Israeli
Politics Of ‘Archeology’
In Jerusalem
By Nicola Nasser
14 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The Israeli arrogance of being
the regional military super power, unequivocally backed by the U.S.
world super power, is dictating a kind of politics that deals trivially
with the national and religious grievances of Israel’s geopolitical
neighbors, whom the Jewish state is supposedly aspiring to live with
in peace and as a regional integral part, while at the same time she
is pursuing policies that antagonize those same neighbors to preclude
altogether whatever potential is left for peace.
Ahead of a trilateral U.S.-sponsored Palestinian-Israeli summit on February
19, a meeting of the Quartet of international Middle East peace mediators
on February 21 and amid daily clashes between native Palestinians and
more than 3.000-force of special military and security units deployed
within an area of five square kilometers in the Israeli-occupied Old
Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers embarked on Thursday on an eight-month
excavations project some 50 meters from the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa
mosque, but on the grounds of the Islamic Haram al-Sharif, Islam’s
third holiest site, amid clashes that wounded scores of Palestinians
and hopeless prayers they would not develop into bloodletting.
Highlighting Israeli destructive arrogance of power, Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert on Sunday trivially dismissed the protesting Arab, Muslim
and Christian outcries as merely “Arab extremists inciting violence,”
adding: “There is no religious issue here,” immediately
after his cabinet “approved continuation of construction at the
approach to the Mughrabeh Gate within the proposed framework, at all
possible speed,” spurning a call by his “defense”
and two other cabinet ministers to consider halting the excavations
and ostensibly expecting world public opinion to believe him and belie
more than two billion Arabs, Muslims and Christians who have confirmed
there was a very sensitive and highly-explosive “religious issue”
and moved towards the United Nations and UNESCO in the hope they could
overcome Olmert’s arrogance of power in a new round of lost battles
between might and right.
Among the louder protesting voices whom Olmert dismissed as “extremists
inciting violence,” in addition to Israel’s PLO partner
in Oslo peace accords and Israeli Arab-Palestinians, are Jordan and
Egypt, both U.S. allies and the only Arab countries to sign peace treaties
with Israel, Saudi Arabia, another U.S ally and initiator of the Arab
League-adopted initiative to make peace with Israel, the Turkish Secretary
General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, whose country is a an important
regional friend of Israel and a NATO member, and the Churches for Middle
East Peace whose board chair Maureen Shea and executive director Corinne
Whitlatch on Friday sent letters to the U.S. administration warning
that “peacemaking may be overwhelmed by the consequences of Israel's
actions in the Old City of Jerusalem,” to name a few.
The eye of the present storm is Bab al-Magharibah, located in the southern
section of al-Haram al-Sharif's western wall, which connects Al Aqsa
Mosque compound with Jerusalem's southern neighborhoods; it was used
by the residents of the Magharibah Quarter which was demolished by Israeli
bulldozers in June 1967 to build the “Jewish Quarter” in
its place. On 28 September, 2000, the comatose former Israeli Prime
Minister, Ariel Sharon, used Bab al- Magharibah as his entry point to
“visit” the Haram al-Sharif, igniting a firestorm of protest
and sparking the Al Aqsa Intifada (uprising), which brought the peace
process to a deadlock until now. In August of 1929, the same site sparked
an uprising known in Palestinian political literature as the “Al-Buraq
Revolt.”
Al-buraq is the Arab-Islamic name of Al Aqsa compound’s western
wall, which the Jews called the “Wailing Wall” before changing
it to the “Western Wall (of the Temple Mount, a widely-spread
knowledge that has yet to be vindicated by historical fact or archeological
findings) after the creation of Israel in 1948. The Israeli Occupying
power after its overwhelming victory in 1967 confiscated by force the
keys to Bab al-Magharibah from the Islamic Waqf to make them ever since
Israel’s “Achilles’ heel” or “Joha's nail”
to claim its imposed “partnership” on the Haram al-Sharif,
later using that self-proclaimed “partnership” at the Camp
David negotiations in 2000 to demand joint sovereignty over the mosque
area.
Jordan says Israeli excavations violate the peace treaty with Israel;
according to this treaty the Jewish state accepted Jordan's custody
of the Islamic and Christian holy places in eastern Jerusalem. The OIC
says they are a flagrant violation to international law and that the
occupying state is irreconcilable to alter the shape of religious and
historical sites. Palestinians say the Israeli excavations are in violation
of the status quo accord that governs Jerusalem since the British mandate.
The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “Israel
exploits the unlimited support from the USA and the unexplainable indifference
on the part of the international community.”
The PLO condemned the excavations as “unilateral provocations
(which) threaten to undermine a fragile opportunity for peace”
and confirmed that, “the Haram Al-Sharif is under the administrative
jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf and is listed as a UNESCO
World Heritage Site,” adding: “Any work potentially affecting
the Haram Al-Sharif must be coordinated with the Waqf, according to
an agreement with Israel. Current work was not coordinated with the
Waqf, in violation of the agreement;” Palestinian and non-Palestinian
Islamic authorities agree and add that all renovations should be confined
to restoring whatever sites damaged to their status quo ante.
Osnat Goaz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority rejected
statements that the excavations posed any danger to the holy site, but
Jordan's King Abdullah II called them “a threat to the foundations
of the Al Aqsa mosque.” 18 leading Israeli archeologists in March
2006 objected to the plan, said it was “illegal” and warned
it will cause grave damage to one of the most important archeological
sites in Israel and the world.
The 22-member Arab League, the 54-member Organization of Islamic Conference
(OIC), the more than 90-member Non-aligned Movement (NAM) and Churches
for Middle East Peace, among many others, were on alert to avert the
snowballing confrontation, held emergency meetings, and decided to move
to the UN Security Council, hopelessly hoping that their move would
not be aborted by the U.S. veto power as it had in previous similar
cases; similar moves are planned with the UNESCO. Meanwhile on the ground
the Higher Follow-up Committee of Arab Israelis, the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) and the anti-Israeli occupation Palestinian factions
are amassing popular peaceful protests amid mounting Israeli military
reinforcements to quell such protests. Chief Palestinian Negotiator
Saeb Erekat warned: “Enough is enough. Recent provocations risk
bulldozing us back into the abyss.” Khaled Misha’al, the
exiled leader of Hamas, warned also that Israel “is playing with
fire.”
However the Israeli arrogance of power, from previous experience, is
betting on the Arab, Islamic and peace-loving roaring protests being
without teeth and that they would as in past similar cases subsidize,
of course after the usual falling of Palestinian “martyrs!”
The Arab League chief on Saturday said Israel is attempting to alter
the features of Jerusalem. Amr Moussa summed up the whole controversy
or more closer to the truth the whole conflict, which the latest Israeli
excavations are only an episode in a 60-year old Israeli pre-planned
non-stop effort to follow up the ethnic cleansing (see “The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine,” Ilan Pappe, Oneworld Publications, Oxford,
England, 2006) and the destruction of the material existence of Palestinian
communities with a cultural cleansing that will erase the Palestinians
from the world memory as it wiped out their country from the map of
the world.
Whatever name you give to it -- being “construction,” “modernization,”
“renovation,” “Judaization” or “archeological
excavations” -- a process of cultural cleansing of Jerusalem has
been going on in the Holy City since Israel occupied it in 1967.
Islam’s third holiest site in Jerusalem is the heart and soul
of the Arab and Palestinian national, religious, historical and cultural
heritage and the symbol of their more than 5.000-year uninterrupted
existence on the land, long before the Hebrews swept into Palestine
through the blood of butchered men, women and children of the completely
destructed Jericho, according to the Old Testament. Destruction of Al
Aqsa Mosque would, God forbids, crown the Israeli cleansing of the Palestinian
cultural structure after obliterating their existential infrastructure.
Robert Bevan, author of “The Destruction of Memory: Architecture
at War,” should have visited Jerusalem or at least should have
got access to the Holy City to update his book with the latest example
of cultural cleansing in modern history: “The first step in liquidating
a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its
history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture,
invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what
it is and what it was,” he wrote in an opening for the second
chapter of his book, quoting from Milan Kundera’s The Book Of
Laughter and Forgetting.
A reviewer of Bevan’s book, Abe Hayeem, (an architect and member
of Architects & Planners for Justice) wrote on 3 February 2006:
“Israel's ‘otherisation’ of the Palestinians by the
building of the Separation Barrier, while destroying thousands of houses,
trees and farms, and creating what are in effect vast prison enclaves,
has ironic echoes of the ghettos that European Jews experienced.”
Hayeem missed upgrading his review by how the Israeli occupation has
changed Jerusalem’s landscape, including renaming its historical
sites and even streets.
Similarly, Afif Safieh, PLO’s envoy in Washington D.C. and former
Palestinian delegate to the Vatican and the U.K., seems also to have
missed the point when, in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter
on January 19, he quoted the Zionist leader Nachum Goldman as saying
in the 1970s while commenting on former US Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy: “It seems to me that diplomacy
in the Middle East is the art of delaying the inevitable as long as
possible.”
Safieh interprets the inevitable as the creation of a Palestinian state
on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel in 1967, but the
facts Israel is creating on the ground in Jerusalem are pre-empting
the creation of such a state and is more realistically making Goldman’s
quotation a valid description of the inevitable end goal of the current
Israeli policies, a cultural cleansing to crown the eroding Palestinian
infrastructural existence in the Holy City, a cleansing that starts
with erasing the Arab-Islamic memory of the city and would inevitably
make a similar erasing of its Christian memory easier later on.
Nicola Nasser is veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank
of the Israeli occupied territories.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights