God's Gold (6 page)

Throughout its history Jerusalem has always been the focus of extreme Middle Eastern politics—bomb scares, street skirmishes, and murder are daily occurrences. Israeli politics is wild and spontaneous; people suck the marrow out of every hour of every day as if it might be their last. You certainly know you're alive when you visit the Holy Land.

The morning I flew to Israel in April 2005 to meet the director of the Temple Mount Faithful, the Middle East was once again in uproar. Three fourteen-year-old Palestinians had been caught red-handed smuggling weapons in Gaza and were shot dead by the Israel Defense Force. Gazan militia responded in the usual biblical fashion—an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—by pumping eighty mortars and Qasam rockets into the Jewish settlement of Gush Katif. The same day, extreme right-wing Jews from the Revava movement marched on the Temple Mount to demonstrate against its “occupation” by Arabs. Some 8,000 police were drafted in to patrol the entrances to the site for three days. The extremists failed to break in. Instead, thousands of Palestinians, including the leader of the West Bank's Hamas cell, Hassan Yousef, flooded the Mount to create a human shield.

Meanwhile, dozens of right-wingers, opponents of the Gaza disengagement plan, burned tires along Tel Aviv's Ayalon Highway, chained the gates of seventeen Tel Aviv schools, and hung signs on their railings reading
JEWS DO NOT EXPEL JEWS
. Should the Israeli withdrawal go ahead, they threatened to paralyze the country with civil disorder.
Jew fighting Jew is a familiar theme stretching back to the First Jewish Revolt of AD 66–70, a historical event that effectively killed the House of Israel and lost the Temple treasure to Rome. The cliché that history repeats is a deadly truth in the embattled Middle East. Lessons are not learned.

Elsewhere, a bored Jordanian workman repairing the bulging eastern wall of the Temple Mount of Jerusalem was accused of defacing this UNESCO World Heritage Site by incising the word
Allah
into the masonry. At the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber was arrested as he tried to take out as many Israeli soldiers as possible. His long woolen overcoat concealing five homemade pipe bombs, worn in temperatures of 86 degrees Fahrenheit, gave his deadly plot away. To travel from the UK to Israel is a complete metamorphosis, a culture shock that sees inertia replaced by thunderous passion.

Jerusalem's Temple Mount is a place of extremes. With its tranquil landscaped gardens, breathtaking blue-tiled Dome of the Rock mosque, and endless fountains and soothing water features, it is extremely beautiful. When you escape the winding alleys of the Arab souk surrounding the Temple Mount, and pop out of the oriental bustle into the open spaces where the Jewish temples of Solomon and Herod once stood, the air somehow appears cleaner, saturated with spirituality. The accumulation of history on the Temple Mount deeply enhances the sense otherworldliness.

However, the holiest place on earth is also one of the deadliest, a seething volcano of hatred that emits tremors that erupt down the centuries. Over the past four thousand years, 118 conflicts have been fought in Jerusalem. It only takes a minor provocation for all hell to break loose. Witness the Tunnel Riots of September 1996, when the government of Benjamin Natanyahu opened an ancient tunnel complex leading beneath the Western Wall. Fierce fighting kicked off, with the deaths of seventy Palestinians and seventeen Israeli soldiers. In 2000, Ariel Sharon's politically insensitive visit to Temple Mount triggered the second Palestinian intifada. With good reason Meron Benvenisti,
the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, calls the rival Jewish and Muslim claims to the Temple Mount “a time bomb…of apocalyptic dimensions.”

In recent years this bomb has started to tick increasingly loudly. One of the fundamental reasons why extremist right-wing Jewish organizations like the Temple Mount Faithful have pressured Vatican City into releasing the Temple treasures looted by Titus in AD 70 is to prepare for the pending liberation of the Mount from Arab occupation and for the rebuilding of a Third Temple. According to Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, a paratrooper who helped free Jerusalem during the Six-Day War of 1967, and founder of the Temple Institute, “The State of Israel can only be one thing—a State with a Temple at its center…. All of today's troubles originate in the sin of abandoning the Temple Mount and the site of the Holy Temple.”

