You Never Know Where The Temple Mount Will Pop Up

In a review of a new book, of which I was unaware, "The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories" by Edward Hollis, I found this extract:

The author also tells the stories of more mundane but more overtly political structures: the Berlin Wall and Manchester’s dismal Hulme housing estates – each of which projected and protected a version of a social utopia, and each of which ended in demolition.

Most political of all are the remains of the structure at the epicentre of the Middle East troubles, the Temple in Jerusalem. A palimpsest of faith and destruction, the Temple was built by Jews, destroyed by Romans and is now at the centre of an irreconcilable territorial conflict as a place claimed by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Yet all that remains is the Wailing Wall and a labyrinth of ruins that constitute the most sensitive rubble in the world.

In his wonderful book Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman [wonderful? try this] covered the appropriation of Palestine’s archaeology as well as its airspace and communications networks, leaving only a horizontal sliver of nominally Palestinian territory. He is duly credited by Hollis, who includes Weizman’s brilliantly absurd proposal for a Ballardian flyover to access the Temple Mount without interfering with the land around it. “Ownership of the Wailing Wall ... has become an insoluble problem whose fixed terms of revenge and offence are as hard and heavy a burden as stone”, he writes.

Well, I searched about and found this (with my comments in italics):

[on] pages 54-55 of Hollow Land...

The Vertical Schizophrenia of the Temple Mount

Subterranean Jerusalem is at least as complex as its terrain. Nowhere is this truer than of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. The ascent of the present Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in 2000 and the bloodshed during the Intifadah that followed were not unique. The Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif has often been the focal point of the conflict.

The Haram al-Sharif compound is located over a filled-in, flattened-out summit [but full of cisterns and underground halls & passages] on which the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located. The mount is supported by retaining walls, one of which is the Western Wall, whose southern edge is known as the Wailing Wall. The Western Wall is part of the outermost wall of what used to define the edge of the Second Temple compound. [as are the rest of the walls]

Most archaeologists believe that the Wailing Wall was a retaining wall supporting the earth on which the Second Temple stood at roughly the same latitude as today’s mosques. But the Israeli delegation at Camp David negotiations argued that the Wailing Wall was built originally as a free-standing wall, behind which (and not over which) stood the Second Temple. [did they? don't recall that? source?] What follows is that the remains of the Temple are to be found underneath the mosques and that was separated Jewish most holy site from the Muslim mosques is a vertical distance of a mere 10 meters. That vertical separation into the above and below was the source of the debate that followed.

Since East Jerusalem was occupied in 1967, the Muslim religious authority (the Wakf) has charged that Israel is trying to undermine the compound foundations in order to topple the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and to clear the way for the establishment of the Third Jewish Temple. Jewish groups contend that the Wakf’s extensive work in the subterranean chambers under the mosques is designed to rid the mountain of ancient Israelites' remnants, and that the large-scale earth works conducted in the process destabilise the mountain and have generated cracks in the retaining wall of the mount.

On 24 September 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanting to demonstrate his control of all layers of the city, ordered the opening of a subterranean archaeological tunnel running along the foundation of the Western Wall, alongside the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount compound [as per the understanding reached between Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat*]. The opening of the ‘Western Wall Tunnel’ was wrongly perceived as an attempt at subterranean sabotage. But Palestinian... sentiments were fuelled by memories of a similar event that in December 1991 saw another excavated tunnel under the Harram collapsing and opening a big hole in the floor of the Mosque of Atman ben-Afan [??? I checked at Passia, "Palestine Facts - 1991-1993 but nothing about this. Othman Ben Addan was the third Mulsim Caliph who succeeded Omar and who Ossama Bin Laden holds in high esteem: "How similar the hardship of the Mujahedeen today, to the hardship the Muslims passed by in al-Usrah (the hardship) army at the time of the prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him), till Uthman Ben Affan came and equipped most of the army, the prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said then: "Nothing of Uthman's deeds will harm him after that". Who is willing to be Uthman of this current hardship??" ] Israel’s chief negotiator at Camp David, Gilead Sher told how, during the failed summit on 17 July 2000 in the presence of the whole Israeli delegation, Barak declared:

“We shall stand united in front of the whole world, if it becomes apparent that an agreement wasn’t reached over the issue of our sovereignty over the First and Second Temples. It is the Archemedic point of our universe, the anchor of the Zionist effort... we are at the moment of truth.”

The two delegations laid claim to the same plot of land. Neither side was willing to give it up. In attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, intense spatial contortions were drawn on variously scaled plans and sections of the compound.

The most original bridging proposal at Camp David came from former US president Bill Clinton. After the inevitable crisis, Clinton dictated his proposal to the negotiating parties. It was a daring and radical manifestation of the region’s vertical schizophrenia, according to which the border between Arab East and Jewish West Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical – giving the Palestinians sovereignty on top of the Mount while maintaining Israeli sovereignty below the surface, over the Wailing Wall and the airspace above it. The horizontal border would have passed underneath the paving of the Haram al-Sharif, so that a few centimetres under the worshippers in the Mosque of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, the Israeli underground would be dug up for remnants of the ancient Temple, believed to be “in the depth of the mount”.

In order to allow free access to the Muslim compound, now isolated in a three-dimensional sovereign wrap by Israel, Barak, embracing the proposal, suggested “a bridge or a tunnel, through which whoever wants to pray in al-Aqsa could access the compound”.

But the Palestinians, long suspicious of Israel’s presence under their mosques, have flatly rejected the plan. They claimed (partly bemused) that “Haram al-Sharif ... must be handed over to the Palestinians – over, under, and to the sides, geographically and topographically.”

Regarding the truth about the remnants of the Temple in the depth of the mount there are few and varied scholarly studies and opinions. But, Charles Warren, a captain in the Royal Engineers that was in 1876 one of the first archaeologists to excavate the tunnels and subterranean chambers under the Haram/ Temple Mount, recorded no conclusive ruins of the Temple, but a substance of completely different nature:

“The passage is four feet wide, with smooth sides, and the sewage was from five to six feet deep, so that if we had fallen in there was no chance of our escaping with our lives. I, however, determined to trace out this passage, and for this purpose got a few old planks and made a perilous voyage on the sewage to a distance of 12 feet... The sewage was not water, and not mud; it was just in such a state that a door would not float, but yet if left for a minute or two would not sink very deep...”

If that Indiana Jones-type description was correct, what Clinton and the negotiating teams hadn’t realised was that the Temple Mount sat atop a network of ancient ducts and cisterns filled with generations of Jerusalem’s sewage.

With all this, can we agree on one issue - no destruction by anybody of historical, archaeological remnants of the past?

-------------
*

Negotiations preceded the opening of the tunnel. In exchange for cooperation on the tunnel exit, in a January 1996 agreement the Israeli government gave the Waqf permission to renovate Solomon's Stables, an area of underground passages underneath the southern end of the Temple Mount, as a mosque for Ramadan prayers. The tunnel opening, in short, took place in the context of negotiations and reciprocity.