In keeping with the general theme of surrender and appeasement, Israel is permitting the Muslim Waqf to dig ditches and do who knows what else on the Temple Mount without archaeological supervision. This has been going on for years. On the other hand, Israeli construction of the Mughrabi Gate walkway, far from the Mount, was stopped because of fear of Arab disturbances.
A bulldozer was seen last week ripping up earth on the Temple Mount, at the Dome of the Rock platform. It slashed a long gash, purportedly to lay new electric cables. With crude, damaging handling, it exposed a largely gray deposit, which according to archaeologists is a sure-fire indication of “archaeologically significant” matter.
Incomprehensibly, despite TV air-time and print space, these revelations by the Archaeologists Committee for the Prevention of the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount (CPDATM) failed to cause much stir…
Only videos taken with a hidden camera brought to the fore the destructive work at the site associated with Jewish history’s most sensitive relics. The officers on hand, moreover, according to testimony by archaeologist Prof. Yisrael Caspi, CPDATM head, forbade him from picking any remains out of the rubble.
Caspi and other archaeologists were warned that they had better not even try to bend down, lest they stretch out an arm to touch anything. A policeman was finally dispatched to maintain particular vigilance against Prof. Eilat Mazar, most suspected of a proclivity to lay a hand on a pottery shard. Speaking for the CPDATM, Mazar expressed “the deepest distress at the continued official disregard and disrespect for the incalculable archaeological importance of the Temple Mount”…
While Muslims under ostensible Israeli rule are free to physically impinge on the deepest Jewish sensitivities, they raise shrill outcries whenever Israel dares do anything even in the Mount’s vicinity, such as the (now halted) construction of a new pedestrian walkway in lieu of the dangerously dilapidated one to the Mughrabi Gate.
Foreign governments acted as if this Muslim outcry were legitimate, even though Israel was acting with complete archaeological supervision and international scrutiny, and the claims of structural threat to the Temple Mount or any mosque were obviously spurious. Yet when the same elements who protested then use bulldozers on the Temple Mount itself, with no supervision and causing obvious damage, they are “protected” from Israeli archaeologists by Israel’s own authorities. — Jerusalem Post (my emphasis)
This is not hard to understand. If Dr. Mazar and her friends threatened to blow up or behead anyone who ‘insulted’ Judaism or came within 100 yards of its holy places, then maybe they would take notice.
Technorati Tags: Temple Mount, Waqf, Eilat Mazar, Israel, Jerusalem
This shameful situation has its origins in Dayan’s ceding ‘Har-ha-Bayit’ to the Wafq in 67′. Our policy through the years has been neglectful, appeasing and morally wrong.