11 February 2007

 

The Wailing Wall

On Thursday I was in Jerusalem to meet with a Palestinian NGO which works in the field of House Demolitions in co-operation with the Rabbis fro Human Rights. We had been meant to meet on Wednesday but that was postponed and my contact, Tzachri, later apologised for not having gotten back to me. We spoke on Thursday morning and agreed to speak again at 2:30pm, and to meet at 3pm near the Wailing Wall, the western wall of the Temple Mount. In the afternoon he didn't answer. So I made my way to the Old City. When I still had no reply I wondered over to the Wailing Wall. Security was tight. I wanted to go into the enclosure, to find a toilette, but the queues at the entrance were too long.

So I climbed the stairs back up to the Jewish Quarter (where I know where there is a free toilette). I passed an Al Jazeera news crew, an attractive reporter stood with her back to the Wailing Wall and above it the beautiful golden Dome of the Rock, preparing to talk into the camera. I paused and looked down. Two bulldozers moved to the right on the Wall, outside the south-western corner of the enclosure, moving earth around. They're repairing a temporary bridge to the Mugrabe Gate which hovers many feet up in the air, (when seen from the west).

In 1967 Moshe Dayan agreed with the Waqf, that it would continue to hold authority over Al-Haram Asharif (the Temple Mount). The Jews would control the Wailing Wall and the Mugrabe Gate. What is going on now is therefore legitimate; what the bulldozers are actually doing is utterly innocuous. But the storm which it is whipping up across the Muslim World, subjective though it might be, is very real. Ehud Olmert might not understand this, but those bulldozers look very different to Muslim eyes, which include almost one in five Israeli citizens. It is not worth provoking a third intifada over the questionable stability of a ramp which has stood for decades.

I glanced at the slowly moving bulldozers for a few seconds, then went into the Jewish Quarter to find that toilette. The meeting which I came to Jerusalem for never transpired. They still haven't gotten back to me.



(Haaratz has two very good pieces on this today. One by Uzy Benziman,
the other by Danny Rubinstein and Yoav Stern.)






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