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Jihad for Jerusalem
Isabel Kershner
 Cover photo of a youth waving an Islamic flag inscribed 'Al-Aqsa Is In Danger' in front of a model of The Dome of the Rock in the Israeli Arab town Umm al-Fahm |
Posters Warning of impending doom at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem have been plastered for years in Umm al-Fahm, one of the largest Arab communities in Israel. As far as the Islamic Movement leaders of this town of 30,000 are concerned, Al-Aqsa was in danger long before Likud leader Ariel Sharon thought of setting foot there.
The largest placard looms at the city�s main entrance, way before the �Welcome to Umm al-Fahm� sign or the landmark coffee-jug shaped fountain. Its Arabic legend reads, �Al-Aqsa is in danger,� and is accompanied by an image of the Dome of the Rock in chains, a computer-graphic eye transposed onto the dome shedding tears down its golden tiles. The same poster, in scaled down form, is pasted on walls all over the city center like a macabre motif.
A fortnight before Sharon made his fateful September 28 trip to the Temple Mount, the historical site of the first and second Jewish temples � or Al-Haram al-Sharif, as Muslims refer to the hilltop compound containing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the seventh-century Dome of the Rock � Umm al-Fahm�s leaders hosted their annual �Al-Aqsa Is In Danger� rally at the town�s stadium. According to Suleiman Eghbariyah, the town�s deputy mayor, the event drew a crowd of 60,000-70,000 and 11 foreign news stations.
Ever since the tunnel riots of 1996, the message has been the same, the images at least as incendiary. Last year, here in Umm al-Fahm, in the central area of Israel known as the Triangle, and in Arab towns all over the Galilee, posters depicted the chained golden dome surrounded by a halo of fire, a clenched fist rising out of the flames.
Sharon�s visit, protected by a company of well over 1,000 Israeli police in full riot gear, prodded a particularly raw religious and political nerve among Arabs. The site, holy to both Jews and Muslims, has taken on a symbolism of eschatological proportions, with associations for both about the End of Days. The visit could barely have come at a more sensitive time, with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators bitterly contesting sovereignty rights over the compound in final-status peace talks.
What was perceived as Sharon�s symbolic �conquest� of the Haram was the cue for the outburst of popular violence and armed conflict throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Those confrontations, in turn, spawned the rioting in Arab population centers all over Israel that have rocked the country to its foundations. Unprecedented in scope and severity, the Arab Israeli confrontations with the police closed off main roads for days throughout the Galilee, the Triangle, and even in Jaffa in the heart of Tel Aviv.
The first days of October claimed over 50 victims � some 40 Palestinians in the territories, 10 Arabs inside Israel, three Israeli soldiers and a Jewish civilian. The entrance to Umm al-Fahm became a mini-battleground. Youths lobbed stones and fire-bombs, and rampaged against symbols of the Jewish establishment such as a gas station and a bank. The Israeli police and paramilitary Border Police battled to keep the main Wadi Ara route open. On October 2, some 30,000 people attended the funeral of Umm al-Fahm�s first �martyr� in its own jihad for Jerusalem.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, minister for internal security and acting foreign minister, told Israel Radio that he was confident the conflict in the West Bank and Gaza would blow over into a last round of peace talks. But reflecting the profound shock of most Jewish Israelis, he said he was far more concerned about the effects of the rioting within Israel�s own Arab population.
Initially, Israeli political and security commentators seemed at a loss to explain exactly why now, after all Israel�s wars with the neighboring Arab countries, and after all the years of the Palestinian Intifada in the territories, the Arabs inside the �Green Line,� the pre-1967 border, had finally exploded. But Elie Rekhess, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv�s Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and an expert on Arab Israelis and the Islamic Movement, sees it as �the culmination of a multi-faceted process that started in the early 1990s.� That process, he says, began with the increased Islamization of the Arab sector in Israel in general.
More recently, he goes on, a climate of militancy has been created by Arab Israeli leaders and some Arab members of the Knesset, who have advocated resistance to the Israeli practice of demolishing illegally built structures in Arab communities. All this, he adds, combines with the Arabs� bitter sense of discrimination, frustration and economic depression.
Under these circumstances, the religious symbolism of Al-Aqsa, which transcends national and political lines, provides the perfect spark. �You don�t need to be in the Islamic Movement to identify with Al-Aqsa,� says Rekhess.
Indeed, by the time the street fighting broke out, Arab Israeli leaders and Arab Knesset members of all political shades � including those from the secular Communist party � had united around the cause. Rushing from funeral to funeral, they were criticized by the Israeli establishment for having failed to act to calm the situation.
Salem Jubran, a former Communist leader, respected writer and educator at the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace at Givat Havivah, the educational institute of the left-wing Kibbutz Artzi movement, says the rage was definitely provoked by Sharon�s visit to Temple Mount, and was fueled by the Arab sector�s economic distress. He also blames the police for fanning the flames by �acting against us as if we�re a people under occupation, firing live ammunition as if they were hunting wild animals.�
The crisis is an expression, to some extent, of the fragmented identity of Israel�s million-strong Arab population. Intensely protective of their Israeli citizenship, they demand to be treated with equal rights they feel they are denied by the state. Yet at the same time, as Muslim or Christian Palestinians, they find it difficult to identify with some of the most treasured goals and aspirations of the Jewish Zionist majority, and natural to support the aspirations of their Palestinian brethren across the Green Line for an independent Palestian state.
