PrintJuly 21, 2007
'Experts' get facts wrong
"Experts" from the Saban Center and a law school gets facts wrong on Jerusalem and the concept of sovereignty in a WaPo piece. Aside from completely ignoring two charters of the Palestinians (both the PLO Charter and the Hamas Charter), which call for the destruction of Israel and, in the case of Hamas, attacks on Jews and Christians around the world, Hady Amr and Joel H. Samuels' column gets several key facts wrong.
The authors write,
"Although it took a decade, the Israelis realized that they could not be secure from Palestinian rancor if they deprived Muslim and Christian Palestinians of sovereignty over the Muslim Noble Sanctuary and the holy Christian churches. The Palestinian negotiators also acknowledged the corollary Israeli need for sovereignty over not only the Wailing Wall, but also the Jewish Temple Mount."
Palestinians have always had sovereignty over the "Muslim Noble Sanctuary" and Christians have always had sovereignty over holy Christian churches. These areas are controlled by their own religious bodies and they are protected by Israel. The term "Wailing Wall" for the retaining wall that was used to support the Temple Mount structures has not been used for generations; it is now, and has been called for many years, The Western Wall. "Wailing" referred to the lamentable pain Jews suffered throughout the world, from the suffering caused by others and from having been denied a home. Since Israel was founded, the Wailing has ended and so has the term. Experts should know this fact.
The experts should also be aware, though they fail to even refer to this history, that shared sovereignty has been tried before, between 1948 and 1967. In those years, Jerusalem was divided between Jordan and Israel. Jordan denied Jews right to worship and treated the area before the Western Wall as a garbage dump. There was widespread desecration of Jewish and Christian religious sites in the area known as the West Bank. This desecration, by the way, has continued. In areas under Palestinian control, archaeological digs have tried to obliterate any Jewish connection to the land, and this is occurring on the Temple Mount where Palestinian digging has become Palestinian destruction.
Who needs such "experts"? Certainly not the Washington Post.
