Avishai vs. The Temple Mount

Bernard Avishai has a post over a TPM entitled Holy Jerusalem.

Some excerpts:

Imagine that both the Islamic world and the Palestinian nation suddenly agreed that the mosques on the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem's old city were not that holy after all; that the Jews were welcome to take them down and build a temple if they wanted to. Could Jews really want this? Okay, forget the animal sacrifices. I mean a temple that, whatever its rites, purports to be ground zero of divinity, the building of buildings on the spot of spots--the here and now of a holy of holies. If Jews believed in such things would they be practicing Judaism at all?

and

Similarly, the Wailing Wall (whose sovereignty is not in dispute) is "holy" in for most every Jew. The night my son was born, in June 1973, I myself cradled my head in its stones and shared my joy with my deceased parents. But I did not do so because I thought I was close to the destroyed ancient arc of the covenant. Rather, I thought I was close to the ghosts of the many Jews who had wept there before me, nursing their losses and mysterious hopes.

Anyway, Jews who claim the Temple Mount today mean holy in a more muscular sense than this. Their Psalmist's Hebrew often sounds like a mental straight-jacket. They imply that the soil of the mount carries traces of God's existence, like basements carry radon. They mean holy in the take-off-your-sandals sense of the word: objectively dangerous, not subjectively poignant. They mean something they are prepared to take on the whole world for, fight and die (and kill) for. Is this Judaism?

and

The wall suggests the supersession of a form of worship which has been long abandoned, and was challenged by Pharisees even in its time--abandoned for good (Hegel might say cunning) reasons that Roman centurions could hardly understand when they tore the temple down: a self-perpetuating priesthood, a hierarchy of fetishists, a sacrificial cult, a comic understanding of sin.

Sidra insists that, after the temple was destroyed, Jews were left, not with divine places or stuff, but only metaphor (God is like this, God is like that). This invitation to poetic innovation engendered our talent for freedom. The Wailing Wall's holiness depends on the Temple Mount being bare of anything meaningful to Jews except for the reminder of the immensity of absence itself. The wall is the evocative symbol (in a religion of symbols) of what is no longer there and, by itself, no longer evocative.

and finally

In any case, something new is happening in this city, and it isn't either the Judaism I knew as a child or a return to an ancient practice. It is a hybrid politicized religion, if that's the word; a new a claim of return, much like Mussolini's claim to return to Rome; a claim carried by ward-of-the-state orthodox families averaging seven children each, reinforced by neo-Zionist devotion to settlement, and a deep sense of grievance over a more recent destruction of European life, what Sidra calls Judaism's new "ruined shrines."

Make no mistake: the people who wish this new Jerusalem to rise will not be talked out of their goals, certainly not by speeches or editorials (or bloggers). The only hope is that what's left of Israel's secular majority will be pushed, and supported, by what's left of the West to stop them.

So, I left this comment there:

Allow me to pick up on one point of fact rather than dispute Avishai's ideological points. He writes: "Similarly, the Wailing Wall (whose sovereignty is not in dispute)". Really?

Let's ignore Arafat's refusal to recognize the past existence of a Temple at Moriah - which would mean the Kotel is bereft of any significance. But Arafat did orient himself not only on Islamic exclusivism of any Jewish link to "Palestine" but on this document: REPORT of the Commission appointed by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with the approval of the Council of the League of Nations, to determine the rights and claims of Moslems and Jews in connection with the Western or Wailing Wall at Jerusalem, December, 1930

As I have explained (here), not only do the Pals. reject any Jewishness in a religious sense, but the Jewish nationalism that extends from that. Avishai could not only cradle his head in the Wall's stones, he could even bang it against them for all it would help his approach to the hostility, antagonism and outright negation the Pals. possess towards any form of Zionism and anything to do with non-Islamic sovereignty over the Kotel.

And that's a fact.