Such right-wing Jews are convinced that we are living in “end-time” that will witness a new Jewish Temple emerge on the Temple Mount. Signs of long-held biblical prophesies shine all around us, typified by the bizarre case of the red heifer. During the Exodus from Egypt and the First and Second Temple periods, anybody entering the Tabernacle or Temple had to be ritually clean. Most purity was ensured through immersion in ritual water baths called
mikvaot
, still visible to this day clustered around the southern entrance to the Temple
.
However, people who had come into contact with dead bodies were more seriously contaminated, especially priests performing funerals. In such instances, cleansing revolved around the ashes of an unblemished red heifer sacrificed on the Mount of Olives.

The Bible describes how God commanded Moses and Aaron to manage such ritual:

From the time of the first establishment of a proto-Temple, the Tabernacle, in the wilderness of Sinai, through to Herod's construction of a Second Temple in the late first century AD, nine red heifers were allegedly born. The tenth, so tradition promises, will appear during the end-time heralding the Third Temple. Yet following the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, no such beasts have been born for the past 1,900 years. By stark contrast, however, since 1997 a rash of appropriately pure heifers have been born: one called Melody at Kfar Menachem in northern Israel; one in the religious youth village of Kfar Hasidim near Haifa; and others on the Texas ranch of a member of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement. Where extremist right-wing Jews have welcomed these signs with unbridled excitement, secular Israel is highly concerned. Various sources have recommended that Melody be shot. To the liberal
Haaretz
newspaper, “The potential harm from this heifer is far greater than the destructive properties of a terrorist bomb.”

Further minor miracles continue to herald the fast approach of the prophetic end-time in Jerusalem. Thus, on July 18, 2002, the Western “Wailing” Wall of Herod's Temple inexplicably started to weep, a sign from God. A section of masonry fifty feet high became wet. As foreseen in the book of Joel, water flowing from the hill of the house of God will signal the redemption of the people of Israel:

The attitude of the Temple Mount Faithful cannot simply be dismissed as the ramblings of a lunatic minority. In the sensitive world of Temple Mount politics, it takes very little to shatter the fragile peace. Nevertheless, plans continue apace to prepare for the end-time. Since 1998 the Temple Mount Faithful have been preparing to lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple. These stones were cut by the Allafy family, immigrants to Israel from Iraq (the ancient Babylon of Jewish exile after the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC), and, coincidentally, one of the largest workers of stones in modern Israel. The Allafys believe they are descendants of the original Temple builders, thus fated to build the Third Temple. For them, an historical circle is closing today.

Three cornerstones of the Third Temple have already been marched to the Temple Mount. Fortunately, Israeli authorities barred their movement beyond the gates, so these insensitive political objects now sit in Jerusalem's City of David. Meanwhile, in 2004 the Passover animal sacrifice was resumed on the Mount of Olives in sight of the Holy of Holies. Since Israel reopened the Temple Mount to the non-Muslim world in August 2003, five thousand Israelis have visited the site every month. Because Jews are forbidden from treading the hallowed ground of the Holy of Holies, even after the Temple's destruction in AD 70, Israel's right wing interprets this trend as evidence of a fast-moving Third Temple culture.

In the modern political climate of this apocalyptic end-time, the resurfacing of the Temple treasure would create an unparalleled level of frenzy leading to appalling conflict, as Jew and Muslim fight over the sacred spaces of the Holy City. Monetary and historical value aside, this is the core reason why the quest for the Temple treasure of Jerusalem is so central and dangerous to contemporary Middle Eastern politics.

Spiritual and historic heart of the world, Jerusalem is also one crazy fairground ride. Ever thrilling, the Western Wall and Temple Mount are a stressful environment. The high-level security, political baggage, and fanatical emotions stoking this religious volcano leave one feeling edgy and disoriented. But in early April 2005, before heading into the center of modern Jerusalem to discuss Jewish treasure in the Vatican with the Temple Mount Faithful, I had no alternative but to face the most “peaceful battleground” on earth. Once again, the Temple Mount had been dragged into the Arab-Israeli peace process, only this time the argument felt personal: the archaeology of the Temple Mount itself was on trial.

Between October 1999 and January 2000 the Islamic trust charged with overseeing the site, the Waqf, dug a massive hole 165 feet long, 82 feet wide and 40 feet deep into the southeastern corner near “Solomon's Stables.” Although the architecture aboveground is the work of the Crusaders and Knights Templar, its subterranean hall of thirteen vaults and eighty-eight piers is ancient, an original design of King Herod to create an inclining entrance leading onto the Temple Mount from the southern triple Hulda Gate complex. The term Solomon's Stables is wishful thinking based on the reference in 1 Kings 4:26 to the wise ruler's 40,000 stalls of horses for his chariots and 12,000 horsemen. Over the centuries the legend stuck.

The latest wounds inflicted on the Mount annexed both Solomon's
Stables and the eastern Hulda Gate into a new mosque extending over one and a half acres, with a ten-thousand-person capacity, making the structure the largest mosque in Israel. In all, an estimated 65,000 square feet of the ancient Temple Mount's surface has been ripped up and paved over.

This development is highly provocative from any viewpoint. In 1967 Moshe Dayan infamously handed back the Temple Mount's keys to Jordan at the end of the Six-Day War to prevent military escalation and greater bloodshed with the Arab world. So today the site is legally controlled by the Islamic Waqf. Traditionally, however, the Waqf has respected the Mount's sacred status to both Judaism and Christianity, as well as to Islam. The large-scale building operations have now shattered this spirit of accommodation.

Virtually nothing is known about the archaeology of the Temple Mount, so any building work carried out without recording ancient deposits is a major lost opportunity to contribute to global cultural knowledge. That ancient remains were destroyed is undeniable—but exactly what is lost remains contentious. Israeli police claim that an arched water channel dating to the time of King Herod was willfully destroyed (although other sources claiming a medieval date are more realistic) and according to an Arab Waqf worker, stones with decorations and inscriptions were deliberately recut to destroy religious marks, including ancient Hebrew texts.

Israeli intelligence believes the Waqf has cleaned out ten giant subterranean cisterns on the Mount with the intention of filling them with water from Mecca's holy Zamzam Spring. Zamzam is a major pilgrimage station in the Hajj, holy to Muslims as the traditional site of the ancient well where Hagar and Ishmael rested after being banished from the home of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 21:9–20). This action would elevate Jerusalem's sanctity within Islam, making al-Aqsa as important as the Great Mosque in Mecca. The entire project is thus seen as a political Arab ploy to deny Israeli claims to a Jewish Temple Mount.

Far more archaeologically destructive, however, was the dumping of 1,500 tons of soil extracted from the Mount across Jerusalem, most
prominently in the Kidron Valley east of the city walls, but also in the municipal city dump of El Azariah. The Waqf claims it has nothing to hide: the disturbed soil was mere fill lacking archaeological value. Conversely, elements of Israeli society accuse the Islamic clerics of de-Judaizing the Temple Mount and deliberately Islamicizing it.

Clearly passions for these extremist positions run very high. I wanted to examine both sides of the argument. My fact-finding mission to the Temple Mount would attempt to flush out any destructive signs of major ancient cultural heritage. I also planned to speak to Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University, an outspoken opponent of the development works and a high-profile member of Israel's Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount.

As I walked through the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in April 2005, I was struck by the city's extremes as a junction for the ancient and modern worlds. The ancient Jewish quarter of 2,000 years ago is today the center of global Jewish identity. Hasidic Jews traded kabbalistic blessings in the guise of red wool bracelets for hard cash. The Pinchas Sapir Jewish Heritage Center and Women's Torah Institute straddle the ruined homes of Roman Jerusalem's High Priests, rejuvenated as museums, and stores peddling Judaica, trinkets, cups, and T-shirts announced
DON'T WORRY BE JEWISH
and
JERUSALEM, JUST DO IT
. A fresh desert breeze rolled in from the southern Judean Desert.

The Western Wall looks dry today; no signs of weeping. A cherry-picker crane, however, is parked on the sacred ground with its operator examining the wall and cheekily peering over its summit at what his Muslim brethren are up to. Bar mitzvah boys are proudly carried aloft on fathers' shoulders. A grandpa tells his wide-eyed grandson, “This is the center of the world.” Past and present converge. The western outer wall of King Herod's magnificent Jewish Temple dwarfs the plastic chairs and a diverse Israeli society. A crooked old man in traditional black Jewish garb retreats backward from the wall, bending down as he moves to touch the sacred ground and run his fingers down his chest in blessing. Another elderly man exits walking sideways for some eso
teric reason. A Russian girl dolled up in a pink leather belt and matching lipstick wafts by. Jewish soup kitchens ring the Western Wall.

As in antiquity, women and men are divided into different sections for worship along the Western Wall. So the women peer over a wooden screen and emit immensely shrill screams, a celebratory cacophony that seems more appropriate company for the tribal boiling of a Westerner in a remote African jungle. They throw silver glitter into the air, which twinkles like fairy dust in the midday sun—messages from God. White doves glide along the summit of the Temple Mount, offering peace to Jew and Muslim alike if they wish to seize it.

At the checkpoint leading up to the Temple Mount, the police have a pressing security issue to tackle: confiscating Bibles. A white-haired English gentleman with a well-polished middle-class accent is quizzed about his brown book. “Is this a Bible,” he is asked. An emphatic no is the response. Much police huddling and discussion ensues. “Are you sure this isn't a Bible?” reiterates the main security guard. The confused Englishman nods an affirmative. More huddling and finally the chief guard is summoned to referee the stalemate. “If this isn't a Bible, what is it then?” he challenges. “Well, if you must know,” replies the innocent abroad, “it's a history book about cannibalism at sea.” The black humor of this ludicrous situation is lost on the guards. All they know is that they must temporarily confiscate Bibles to prevent Christians praying publicly on the Temple Mount and potentially inciting religious conflict.

I enter the Morocco Gate where, according to Muslim tradition, Mohammed harnessed al-Barak, his trusty horse, when he flew into Jerusalem. To my left, well-manicured gardens conceal the 70,000 Muslim
shahid
(dead holy warriors) of the twelfth-century Crusades. The Mount today is seemingly completely free of Roman architecture. The smell of strong Turkish coffee wafts through the air from the Old City, home to 15,000 Arabs and 5,000 Jews.

If you didn't know the extremely dark history of the Temple Mount, you could be forgiven for judging this place an oasis of peace. In reality, the site has been a production line of hatred, death, and destruction over
the millennia. A spent bullet from the 1967 Six-Day War lies at my feet. Yet tranquillity reigns today. The northern quarter, where Titus finally broke through the mighty Antonia Tower fortress to set alight the cloisters of the Second Jewish Temple, is now a garden of olive and cypress trees and exotic fountains. A teacher shrieks at her pupils along the eastern wall, where hundreds of Arab kids sit within the vaulted classes of the “Al Aqsa Sec. Religious School—1901 Est.”

But I was not on the Temple Mount for tourism. Instead, I was searching for traces of destruction that would confirm or refute Israel's claims of an ongoing cultural intifada on the site. Was Israel presenting a balanced case or was Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, chief Muslim administrator of the Mount, correct when he recently stated that “The Temple Mount was never there…. There is not one bit of proof to establish that. We do not recognize that the Jews have any right to the wall or to one inch of the sanctuary…. Jews are greedy to control our mosque…. If they even try to, it will be the end of Israel.” If simple building work can inspire such a tongue lashing, what would be the repercussions of the reappearance of the Temple treasure?

The signs did not look good for Sheikh Sabri. A bulldozer was parked immediately outside the entrance to the Dome of the Rock mosque. Something unusual was clearly going on. Traces of massive earth-moving activities quickly became obvious. Olive tree gardens had been filled with freshly relocated earth and, on closer examination, revealed a high density of Roman, Islamic, and Crusader pottery, undeniable proof of a first-century BC to first-century AD presence on the Temple Mount.

No pottery has ever been published from the Temple Mount, yet here was tons of the stuff beneath my feet—an archaeologist's dream. Sheikh Sabri had been speaking nonsense. With such a collection of potsherds, archaeologists can spin wonders and tease fresh and important historical data from silent soils.

Nearby, what can only be described as a breaker's yard had been shoddily assembled. On one side stood piles of ancient stone masonry, and on the other newly cut blocks of stone “repackaged” for reuse in
modern structures on the Mount. While I had no problem with the Waqf developing the site to accommodate growing numbers of Muslim worshippers and wasn't partisan about the politics involved, the level of destruction coupled with a lack of documentation of this vital site's ancient remains was seriously disturbing.

Imagine if developers cut chunks out of Rome's imperial Forum and threw out the cultural debris without sieving the soils or recording what lay in the exposed trenches. The Eternal City would be in uproar, no doubt the pope would protest, and the collective archaeological community would denounce these sacrilegious activities. In historical terms, the Temple Mount is without doubt more important than Rome's Forum. But this is Jerusalem, where passions run high and politics pervade. Very few outsiders are willing to stick their neck out and be seen to be anti-Islamic. To me, however, this is not just a political matter but, actually, an ethical debate about protecting the past.

If the Waqf had nothing to hide, I couldn't help wonder why it had off-loaded three hundred truckloads of soil and debris under cover of night. Why had important ceramic remains been concealed under olive groves and, most grievously, how could it explain and justify the recutting of ancient masonry without specialist archaeological supervision? Ancient inscriptions may well have been erased.

 

G
reat destruction had without any doubt already been perpetrated on the Temple Mount. To discuss the scale of the problem, and the political fallout, I had arranged to meet Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University, a very high-profile, outspoken critic of the Waqf's building activities. On the way to the City of David, where she was currently excavating Iron Age remains, I exited the Temple Mount by the northern Katemin Gate, desperate for a refreshing drink. But all I could find along the shadowy market alleyway approaching the holiest site on earth was a bewildering array of children's toys. Not dolls and action men, as you might naively expect—appropriate for kids of all faiths—but a vast armory of plastic guns and weapons: imitations of “Swat Police,” “Power,” “Space,” and “Tommy” pistols; curved scimi
tars and straight-edged Crusader plastic swords; even sets of guns, face masks, and mustaches. In this way new generations of religious hatred are born a hairbreadth away from the holiest place on earth.

As crowds of Muslims pushed their way onto their Haram al-Sharif, a Hasidic Jew stopped in the narrow entrance to the ancient Temple Mount and started to pray, bending sharply at the waist. Had the world gone crazy? Were both Muslims and Jews hell-bent on stoking up further bloodshed and hatred? An Arab boy looked at me, pointed, and smirked. I asked him whether the Hasids do this a lot. “Yeah,” he replied, “they're head cases.”

Clambering down the Ophel hillside, I found Dr. Mazar sorting ancient pottery in her laboratory on the edge of the City of David. The vast pit of her excavation was hidden from prying eyes by a tall screen, security guards, and a fearsome Alsatian dog. Only back in London would I discover why such secrecy shrouded her dig: Dr. Mazar claimed to have discovered the biblical palace of King David, no less.

Eilat Mazar has both a professional and an emotional vested interest in the problems of the Temple Mount. Her grandfather, Professor Benjamin Mazar, excavated at the southern foot of the site for ten years, and from him she inherited the digging bug and also the far more serious responsibility of his publication backlog. To her credit, both scientific and popular articles and books have now started to flow. When complete, her work will comprise the most important body of scientific information about the history and archaeology of the Mount.

An outspoken critic of the Islamic Waqf's clearance operations and the Israel Antiquities Authority's weakness over the scandal, she is nevertheless a balanced archaeologist. Rather than ignore all cultural evidence other than the Jewish remains from the periods of King Solomon and Herod, her books, such as
The Complete Guide to the Temple Mount Excavations
, cover all antiquity from the tenth century BC to the Ottoman period, with equal balance and without historical bias.