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Moshe Kempinski , author of The Teacher and the Preacher, is the editor of the Jerusalem Insights weekly email journal and co-owner of Shorashim, a Biblical shop and learning center in the Old City of Jerusalem.
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By Moshe Kempinski
February 9, 2007
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If you follow the news carefully over the next couple of weeks you will be able to witness the careful and delicate work of creating a false new "reality". What began as an attempt to rebuild a damaged ramp leading to the Mughrabi gate has escalated into an international incident. The work is proceeding near a temporary walkway that replaces a centuries-old stairway which collapsed during storms in 2004. The Israeli authorities have explained that the renovations are needed to safeguard the ancient site and have told all the critics that there will be no structural damage to the ancient site or to the Temple Mount beside it.
Yet those facts will not deter the forces in the Arab world that are trying to diffuse and end the inter Palestinian warfare. History has taught that in deterirating situations like the one in the Palestinian Authority , one can always defelct the criticism and blame the Jew. The Palestinian leadership has made that very thought clear with their recent declaration, "We must unite the Hamas and [Fatah] blood in the struggle against Israel as we did at the beginning of the intifada " The Department of Arab and International Relations (DAIR) of the Palestinian Authority, has upped the ante by declaring that Israel has begun "demolishing two rooms in [the] Al- Aqsa mosque ... in line with the Israeli plans to demolish the entire holy shrine and build the alleged Solomon temple in its place." Israeli-Arab citizen Sheikh Raad Salah, a former security prisoner who heads the radical Islamic Movement, has issued a call for an Intifada of Israel's Arabs The leaders of Jordan, Syria and Iran, as well as Islamic chiefs in Egypt, has all condemned the work. "The world of Islam should show a serious reaction to the Zionist regime's insult to Al-Aksa Mosque," Iranian Islamic ruler Ayatollah Ali Khameini said on Wednesday and has called on Muslim nations to attack Israel in response .
An Israeli Foreign Ministry statement dismissed the criticism as an exploitation of the situation. "The Temple Mount is the holiest site of the Jewish people," Foreign Minister Tzippi Livny said in a statement Wednesday. "The State of Israel will never do anything to harm the freedom of worship of members of all religions -- in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel. There are irresponsible elements, who know full well that no harm is being caused here to any holy site, who are exploiting Israeli democracy to fan religious feelings for political gain ."
I look out the window of our shop in the old city and watch the foreign press wandering the streets of the Old city of Jerusalem passing the time and waiting for the explosion that in fact their very presence may inadvertently bring about. Yet the more menacing presence here in the streets of the Jewish Quarter are the blond-haired European crusaders who have come to make a presence and stand beside their comrades in arms against the Zionist creeping menace. They walk by in groups of three and four and look in disdain at any Jew that dares come across their way in the streets of the Jewish quarter.
I made a point of walking out of my shop on Tiferet Israel Street and descended the stairs to see what is being termed " an explosive powder keg" by the Western Wall. What I saw were hundreds of policemen and army alongside hundreds of journalist hovering over the fenced-in "pit of doom". Yet in the midst of the the powder keg were two small tractors with shovels attempting to dig out the mound of earth in order to construct the pylons that would hold up the bridge entry into the Mughrabi gate.
These small tractors looked so very different than the way they appear in some of the AP photographs. In those photographs , the angle of the shot make them look those otherworldly fighting machines in "War of The Worlds" with their gigantic arm hovering over the "small and vulnerable" mosques on the Temple Mount. In fact the little machines could hardly hold the burly driver sitting inside of them as he was maneuvering them on the mound in the Western Wall Plaza.
Arab politicians at the site were lamenting on the TV news that though the excavation seemed harmless the whole area was "closed in by fences and under a shroud of suspicious secrecy". At that point the antiquities department took the Arab politicians into the area and showed him all there was to see. I highly doubt that the personal tour will quench the thirst for drama and blood.
We are watching drama being choreographed and fueled by self serving purveyors of hate and abetted by a media and perhaps a public looking for drama and action. I met a freelance photographer on his way down to the wall. I asked him what was the big deal, as it is clear that the work has a very limited puropose and direction. He answered that the those facts are irrelevant and that "what is important is the story".
I fervently pray that the resulting choreographed story will not result in more unnecessary bloodshed. That doesn't seem to concern those who are fanning the flames because in the end they know that they can always blame Israel.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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