More On The 57-State Solution

Following up on my previous post on the suggestion that the Temple Mount administration by transferred to the 57-member Islamic States Council, we have an article by Zvi Bar'el in Haaretz on the subject, Arabs aren't thrilled by the idea of controlling the Temple Mount.

Some excerpts:

The announcement by Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), to the effect that the PA is willing to transfer the holy places in Jerusalem to Islamic sovereignty in exchange for genuine Israeli compromises, was ostensibly supposed to constitute a breakthrough.

But that same Islamic sovereignty does not particularly thrill the foreign ministers of the 57 countries that met at the end of the week in Damascus for the Islamic Conference Organization. The proposal did not even come up for discussion...

Not only can the proposal to transfer the Temple Mount to Islamic sovereignty not be defined legally - since what legal significance is there to the term "religious sovereignty" - it also angers some Fatah members, who say that "if the proposal really is valid, it overturns the vision of Yasser Arafat, who always adhered to the viewpoint that a Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital and the Palestinian flag on Haram al Sharif [the Temple Mount], is not a state."...Technically, if the PA wants to surrender sovereignty over the Temple Mount in favor of Islamic representation, it will first have to go back to the Arab League in order for that body to make a decision.

...Hatem Abdel Kader, the new minister for Jerusalem affairs in Salam Fayyad's government, this week explained the Palestinian proposal in somewhat deeper detail, claiming that it does not refer to an international body that will assume responsibility for the Temple Mount, but rather an Islamic country.

But even this explanation is not sufficient. Which country will it be? Will it be an Islamic Arab country or a non-Arab country, like Iran, Turkey or perhaps Indonesia?...

57?

Hmmm.

The number 57 has mystical significance to the Heinz company, but it has never had much to do with reality. The slogan was invented by the company's founder, Henry J. Heinz, during a ride on the New York elevated in 1892. While he was reading the car cards on the ceiling, Heinz's eye alighted on the slogan "21 styles of shoes." To pedestrian minds such as our own, R.B., this probably doesn't sound like one of your killer advertising mottoes, but that's why we're not millionaire ketchup barons. Heinz could recognize genius when he saw it. Cogitating briefly, he conceived the immortal words "57 varieties," and immediately hopped off the the train and set about plastering the nation with the now-famous pickle-plus-number logo. The one problem with this scheme was that at the time the company was manufacturing more than 60 varieties. However, Heinz stuck with 57, for what his biographer describes as "occult reasons."

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And excerpts from Max Singer's piece:

The simple truth can help bring peace

An often-overlooked piece of Palestinian behavior is key to the pursuit of peace. The Palestinians teach their people that no Jewish kingdom ever existed in the land they call Palestine, and that there was never a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Presumably some Palestinians know these teachings are false, but for most they are "facts" learned in school and taken for granted. These falsehoods are deliberately spread by the Palestinian leadership...This false story helps explain the Palestinian refusal to make peace, because so long as Palestinians think the Jews were never here before, they will see Jews as a foreign colonial implant with no moral claim or right to the land...When a powerful foreigner comes and takes your territory just because he wants it, you have no honorable way to yield your rights. Accepting such a foreign invasion would be a cowardly sacrifice of honor...

...THE UNITED STATES CAN make an important step toward peace by publicly assuring the Palestinians that there were indeed ancient Jewish kingdoms in the land, and a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount before the birth of Muhammad. There are plenty of Muslim sources that the US can use to teach these facts.

Denial of the Jews' ancient connection to the land is much more important than Holocaust denial. Israel's claim to the land has nothing to do with the Holocaust. The international decision that Palestine should be a Jewish homeland was made by the League of Nations a generation before the Holocaust. Jews claim the land based on their continuous emotional and religious attachment to it since ancient times - not as compensation for six million dead...