An April 7 report of the International Crisis Group, a transnational non-profit, non-governmental organization that advocates policies directly with governments, multilateral organizations and other political actors as well as the media, reveals that Prime Minister Netnayahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah in 2014 reached a deal to curb violence on the Temple Mount. Needless to say, the violence to be curbed was entirely created and carried out by Arabs, and then confronted by Israeli security forces. And yet, Netanyahu was the one who made the commitments to appease the instigators of savagery.
“Even as protest and violence surge around Israel and in the West Bank, the Holy Esplanade, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and Palestinians as al-Haram al-Sharif, is, ironically, quieter than in years,” goes the report, blithely ignoring the fact that the entire enterprise over the past seven months, of attacks on Jews by Arabs wielding knives, stones and firebombs was dubbed the “Al Aqsa Intifada.” It continues: “Supremely important religiously and nationally to Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, it has repeatedly been the epicenter of violence and protest. Today’s surprising calm is the product of quiet understandings in 2014 and 2015 between Jordan’s King Abdullah and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But as the religious calendar enters the holiday season, activists on both sides are likely to regain their footing. Crisis Group has previously urged bolstering the Status Quo, the informal arrangement from the mid-nineteenth century that has regulated management of the Esplanade since Israel conquered it in 1967. This remains crucial, but most immediately important is maintaining the understandings on access.”
We’ll ignore the omission by the ICG of those unhappy years from 1948 to 1967, when Jews were barred from going near the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem by Jordanian snipers — never mind actually visiting the Western Wall or the Temple Mount. But despite those invisible original sins of the Arabs, when all is said and done, the ICG has no doubt who is to blame for the violence: it’s those Jews with their bizarre claims on territory they haven’t controlled since the first and second centuries: “As the Israeli political conversation increasingly emphasizes Jewish identity, and religious Zionists strengthen within both its governing coalitions and the ruling Likud Party, Temple activists advocating expanded Jewish rights on the Esplanade gain more traction among the Jewish public.”
In other words, those Jews, known for their religious fanaticism, could some day demand to share equally in the Temple Mount, something that could provoke nothing but Arab rage, for which the Jews would surely be blamed.
“Even if their triple demand – for undisturbed Jewish access, Jewish worship and Jewish sovereignty – has little chance of realization any time soon,” goes the report, because, really, who would pay attention to such nonsense, “its growing prominence has stoked Palestinian fears that Israel plans to divide the holy site, as it did Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994 after centuries of Muslim-only worship and control.”
Did you catch that? “Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque,” not the Cave of the Patriarchs, which every God-loving Christian would recognize from his or her Book of Genesis: “In the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a burying-place.” (Genesis 49:30). No, for some obscure reason, out of the blue, in 1994 the Jews claimed an entire half of that building, which anyone in their right mind knew had always been a mosque.
God save us from helpful, cheerful gentiles, eager to preserve the status quo…