The al-Aqsa intifada also began on the Temple Mount when, using the pretext of the visit of Ariel Sharon the day before, Palestinians erupted in violence during the Friday prayers of September 29, 2000, in what appeared as a pre-meditated attempt to obtain through the use of force what they failed to achieve during the Camp David Conference that July. A pretext, because had they wished to keep the quiet, in spite of what they regarded as a "provocation," they could have contained their "anger" and "frustration"--otherwise what would prevent the Israelis too, at any time they are angry and frustrated, from causing a conflagration? The question here is one of maturity and responsibility: the Palestinians are supposedly not deranged children who irresponsibly break loose and cause hundreds of casualities to themselves and others just because they are frustrated.

But the pattern is not new: anything Israel does, even an act of self-defense against overwhelming force, is provocation and aggression, but anything the Palestinians do, even the most murderous and cowardly attacks, is a commendable act of bravery for which they often win the title of Shahid (Martyr). They pit children, armed with rocks and bombs, in their hundreds, against Israeli soldiers, and dub their unprovoked attacks jihad, but when they are hit in the ensuing test of force, then the Israelis are the cruel enemy that shoots indiscriminately at teenage Palestinians. It does not occur to them that had they not sent children to the front, they would not have been hurt, exactly as they could avoid the entire intifada had they contained their repeated "days of rage."
Next issue: Part 2

Raphael Israeli is professor of Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Chinese history at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. This essay is adapted from a study published by the Ariel Center for Policy Research.

The Christian Stake in a Jewish Jerusalem

Edward Alexander

(The following is a speech delivered at AFSI's Western Conference in Portland, Oregon in April of this year.)

Here we are in the city of Portland, intensely agitated over events in a city at the other end of the world, a city which some among us have never seen, perhaps never will see. But the capacity of Jerusalem to arouse strong feelings in those who have no actual experience of it as a living reality is well known. In his autobiography, John Henry Newman wrote that the 1841 proposal of the Church of England (to which he then belonged) to consecrate jointly with Lutherans a Bishop of Jerusalem had brought him to his "death-bed" in the Anglican Church. "Have you heard of this fearful business of the Bishop of Jerusalem?" he wrote to a friend in October 1841. "It seems we are in the way to fraternise with Protestants of all sorts--Monophysites, half-converted Jews and even Druses. If any such event should take place, I shall not be able to keep a single man from Rome." Newman's contemporary, the intensely Protestant John Ruskin, remarked in the final chapter of his autobiography that the landscape of Scotland has been of more import in world history "than all the lovely countries of the South, except only Palestine." Neither Newman nor Ruskin had ever seen Jerusalem or any other part of Palestine--Eretz Yisrael.

Still more striking an example comes from the diary of Moshe Flinker, an Orthodox Jewish boy who, hiding from the Nazis in Brussels in 1943, found consolation for his lonely suffering in a school almanac from Eretz Yisrael: "It...seemed like a letter to me, as a sign of life of the rest of my people....I can hardly bring myself to return it to the library. The name of the almanac is 'Moladeti'--My Homeland. Each time I stand to say the eighteen benedictions I direct my whole soul to my lovely land, and I see it before my eyes; I see the coast, I see Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Haifa. Then I see Jerusalem."

For most Jews, including Jesus, Jerusalem was the navel of the world, the place where God had touched the earth and which He had chosen as His dwelling place. For Christians there are two Jerusalems, the historical memory--the City of David and Solomon, the site of the Temple, the city where Jesus preached and performed miracles, outside whose walls he was put to death and buried, and rose again--and the mystical city, "the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem...the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven" (Heb. 12:22-23), where there is no temple (Rev. 21:22) but where a new covenant is mediated. The builder and architect of this mystical Jerusalem is God and its citizenship is acquired through faith. It transcends both space and time.

For Jews, Jerusalem is all this and more. The Jerusalem of priests and prophets, of rabbis and saints, is also the Jerusalem of synagogues and museums and schools and supermarkets. It is for the well-being of Jerusalem that Jews pray at each wedding and funeral, at the beginning of each Sabbath and the end of every day. "Next year in Jerusalem" is the concluding utterance at Passover and Yom Kippur.

Because normative Judaism never separated (as Christian mysticism would) celestial from earthly Jerusalem, it made of Jerusalem a unique symbol of orderly civilized life"--For thus says the Lord:...My House shall be called an House of prayer for all peoples." (Isaiah 56:7) Judaism alone attached sanctity to the whole of

August 2001               - 7 -               Outpost