, who was behind the project to unearth the Western Wall along its entire length underground, and who passed away this year at a 'good old age and full of good deeds.' Dozens of testimonies to the status of the Western Wall can also be found in the book of the Jewish scholar, Yitzhak Yehezkel Yehuda, who about one hundred years ago published a comprehensive study on the Western Wall. Yehuda's work was submitted to the 1930 British Western Wall Commission, establishing the Jewish connection to the location. The Cairo Geniza, which was discovered some 160 years ago in the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, also contained documentation of Jewish prayers at the Western Wall dating back to the ninth and ten centuries.
- For centuries, the residents of the Mughrabi Quarter forced the Jews seeking to pray in the narrow passage alongside the Western Wall to pay them protection money. They played an active role in defiling and desecrating the holy site by tipping garbage, animal dung and human feces there, as well as an entire spectrum of activities designed to intimidate, obstruct and harass the Jews who came to pray there. In the short period of time during which Jordan ruled in Jerusalem's Old City, 19 years (Israel has been the sovereign power there for 57 years now), it breached its written obligation to enable Jews to visit the Western Wall and pray there (Section 8 of the Armistice Agreement signed with Israel in 1949).
- The evacuation of the Mughrabi Quarter and its demolition in the Six-Day War was an act of pure historical justice in relation to the residents of that quarter, settling the centuries-old score with them. Thus, it was also possible to remove the latrines and sewage pipes they had built there and placed right next to the stones of the Western Wall, desecrating the holy site. This also paved the way for hundreds of thousands of Jewish worshipers to gather together for prayers at the Western Wall (the old, narrow Western Wall passageway was designed to accommodate no more than a few hundred people, only when crammed into an extremely crowded space). The Arab families who were evacuated from the Mughrabi Quarter – living in dilapidated houses and squalor, which according to the documents of the Jordanian municipality, were due to be demolished in any case – were awarded financial compensation and alternative accommodation. They even wrote a letter of thanks to the then Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek.
- The Muslim claim that the Western Wall was actually one of the walls of Al-Aqsa and that the Jews have no ties with it, took root following 1967, after the Muslims expanded the definition of Al-Aqsa from the southern mosque alone and applied it to the entire compound and it surrounding walls.
- The British Western Wall Commission, which operated following the 1929 Arab riots, did determine that the Western Wall is Muslim property, while the Jews are allowed only to use the site, but in legal terms, Israel amended that tremendously biased report when it abolished the status quo imposed by the British Mandate at the Western Wall, expropriated part of it and registered it with the Lands Registration Bureau as property of the State of Israel.
When thousands cried at the Western Wall only a few months ago during a special prayer session for the safe return of the hostages, I was reminded of the words of the poet Avigdor Hameiri, who wrote in his poem about "the last rain of tears" and the eyes "looking (from the Western Wall, NS) back at all the generations" (from the poem "By the Kotel"). Now, when the Palestinians spread lies regarding the Western Wall and accuse us of committing war crimes there, it is both possible and in fact obligatory to debunk them. But, before doing so, it might be a good idea to adopt the approach taken by Rabbi Kook when faced with similar falsehoods regarding the Western Wall, that were spread at the turn of the twentieth century. "By relying on certificates," Rabbi Kook said to the members of the Shaw Commission, years before the ICC came into being at The Hague, "we are likely to weaken the truth... and that is – one of the most famous and well-known facts that need no evidence (the ties of the Jews to the Western Wall; NS). To what can this be compared? To someone holding up a candle in order to boost the sunlight."
Smuggled out of Al-Azhar
Hamas gave a name to this current war: "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood". That name too, just like the myths regarding the Western Wall, is a pure expression of tremendous deceit and falsehood, a double lie: the many Muslims who are convinced that Al-Aqsa is in danger, are also convinced that "their" Al-Aqsa that is at risk lies in a location where our Temple was never situated; that the Temple on the Temple Mount is nothing more than a forgery and an invention, or as they put it: "Al-Mazzum", or in other words: the alleged, false and imagined.
