UN-Truth

Palestinian television is showing a live broadcast of Friday prayers from Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of East Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Media Communications Center (JMCC) has just sent out an SMS saying that Hatem Abdel Qader (Eid), a Fatah activist from East Jerusalem who resigned last spring from a brief tenure as Palestinian Authority Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, was at Al-Aqsa mosque, along with Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, despite an Israeli order (Ministry of the Interior, upheld apparently by an Israeli Court) banning them from the site for six months.

The interior of Al-Aqsa apears to be mostly unadorned. Grey stone blocks compose the columns and arches. And the rows of men praying in Al-Aqsa today were wearing their winter jackets, mostly all in modest tones of grey or taupe or brown, with an occasional blue nylon jackets reminiscent of former Palestinian security forces uniforms, which are now worn by Al-Aqsa’s team of security men.

The men all appear very serious in their prayer.

Neither HAtem Abdel Qader nor Sheikh Ikrima Sabri showed up in the pictures being shown on Palestinian television.

Al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock are the two structures on the mosque esplanade called the Haram ash-Sharif (the Noble precinct) which is the third holiest site in Islam.

This plateau is, however, believed to be the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples, which were both destroyed by acts of war (Babylonian and Roman), and whose loss is mourned to this day. It is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall (or “Wailing Wall”), where Jewish prayer from around the world is directed, is part of the supporting structure of the Haram Ash-Sharif.

An vaguely determined part of the Western Wall — probably up toward the middle of its visible height, and near the access ramp going from the Western Wall Plaza up to the Moroccan Gate (Bab al-Maghariba), is also sacred to Muslims who believe that a horse ridden by the Prophet Mohammed on his night right from Mecca was tethered at that spot, before Mohammed ascended (as if in a dream) to heaven.

The Old City of East Jerusalem — where some Jews were among the established population and had lived, some families for generations, until their evacuation in mid-1948 — did not become part of the State of Israel at its creation in May 1948.

Instead, it was controlled by Jordanian forces, until Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the June 1967 Six-Day War.

For Palestinians – and this is crucial to understanding part of the current problems concerning a “settlement freeze”, and to the Palestinian negotiating position in general – East Jerusalem (including its Old City) has the same status as the West Bank (it was trritory not under Israeli control at all until after 4 June 1967). Israel — as is explained below — argues that Jerusalem (including the Old City and parts of East Jerusalem that Israeli appears to now be unilaterally redefining and redividing by The Wall and checkpoints) is an integral part of Israel that they do not intend to give up.

Within days of Israel’s capture of the Old City, the Israeli military displaced those Palestinians living in close quarters almost right up to the Western Wall, where only a small place, the width of a normal street, had been assigned for Jewish prayer during the British Mandate period following the First World Wall. Approximately 900-1,000 people lost their homes in one fell swoop as the Israeli military cleared and created the Western Wall Plaza. The Old City quarter in front of the Western Wall had previously been known as the Moroccan Quarter, after many of its inhabitants who were descended from Moroccan or other African pilgrims who came to Jerusalem — and whose families had also been established there for generations. A large number of those displaced persons were moved to the Shu’afat Refugee Camp in a northern suburban area which Israel effectively annexed, in the summer of 1967, to become part of the enlarged “Greater Jerusalem Municipality” under Israeli law and administration. The Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem were given Israeli permanent residency.

At the time, in 1967, Israel’s then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan negotiated an agreement which still, technically, stands to this day, by which the Islamic Waqf (Trust) authorities (now Jordanian — a country with whom Israel has a full Peace Treaty — and Palestinian) administer affairs on the Haram ash-Sharif (except, of course, overall security, which is ultimately Israel’s responsibility), while Israel controls the Western Wall and the Western Wall Plaza.

In 1980, Israel proclaimed this Jerusalem (meaning, it was understood, the Greater Jerusalem Municipal area) as its eternal and undivided capital.

Now, a revived Jewish Quarter extends from the Western Wall Plaza. From 1967, a Rabbinic and an Israeli administrative prohibition existed against Jewish prayer up on the Haram ash-Sharif (Temple Mount) — but it appears to be eroding under pressure from the often-militant Israeli national-religious settlement movment and its ideological rabbis. And Palestinian Muslim leaders have been raising the alert in recent months that an attempt to institute Jewish prayer in or around the Al-Aqsa Mosque might result in a division or even an occupation of that extremely important religious site, similar to the situation that exists at the also extremely-important Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where Abraham and Sarah and some of their descendants are buried. A massacre of Palestinian worshippers at dawn prayer during Ramadan by a reserve IDF officer, Baruch Goldstein, who lived in the nearby Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arbaa in February 1994, has resulted in the extension of the institutional restrictions against Palestinian worshippers, sometimes for days during Jewish holiday periods. (Goldstein’s tomb in Kiryat Arbaa is the site of reverential visits for some of the more militant national-religious Jews)

Israeli religious and government officials do not respond directly to this fear, but they do accuse the Muslims of incitement.

The Rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinovich, told this reporter recently that before the 1994 massacre, everything was fine in the Ibrahimi Mosque.

The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that “[Israeli] Police on Wednesday detained an Israeli man and his daughter for a few hours after they ascended the Temple Mount and began to pray at the contested holy site, the Jerusalem police spokesperson reported. David Kirschenbaum told The Jerusalem Post he went up to the mount with his daughter on the day before her wedding, in order to take in the holiest site in Judaism. Kirschenbaum denied he prayed at the site, but said that he was pointing at sites on the horizon and police mistook his daughter’s nodding for Jewish prayer. Kirschenbaum said he was then led away from the Mount by police and taken for an investigation at a Jerusalem police station. He said police told them he was being provocative and when he disputed the arrest, they told him they ‘don’t want to get into a discussion over politics’. Kirschenbaum, who has no criminal record, was not charged with any crime and said he was not handcuffed during his arrest, though he was fingerprinted and made to sign an affidavit vowing he would not disturb the peace again”. This Jpost report can be read in full here.

Meanwhile, overnight (Thursday to Friday), as Israel’s YNet website reported, “Fire was set to a large mosque in the West Bank Palestinian village of Yasuf, east of Salfit, Thursday night. Hebrew slurs were sprayed on the walls that said: ‘We will burn all of you’. The words ‘price tag’ were also scrawled on the walls. ‘Price tag’ is the slogan adopted some months ago by extremist settlers who carry out reprisals against Palestinians in response to the evacuation of settlement structures by Israeli defense forces … Extremist settlers initiated their ‘price tag” attacks a few months ago. They included setting fire to Palestinian fields and damaging houses or vehicles. The defense establishment estimates that this current ‘price tag’ reprisal came in response to the 10-month building moratorium imposed on West Bank settlements by the cabinet. They expressed their concern that the situation would worsen”. This YNet report can be read in full here.

Clashes between the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinians in [Kafr] Yasuf were reported later Friday…

Filed under: Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians