TEMPLE MOUNT – NOT LISTED IN THE LAND REGISTRY
By Nadav Shragai
Ha’aretz, Israel
July 6 2006
Tel Aviv architect Tuvia Sagiv, an amateur but well-known researcher
of the history of the Temple Mount, no doubt did not imagine that
his influence would go as far as the Oval Office of the president
of the United States. However, according to Dr. Shmuel Berkovits,
an attorney who has written a new book about the holy places, Sagiv
is the source for former president Bill Clinton?s proposal to divide
sovereignty over the Temple Mount vertically, from top to bottom. At
the end of December 2000, Clinton proposed that the Palestinians get
the sovereignty over the level of the mosques while the Jews make do
with sovereignty over the depths of the mount, the Western Wall and
the Holy of Holies.
Sagiv combed the Temple Mount with radar equipment and infra-red
cameras that were operated from helicopters flying above and alongside
the site. Relying on these tests, he claimed that the Temple had lain
at a depth of 16 meters below the water fountain between Al-Aqsa Mosque
and the Dome of the Rock, and that what is known as the Western Wall
is not the western wall of the temple but rather part of the wall
that was built by the Emperor Adrianus around the Roman shrine that
he built on the Temple Mount after the conquest of Jerusalem and its
destruction in the second century. Sagiv proposed breaking open a
giant gate in the Western Wall through which Jews could go to reach
the level of the Temple, under the level of mosques.
Sagiv’s revolutionary approach is not in keeping with accepted
scholarly opinions. Most of the important archaeologists and rabbis
to this day believe that the Holy of Holies is not situated deep
under the ground but rather at ground level as we know it at present,
exactly at the spot where the rock is located in the Dome of the Rock.
Berkovits, in his new book, "How Dreadful is This Place," recounts
the history of Sagiv’s theory, which was submitted more than 10
years ago to Ariel Sharon when he was still an opposition member of
the Knesset. At that time, Sagiv proposed to Sharon that it would
be possible to solve the problems of Jews and Moslems praying on
the Temple Mount by dividing the use of the site lengthwise rather
than breadthwise. Some time later, the U.S. Embassy asked Sagiv to
furnish them with an expository copy of his proposal, and in this
way the idea made its way into the hands of Clinton.
In any event, Berkovits is of the opinion that even if Sagiv’s idea
were more acceptable, the Palestinians would never agree to Israeli
sovereignty over the depths of the mount, both because of their
historic fear that the Jews would undermine the foundations of the
mosques and knock them down to rebuild the Temple, and because of
their anxiety lest the Jews dig there and find the remnants of the
Temple, proof that it existed on the Temple Mount, contrary to the
Palestinians’ claims about this.
"No holy buildings"
Holy sites are more or less Berkovits’ profession. He is a
world-renowned expert in the field, and he has been doing research
for 25 years, as well as teaching and consulting on these topics. He
is a member of the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies, serves
as an adviser to the Armenian Christian community, to the Museum of
Tolerance and the Diaspora Yeshiva. His doctoral thesis was put at
the disposal of the Israeli team at the Camp David peace talks with
Egypt in 1978 as the central reference document about the holy sites.
His previous book, "The Wars over the Holy Places," won first prize
in 2001, in the field of Israeli security, from the Jaffee Center
for Strategic Studies.
Academics and experts in international law will find a great
deal of interest in the analyses and the legal innovations in his
new book which deals with sanctity, politics and law in the holy
places in Jerusalem and in Israel in general. He even received an
enthusiastic foreword from the former president of the supreme court,
Meir Shamgar. (The two sit together on the committee for prevention of
the destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount). But the general
public will be more interested in those holy cows that Berkovits is
not afraid to slaughter, and not always with academic caution.
The most obvious example is his attitude toward the affair of the
burning of the synagogues at Gush Katif. Berkovits states: "The
Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces are keeping secret
the information, as if it was a military secret, that before the IDF
withdrew from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, the army chaplaincy
removed the sanctity of all the synagogues and religious study centers
in the Gaza Strip so that the buildings which the Palestinians looted,
burned and destroyed in the settlements that were evacuated were no
longer synagogues but merely regular buildings."
Berkovits says he posed a question to the army chaplaincy on this
matter but received an evasive answer, and the military chaplains
were prepared only informally to tell him of these developments.
In his book, Berkovits cites, for the first time, the full halakhic
ruling written by Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger in which he gives the
details of the required halakhic procedure to remove a synagogue’s
sanctity. The most substantive stage of this procedure comes when
there is an act of sale, and the central role is supposed to be that of
the chief chaplain of the IDF. In his halakhic opinion, Rabbi Metzger
sats the state must assign its rights according to the property laws
to the army chief rabbi, and he is the one who must later carry
out the sale to the state treasury. At the time of expropriation,
Metzger instructed, the state must make a legal commitment to give
something in return for the buildings whose sanctity has been removed,
and for buildings that serve for other religious purposes (such as
ritual baths). This commitment, he says, will serve as a payment for
the sale "and will lead to the implementation of the removal of the
sanctity." Berkovits also refers to another, albeit less painful,
sham, presented to the Israeli public in 2001 : the negotiations in
Taba between representatives from Israel and from the Palestinian
Authority, which devoted a great deal of time then to the status of
Jerusalem’s Old City and the Temple Mount. The foreign minister at
the time, Shlomo Ben-Ami, and Yossi Beilin, declared that there had
been progress in all the issues and stated that we had never been so
close as then to signing a peace agreement. The person who revealed
that this was a bluff was none other than Ben-Ami himself. The book
quotes him as saying: "It was a week before the elections and this
is a legitimate act. It would have been stupid not to take advantage
of it." The former prime minister, Ehud Barak, also refers to this
display as "groundless."