Part of the legitimacy that terrorism draws upon from this lie is based on this addition, as it is much more legitimate to falsely accuse and murder Jews in order to "protect the 'captured' Al-Aqsa, and to liberate it from the Jews who are planning to destroy it," when Israel and the Jews "are planning to target the place" whose connection to the Jews is nothing more than a lie and a forgery.
This is how the lie that supports the accusation intensifies the legitimacy to murder in its name. As far as the Hamas Nukhba terrorists and those who sent them are concerned, they are not merely murdering the Jews whose very souls are intertwined with the Temple Mount and its history, simply to redeem Al-Aqsa from the impurity of the Jews and their hold over it; from their point of view, they are also murdering the forgers of history, who have no real ties to that site. In essence, and above all, they seek to liberate the Mount on the conceptual level.
Years before the Hague was an issue, Rabbi Kook said to the members of the Shaw Commission: "The connection of the Jews to the site is one of the most famous and well-known facts that need no evidence. To what can this be compared? To someone holding up a candle in order to boost the sunlight"
Here too, just as with the story of the Western Wall, there is an entire spectrum of evidence and sources – Torah, historical and archaeological sources – which completely refute the Muslims' blanket denial of the Jewish affinity to and precedence in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Here too, the situation is akin to "someone holding up a candle in order to boost the sunlight," but here we also hold an additional trump card: a long list of Muslim sources and clerics, who for some 1,350 years have identified the Temple Mount as the site of the Jewish Temple, and Israel would do well to finally take this trump card out from its sleeve and actually play it.
The first one to do so, was the Persian historian Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr ibn Yazīd al-Ṭabarī (838-923), who was one of the first, most prominent and renowned commentators on the Qu'ran and the Muslim tradition. One of his ancient manuscripts, which bears the seal of Al-Azhar – the most important study institute in the Sunni Muslim world – was photographed and smuggled years ago by Noha Hassid (originally an Egyptian Muslim named Noha Hashad) and was given over to the Middle East scholar Dr. Edy Cohen. The text, which was also previously known, once again began to fan the flames. Al-Ṭabarī writes there, among others: "Bayt al-Maqdis (the Temple Mount) was built by Solomon, the son of David, and was made of gold, pearls, rubies and the peridot gemstone; it was laid with silver and gold, and its pillars were also made of gold."
This documentation, from a pillar of Islam such as al-Ṭabarī, clearly contradicts the efforts of many Muslims to rehash the history of the Temple Mount in recent years. It goes against the Muslim claim, according to which "the myth of the false temple is the greatest crime of forgery in history," and entire books have been written in this spirit.
Just like al-Ṭabarī, there are dozens more Muslim clerics from earlier periods in history. "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" in effect erases their writings on the topic of the Mount and its history, as well as the Jewish connection to it. These writings do not fit in with the philosophy of destruction of the Jews and the State of Israel espoused by the new Nazis from Hamas and their collaborators in the PA, and with the role assigned to Al-Aqsa as an instrument for attaining that goal.
This orderly ideology was incorporated about three years ago in the content of the 'End of Days' Conference' held in Gaza under the auspices of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar. Here they did not only deal with Al-Aqsa but also the issue of the "right of return". The conference and its content was exposed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and then by Israel Hayom, but the Israeli media did not attribute much significance to it. During the conference, Yahya Sinwar's speech was read out, which spoke of "the full liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea, and the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes."
The conference chairman, Kna'an Obeid, explained that the organization is in possession of "...lists of the numbers of the apartments and the Israeli institutions, educational institutions, schools and power plants, and there is no choice but to prepare to run them... We believe that the liberation will be completed within a few years. If Israel ignores this warning, this will be an unprecedented historical event both on a regional and a global scale, and it will indeed have global implications."
The conference's closing announcement included descriptions of the various dimensions of the "liberation" and the "return" to the 1948 lands, and it also mentioned the practical assistance that would be provided to those returning refugees as well as the plans for the absorption of the Palestinians back in their cities of origin.
One of those cities of origin is of course Jerusalem. It was actually the PA and not Hamas, with help from the Turks, that documented 7,000 buildings (in western Jerusalem) in which Arabs had resided prior to the War of Independence, including photos, addresses and their land registration extracts. Apart from winning the war over hearts and minds for the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa, Hamas and the PA also seek to implement the plan for the return of the Palestinian refugees, and not to do so in theory but in practice. And first and foremost, this means Jerusalem. This is something else that we really do need to remember on Israel's 57th Jerusalem Day.
Think big – expand the city
Demographic maths has accompanied us here in Jerusalem since the city was reunified, almost for sixty years now, the various Ministerial Committees for Jerusalem have even defined the positive Jewish demographic balance as a target, and from time to time have updated this in terms of the numbers involved.
In 1967, we began with 74 percent Jews and 26 percent Arabs. Today, the ratio in terms of percentage is 60:40 in favor of the Jews. In 1967 there were 69 thousand Arabs in Jerusalem. Today, there are some 400 thousand Arabs resident in the city. The Arab population has grown sixfold. In 1967 there were only 200 thousand Jews living in Jerusalem, and today there are some 600 thousand Jews in the city. The Jewish population has tripled.
The photocopy of al-Ṭabarī's ancient manuscript, which was smuggled out of Al-Azhar, contradicts the rewriting of the history of the Temple Mount in recent years conducted by the Muslims, according to which, "the myth of the false temple is the greatest crime of forgery in history."
Despite the reversal in the fertility rate – in the Jewish sector of the population this stands at 4.3 children per woman, while among the Arab sector this amounts to 3 children per woman – the Arab majority has been growing mainly due to the negative Jewish migration from Jerusalem. Approximately 18 thousand Jews leave the capital each year. Much less Jews come to live there annually. This is referred to as a "negative migration balance." Over the last 45 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents have left the city.
There is a relatively simple method that should make it possible to contend with the Jewish demographic plight in Jerusalem, but that requires political courage and vision. The Arab neighborhoods located beyond the security fence, a veritable 'Wild West', rife with crime, drugs, illegal building and terrorism, complete with a huge Israeli governmental vacuum, are inhabited by about one third of the population of east Jerusalem; some 140 thousand residents.
It is possible to remove these neighborhoods form the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem without removing them from the territory of the State of Israel, and then to establish for them a separate local Israeli council or councils. The residents permits that the inhabitants of these areas possess, from across Kafr 'Aqab and the Shuafat refugee camp, will remain in their possession, and by virtue of the fact that they live within the bounds of the State of Israel, they will continue to enjoy their resident's status along with the economic benefits that are part and parcel of this.
At the same time, we should begin to establish an official municipal link between Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements in the "Greater Jerusalem" area, a term coined by the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin OBM. In 1998, the first government of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, decided to establish an umbrella municipality for Jerusalem and its Jewish satellite towns, such as Ma'ale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Givat Ze'ev, but this decision was never actually implemented. The Americans saw to that, even though it merely involved municipal annexation rather than the application of the Israeli law.
Now, when the deck of cards has been reshuffled, it might be a good time to revisit that idea. If the northern Arab neighborhoods are removed from Jerusalem and the Jewish neighborhoods in the surrounding communities are municipally annexed to the capital, the demographic situation in Jerusalem will dramatically improve in favor of the Jews. Then, Jerusalem, in terms of hearts and minds too, will cease to remain merely a city. It will also become a metropolis. This will also facilitate an end to the insufferable crowding of Jerusalem within its current municipal boundaries, which has an adverse effect on both the beauty of the city and the quality of life of its inhabitants, as well as enabling much more expansive construction of housing units for the Jewish population in "Greater Jerusalem". Now is the time to step up to the plate.
