The Truth About the Temple Mount Excavations

Everyone is up in arms about Israel’s purported excavations “on” the Temple Mount (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). There have been calls for a new Intifada, catalyzed apparently by Israel’s construction project.

So what, exactly, are the Israelis doing? Take a look at the below image:

KEY:
GREEN represents the Temple Mount and surrounding area under complete control of the Waqf.
ORANGE represents the Western Wall.
RED represents the Mugrabi Bridge which is under complete Israeli control as stipulated in the post Six Day War provisions with the Waqf.

Moshe Dayan, having decided to cede control of the Temple Mount to the Waqf, despite Israel’s having secured its territory in 1967, nonetheless wished to maintain an entrance on the Israeli side, be it for security reasons or for non-Muslim worshippers who wished to access the Temple Mount from Israel. This entrance was by way of a bridge (RED) to the Mugrabi Gate. This bridge is completely outside of the premises of the Temple Mount.

Why is Israel excavating under the site of the bridge? In order to make sure that no antiquities will be harmed when laying the infrastructure for the new, more structurally sound, Mugrabi Bridge. The original bridge had been damaged in an earthquake and subsequent snowstorm and was declared unsafe by engineers. The new temporary bridge impinged on the women’s section at the Western Wall, significantly reducing it in size.

Is there reason for controversy? Israeli archaeologists are up in arms as the pylons which support the bridge are being built in what it apparently an archaeology “rich” area. The pre-construction excavations currently underway are meant to uncover and remove artifacts which might have otherwise been destroyed by the building. But it is the Israelis who have the right to protest the digging, as it is taking place on Israeli sovereign soil, albeit with the intention of the preservation of priceless antiquities.

This is to be contrasted with continued unmonitored excavations by the Waqf at the Temple Mount which have rendered untold damage to both invaluable antiquities and evidence of the Jewish temples. Israel did not use this violation of the 1967 Protection of Holy Places laws as an excuse for violence, nor was the religious outcry against this desecration anything close to the recent protests against the fabrication of Israel’s damage.

A small group of dedicated archaeologists and volunteers founded the Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount to protest the Waqf’s ongoing excavations and to sift through the truckloads of rubble generated for items of archaeological significance (pictures here).

So what can you do?
1. Tell the truth to as many people as you can.
2. Check out this page from the Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount’s website.

BREAKING: Blood Libels

I caught the tail end of an interview on Israel’s Channel 1 where it was revealed that an Israeli scholar has published a book in which he contends that there is historical basis for the blood libels of the Middle Ages.

There is, of course, the infamous article of Yisrael Yuval which places the blame for the blood libels on the graphic post-Crusades Jewish literature. But this is a whole different ballgame.

UPDATE: A did a little digging around, and the scholar in question is Professor Ariel Toaff of Bar-Ilan University. The title of the book is Easter of Blood (according to the Telegraph; according to The Washington Post, the title is Bloody Passovers: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders).

Have a look at the following articles: here, here, and here. The purpose of academic tenure is precisely to facilitate the publication of these types of controversial works, while protecting the security of the professor’s job in light of fierce criticism. As is often the case, I don’t think that any conclusions should be drawn from three newspaper articles. I would like to see members of the academic community reading and reviewing the book, and either verifying or rebutting its purported claims.

PSI Jerusalem

(PSI = Picture Site Identification)

A free guest posting to whoever can tell me where this picture was taken:

The Location of the Temple

Prof. Joseph Patrich of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology has arrived at an academically divergent, though apparently authoritative conclusion for mapping the exact location of the Second Temple based on a convergence of archaeological and rabbinic evidence.

One interesting implication of his study:

In spotting the Temple in this way, Patrich concludes that the rock, over which the Dome of the Rock mosque was built in the 7th century C.E. is outside the confines of the Temple. The rock is considered by Moslems to be the spot from which Muhammad ascended to heaven and for Jews the place at which the binding of Isaac took place.

Army as Family

The upper echelons of the military here like to emphasize that the IDF is a family-oriented army, what with weekly (or biweekly, or even daily) leave, families visiting their sons on the base over the weekend, and the notorious mothers who somehow attain the phone number of their son’s company commander and bug him with their perceived grievances.  (We had a mother who called our company commander to complain that on Fridays when we were given leave for the weekend, we weren’t given breakfast.  While not being fed is in contravention of IDF regulations, no soldier ever made a stink about it.  Until one Friday when we were ordered to approach a table set with food and eat something before boarding the buses out to Be’er Sheva.)

Amos Harel reports for Haaretz today that six (!) “settler families” have lived in an IDF camp in Hebron for over a decade.  Harel notes that it is a “company sized camp” and that while the settlers enter and exit the camp through the same gates as the soldiers, they are nonetheless physically separated from the soldiers in their dwellings by a “fence of corrugated metal.”

While Dror Etkes of Peace Now contends that this situation is indicative of the “growing distortion in the relations between the IDF and settlers,” so long as this arrangement has not been declared illegal, I am happy to see a situation where settlers and soldiers are able to coexist in Hebron in such close quarters.