Berkovits also does not hesitate to apparently contradict earlier
publications about the Taba talks, such as that of Dr. Menahem Klein
in his book "Shattering a Taboo."
Klein wrote in this book that, at the Taba talks, "Israel agreed
to place the neighborhoods close to the Old City (such as Silwan,
a-Tur, Ras el-Amud, and Sheikh Jarrah) under Palestinian sovereignty,
and that the Palestinians agreed that neighborhoods like Gilo, East
Talpiot, French Hill and Ramot would be part of Israel." Berkovits’
book, "How Dreadful is This Place’" offers a different version,
that of attorney Gilad Sher, who headed the Israeli negotiating team
to the talks. Sher contends that the sides did not really conduct
negotiations and did not arrive at any real agreement on that at all.
All the same, Berkovits points out that the very fact that the Israeli
side agreed to the Clinton document (although with reservations)
gives the impression as if there was some type of agreement.
The big denial
The book devotes space to the great show of denial the Muslims have
initiated in the past few years about everything to do with the
existence in the past of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, and
it brings examples to illustrate that this is not how things were in
the past. A guide to the Temple Mount, put out by the Supreme Muslim
Council in 1924, states explicitly that "the identity of the Temple
Mount as the site of the holy shrine of Solomon is beyond any kind
of doubt." Berkovits’ book also quotes texts from the Palestinian
historian Aref al-Aref (1892-1973). Al-Aref was the partner of the
Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini in the leadership of the Palestinian
National Movement at the beginning of the Mandatory period, and in
his book, "A Detailed History of Jerusalem," he writes: "The Wailing
Wall is the exterior wall of the temple that was reconstructed by
Herod … and the Jews visit there frequently and, on particular,
on Tisha B’Av [the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple]. And
when they visit the wall, they remember the glorious and unforgettable
history and they begin to weep."
Berkovits returns to a finding he mentioned in the past and makes it
more concrete – about claims that the Western Wall is holy to Islam
because that is where Mohammed tied his winged horse, Al-Burak. Until
the middle of the 19th century, various places in the Harm el-Sharif
[as the Muslims call the Temple Mount] compound were mentioned as
the place to which he tied his horse, sometimes the eastern wall,
sometimes the southern wall, but never the Western wall. Berkovits
assumes that the Muslims’ eventual decision to choose the Western wall
was a reaction to the fact that, at the beginning of the 19th century,
the Jews started to bring chairs, tables and Torah scrolls with them
when they came to pray in the plaza in front of the Western wall. He
also cites a long list of proofs of the existence of the Temple on the
Temple Mount. Among the interesting details, and the lesser known ones,
on this list are two Greek inscriptions from the Second Temple period
that were found in the vicinity of the Lions’ Gate that prohibit the
entry of foreigners beyond the barrier that surrounds the Temple,
and threaten trespassers with the penalty of death in the following
language: "A foreign person shall not enter inside the partition that
surrounds the Temple or to the court that surrounds it, and whoever
is caught will pay with his life and his fate is death."
Incidentally, a photograph of the inscriptions appears in the complete
guide to the Temple Mount archaeological excavations that was published
a few years ago by Dr. Eilat Mazar, and they are mentioned in the
description of the Temple by Josephus in his book "The Jewish War."
Berkovits, in his book, proposes a series of changes in Israeli
legislation relating to holy sites, following the author’s discovery
that there is no definition of the term "holy place." It also points to
a hitherto unknown fact that could have far-reaching implications in
the argument over the High Court of Justice’s right to hear petitions
about implementing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount: In
the most famous case on this subject, known as "the High Court ruling
on nationalist groups," the High Court ruled that Israeli courts do
not have the authority to discuss whether the right to prayer can
be implemented at holy sites altogether, and at the Temple Mount in
particular. With this in mind, all the petitions dealing with the
implementation of the Jews’ right to pray at the Temple Mount over
some 30 years have been rejected. But in a different case, known as
"the High Court ruling on women at the Wall," the High Court ruled
that it has the authority to discuss the right to pray at the Western
Wall, and in this ruling it effectively overturned its own ruling in
the case on the nationalist groups.
In the last chapter, a fascinating issue is examined. It transpires
that the Temple Mount and most of the Western Wall are not registered
in any way in the Israel Land Registry ("Tabu") and the issue of who
their earthly owners are, has not yet been decided. At the same time,
and contrary to what is generally thought to be true, Israel has
constantly refrained from expropriating the Western Wall so that this
will not be interpreted as a relinquishment of the other walls of the
Temple. One part of the Western Wall was expropriated and registered
in the Land Registry as property owned by the State of Israel. The area
in question is between the southwestern corner of the Western Wall and
as far as the "Makhama" building [deep beneath which lie the tunnels
from the Second Temple period], along the entire height of the wall.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress