Accommodation and Normalization

When Israel won its third defensive war against its attacking neighbours in 1967, Jews were jubilant that they were able, at long last, to access the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, all that was left of the Second Temple of Solomon, the most important of Jewish religious heritage sites. Jordan, which had previously administered the Old City of Jerusalem, refusing access to Jews, was forced to relinquish its exclusive and exclusionary hold.


Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall
 
But the State of Israel, in a gesture of generosity to Muslims, allowed Jordan to co-administer the sacred Temple Mount through the Palestinian Waqf which oversees the Dome of the Rock, a later Muslim structure built over the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, an elevated area which Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary. Muslims deny the historical heritage existence of the Temple of Solomon, and claim the area to be theirs alone.

East Jerusalem; Temple Mount and Dome of the Rock

It has become a common occurrence that Muslim worshippers at what they call the Noble Sanctuary will throw stones at Jews attempting to mount the Temple Mount to pray at their holy site. As a result, for the most part Israeli police try to convince Jews to desist from approaching the area. During Passover, a group of 30 Palestinian youth a few days ago, attacked, stoning Jewish worshippers approaching the Temple Mount to pray.

It is hardly surprising that Palestinian youth engage in such violent, exclusionary behaviour. They have been taught through school curricula and heard sermons in their mosques that deny the legitimacy through heritage and cultural belonging to Jews. They have been taught that the land upon which Israel sits rightfully belongs to the Palestinians, and only when Israel is destroyed will the land return to its rightful owners.

"I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those [Palestinian] kids, they'd say I want these kids to succeed", ingenuously stated U.S. President Barack Obama on March 21 in Jerusalem, during a speech directed at a Jewish audience, aimed at eliciting sympathy for the plight of the stateless Palestinians. The fact of the matter is, Palestinians don't appear to care whether their kids succeed.

That evidence lies in the fact that their kids are taught to hate, not to be tolerant, co-operative, and interested in sharing the land, only in co-opting it. Summer camps operated by Hamas in Gaza teach Palestinian kids their version of Jewish-Arab history, and they teach those vulnerable kids how to use weapons, teaching them as well against whom they should be used when the opportunity arises. Therewith lie their future militia members.

Israeli Jews care about the future of their kids. They have from the very first striven to find useful accommodation with the Palestinians, to settle once and for all the disagreements between the two people, to have each accept their own boundaries demarcating the land each is to occupy as neighbours, sovereign and useful to one another in advancing their futures in the Middle East.

At each and every opportunity to bargain for peace, from Yasser Arafat's 2000 Camp David decision to refuse for fear of what would await him personally at the retributive hands of his own PLO militia the PLFP, and from his successor Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 -- offered a Palestinian state on all the terms that the PA insisted upon finally met by Ehud Olmert -- the Palestinians refused.

Israel is beset by violence wherever it looks -- north, south, east, west. The Arab Spring has catapulted Islamism toward the ascending opportunity it has long agitated toward. From Tunisia to Libya, Egypt to Syria, Qatar to Turkey, radical Islam has succeeded in reaching its goal of conquest, routing the previous secular tyrannies to lift up their own dictatorial theocracies upon the people.

Mahmoud Abbas has just visited Amman, Jordan, where he sat with King Abdullah and each swore allegiance to upholding the safety of the Noble Sanctuary and the Dome of the Rock against the plans of Israel to "judaize" that area, the third most holy in the Islamic pantheon of holy sites, and the first most sacred to Judaism.

The Palestinian Authority, as one of its pre-conditions for peace between itself and the State of Israel, insists on having East Jerusalem included within its preferred borders as a sovereign state, claiming it must have Jerusalem as its capital. Its plan clear enough; to exclude Jews entirely once again from approaching Jewry's most sacred religious site.

But then, that goes hand-in-hand with the insistence on the 'right of return' whereby millions of descendants of the original 750,000 Palestinians who fled the area in 1948 upon the declaration of the State of Israel.  With the United Nation's passing of Partition of Palestine, the plan that the Palestinians and the Jews would each share the area, and the Palestinians rejected the plan.

Such a return would nullify Israel as a Jewish state. This is simply Islamic conquest and the destruction of the State of Israel in yet another guise.

So much for sharing geography between equally endowed and entitled peoples whose heritage lies deep within the ancient territory.