WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Israelis rightly joined others this week in condemning an Israeli journalist who snuck into Muslims-only Mecca during Biden’s trip to Arabia. But critics of that who also deny Jews rights to visit and pray on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount engage in an unjust double standard.
Tobin’s Right – Jerusalem’s Not Islamic Like Mecca
Ok, what bothered you most about President Biden’s trip to Israel and Arabia last week? Non-progress on oil production, Iran confrontation and the Abraham Accords? Removal of the Israeli flag from Biden’s car and omission of Israeli government representatives in his visit to Augusta Victoria Hospital over the “green line” in Jerusalem? What I wrote about last week, Biden’s reiterating a western Palestine 1949-ceasefire lines-based “two-state solution”? By me, the disrespect that Biden and Saudi Arabia jointly showed, in their “joint statement” vowing “to remain closely coordinated” in their joint pursuit of that “two-state solution,” for Judaism’s holiest site, not the Western Wall, which is a retaining wall of it, but the Temple Mount, where the two Jewish Temples had successively stood for a millennium.
Jonathan Tobin wrote a sound article this week, Judaism Deserves as Much Respect as Islam, JNS, Thursday, 7/21/22, rightly criticizing an Israeli TV journalist who not only snuck into Muslims-Only Mecca during the President’s Arabia visit, but broadcast it. But Tobin’s focus went beyond this “mere joy ride” that “completely lacked respect not just for the rules [of the country he visited], but for the customs and sensibilities of Muslims.”
Tobin was rightly concerned that this “journalistic stunt by a deeply foolish person” might complicate Saudi Arabia’s willingness and even ability to reach normalization with Israel and a regional alliance against Iran, but it was “another takeaway from this fiasco” that formed the heart of his article:
“As even some Israeli outlets pointed out, many in the Muslim world will draw an analogy between Tamar’s [the Israeli journalist’s] thoughtless act and the willingness of Jews to visit and even pray on the Temple Mount. Some, like Haaretz, even compared it to Ariel Sharon’s walk on the mount that has been mythologized [it had been pre-planned, as Tobin points out] by apologists for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as having set off the Second Intifada.”
I highly respect but don’t always agree with Tobin [e.g., he’s prone to say “West Bank” instead of Judea-Samaria], but I agree with him fully on his calling out the falsity of this Mecca-Temple Mount analogy:
“While Muslims have every right to expect Israelis and anyone else to respect their customs and religious sensibilities with respect to Mecca, the notions that the same rules ought to apply in Jerusalem are not so much inappropriate as they are outrageous.”
Tobin correctly writes that “To this day, Palestinian leaders continue to promote the lie that the Temple Mount has no connection to Judaism and is a solely Muslim holy place,” and demand Jews keep off and not pray there. He accuses Muslims of harboring “a continuing belief that all of the region is inherently Muslim and that non-Muslims there are dhimmi, second-class persons.”
Robert Wilken, in The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History & Thought (p. 23), refuted from the Christian perspective this notion that Palestine is “inherently Muslim”:
“Palestine was joined to the West, first through the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Ptolemies and Seleucids [Alexander’s successors], later through the Romans…. The people of Palestine became part of our history, the history of Greece and Rome and of Christianity, not simply a distant chapter in the fortunes of the ancient Near East.”
There is, of course, a homeland Jewish refutation of Palestine [i.e., the land of Israel] as “inherently Muslim” as well. In Jerusalem [n.b.] as elsewhere, it’s written in stone.
Tobin laments “an unwillingness on the part of the West to demand that their institutions and culture be treated with the same deference as those of Islam.” I agree with him here too, and I would start with decrying the use by those speaking for institutions of the West of terminology (not least “West Bank” of the Hashemite kingdom of [Trans-]Jordan and “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem,” including the Temple Mount) delegitimizing Palestine equity of the West, not just of us Jews.
A classic capitulation of Christian along with Jewish equity in the Temple Mount was perpetrated last year, May24, 2021, by the Philadelphia Inquirer, in reporting, so to speak, on Israel’s reopening access to the Temple Mount to Jews, to whom it had been temporarily closed by Israel in the face of Arab rioting there. Under a headline “Mosque Visits Resume” [they’d never been suspended for Muslims], the Inq ran a photo of Arabs clashing with police the previous day, captioned:
“Palestinians clash with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa mosque complex Friday. On Saturday, a group of 250 Jews visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.” [emphasis added]
I.e., after ceding the millennia-honored Western name of the site, “Temple Mount,” in favor of the Muslim name, “Al-Aqsa mosque complex” [which it had done before – e.g., on 7/15/17, the Jerusalem Post and Inq ran the same photo of Israeli police standing before a door leading to the Temple Mount; the JPost caption called the site “the Temple Mount compound,” the Inq “the Al Aqsa mosque compound”], the Inq went on to champion the extreme Muslim contention that the mantle of “the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam,” embraces the entirety of the Temple Mount complex, not just the Al-Aqsa mosque building itself at the Mount’s southern end. The Jews visiting the site that day visited the Mount plaza, not the Muslim mosque building itself.
But back to what bothered me most about Biden’s Israel-and-Arabia visit this past week. For two decades, Saudi Arabia has stuck to its guns, “the Arab Initiative” of 2002. As the Saudi foreign minister stated last week, referencing its 2002 demand, “We have committed to a two-state settlement with a Palestinian state on the occupied territories with east Jerusalem as its capital – that’s our requirement for peace. That hasn’t changed.”
By us, of course, there are no “occupied territories,” least of all an “east Jerusalem,” but, talk about disrespect of what others, in this case most Jews and some Christians, deem holy to them, there’s an arrogance to this Muslim outrage that Jewish and Christian equity in the Temple Mount site (antedating Islam by, respectively, sixteen hundred and six hundred years) is zero. Instead of exhibiting, as Tobin put it, “an unwillingness on the part of the West to demand that their institutions and culture be treated with the same deference as those of Islam,” the West ought to say “Jews and Christians will walk meekly out of the Temple Mount and historic Jerusalem when Muslims meekly walk out of Medina and Mecca.”