On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City. That visit was the opening act of the second Intifida, the so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada”, named after the al-Aqsa Mosque located on the Mount.
According to Jewish scholar Avishai Margalit, Sharon went there not to antagonize the Palestinians (although he must have been aware that that would happen), but to have an upperhand over Benjamin Netanyahu in the forthcoming election. He certainly did not expect the violent outbreak that would follow, asserts Margalit in Snakes and Ladders:
Sharon’s appeal to the party was limited. He looked old and tired, and had little appeal for the more moderate voters in the “center.” […] Sharon had every reason to fear Netanyahu’s return, knowing that Netanyahu could regain his hold over the Likud Party quite easily, thereby robbing Sharon of his last chance, at the age of seventy-two, of ever becoming the prime minister of Israel. And so Sharon acted. [...]
The Temple Mount was the perfect place for Sharon’s move. It was at the center of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians: […] he would be proving his own courage by entering the Palestinians’ lion’s den. His message, as he saw it, was clear: no one can out-right me. Should the Palestinians protest—so much the better for his purposes. But, from all the evidence, he did not expect the sequence of events that followed his visit. I do not believe, as many Palestinians seem to do, that Sharon went to the Mount precisely in order to provoke them into doing what they eventually did. He had Netanyahu on his mind, not the Palestinians.
Whatever the case may be, that was then. Today, al-Aqsa is again at the centre of a catastrophe in the making. This time though, nobody will be able to plead ignorance.
It begins with an Israeli report according to which one of al-Aqsa’s wall was in danger of collapsing. Palestinian Muslim officials disagreed. Everything is fine, they say. “We invited highly professional experts from Egypt and other countries who examined everything here. And they said everything was fine.”
However, Israel has been doing excavation works near and around the Mosque.* If the al-Aqsa is in danger, the Palestinian Muslim authorities now say, it is because the Israelis are excavating near its location. To complicate matters even more, extremist Jewish groups are said to have been planning for a while to blow up the holy site, according to this source.
Things have been heating up lately. Given the sensitivities involved, if anything bad befell al-Aqsa, it is almost certain that all hell would break loose. That could not come at a worse time, that is, just at a time when the Palestinian warring parties have decided to work towards a unity government, despite all sorts of machinations to prevent such a coming together by Israel and the US. A meeting is indeed scheduled to take place at Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday between Abbas and Maashal who has said that failure is not an option. Haniyeh will also participate as head of the Palestinian government delegation.
But the situation is very bad. In its latest communiqué regarding matters at al-Aqsa, the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas Movement, is warning about the dire consequences should harm befall the mosque. It is desperately calling on the entire world to help “before the ‘big catastrophe takes place’ and thence ‘regret would be of no use because the entire region would be on fire’.”
* Here is a timeline of sorts.
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Update:
“Nonviolent demonstration to save Al Aqsa Mosque area from Israeli destruction”