Beyond defending the Palestinian and Muslim integrity of Al-Aqsa, notes Jubran, the Arabs of Israel oppose Israeli control in all of East Jerusalem. �It is Palestinian Arab territory under occupation,� he adds. �There can be no peace with occupation, and no occupation with peace.�
THE SLOGAN �AL-AQSA IS IN Danger� has been the rallying cry of the Islamic Movement in Israel for years, and particularly of the more militant �northern� wing headed by Umm al-Fahm�s mayor Sheikh Ra�ed Salah. Sheikh Ra�ed�s faction broke away from the mainstream Islamic Movement headed by Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish of Kafr Qasem in the mid 1990s, because of its opposition to a newly adopted decision to run candidates for the Knesset. The radical faction saw that decision as legitimizing the State of Israel, which it was unprepared to do. The two factions were reportedly already at odds over Oslo, with Darwish supporting the diplomatic process and Ra�ed and company opposing it.
Asked to define the danger Al-Aqsa faces, in an interview held shortly before the Sharon visit and the ensuing explosion, Suleiman Eghbariyah told The Report, �We say it all the time � the constant excavations carried out by Israeli archeologists under the mosque are affecting its foundations.�
Sitting in his office in Umm al-Fahm�s drab city hall, with a view of the town�s own golden dome of the relatively new Abu Obeidah mosque behind him, Eghbariyah presented the party line concerning the Mount, insisting that �so far, the archeologists have found nothing [at the site] that belongs to the Jewish people. And now,� he went on, �in the era of peace negotiations, the talk of dividing [control] of Al-Aqsa presents a danger to its very existence. Al-Aqsa is for the Muslims, but there is enormous U.S. pressure on the Palestinian Authority to make concessions to the Jews there.�
When pressed to consider the strength of Jewish claims and attachment to the site, Eghbariyah only proffered the observation that �if everyone were to go back 4,000 years, the whole world would be at war.�
No armchair radicals, the Islamic Movement�s members have extended their activities far beyond the Umm al-Fahm stadium, reaching right into the sacred precincts of Al-Aqsa itself. �The mosque was generally neglected,� explained Eghbariyah, so in 1993-94, he said, the Islamic Movement got permission from the Waqf � the Islamic trust that administers the Muslim shrines � to start renovations. As Israeli citizens, said Eghbariyah, they were able to go ahead with work that Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza had been barred from doing.
The first project was to turn a cavernous underground space known to Jews as Solomon�s Stables into a marble pillared mosque. Called the Marwani Mosque by Muslims, it can hold up to 15,000 worshipers, Eghbariyah claims. Then came the restoration of the vaults that Muslims call Old Al-Aqsa, underneath the present day mosque. (Archaeologists say the vaults are access tunnels to the Temple Mount courtyard, built in the time of Herod�s Temple.) Next was the installation of washrooms for worshipers, and most recently, the paving of a plaza above the Marwani Mosque.
Eghbariyah said that the Islamic Movement engineers work in coordination with the engineers of the Waqf�s planning committee, and that the work is carried out by a rotating army of Arab Israeli volunteers. �Over every week we have a thousand volunteers from the Galilee, the Triangle and the Negev, including a lot of skilled laborers,� he claimed. �They work for a day or two, under supervision.�
Supporters lend equipment and donate materials, he said, while funds are raised by Sheikh Ra�ed�s Umm al-Fahm-based Al-Aqsa Foundation. Cash comes in via the mosques, by bank orders and through special fundraisers. A dinner at an Umm al-Fahm restaurant for 100 invitees raised some 200,000 shekels (a little under $50,000) a month ago. According to reports, the mid-September rally at the stadium raised in the region of a million shekels and netted about 5 kilos of gold jewelry donated by those without ready cash. Contributions also come in from abroad. The carpets for the Marwani Mosque, for example, were donated by President Mubarak of Egypt.
The Islamic construction work at Temple Mount has been raising Israeli hackles for years. Officials complain that the Islamic Movement has aggressively pushed the Waqf, which is loyal to and constrained by the Palestinian Authority, further than it wanted to go at the Haram al-Sharif. In the wake of the rioting, Haim Ramon, the minister in Prime Minister Ehud Barak�s office responsible for Jerusalem affairs, publicly branded Sheikh Ra�ed as the most extreme element on the Mount.
In what Muslim leaders have called a �political show of force� in the week prior to Sharon�s visit to the Mount, Israeli authorities stopped the entry of additional building materials into the mosque compound on grounds that the new paving above the Marwani Mosque had extended beyond the area quietly agreed upon with the Waqf. While Israeli security sources concede that the extra paving wouldn�t actually do any damage, they say it is a matter of maintaining agreements and showing �who is in charge.� Waqf officials, for their part, maintain the fiction that they have no dialogue with the Israeli government.
Sharon, who is particularly despised by Palestinians for his part in the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon in the 1980s, walked into a minefield of Jewish-Muslim sensitivities on Temple Mount, and into a more subtle net of intra-Muslim tension as well. For the Waqf, piqued by Israeli reports of the Islamic Movement�s leading role within Al-Aqsa�s precincts, is now struggling to maintain its own prestige.
In a recent interview with The Report at his office abutting the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem�s Old City, Waqf secretary general Adnan Husseini constantly downplayed the Israeli Islamic Movement�s role in the renovations, stressing instead that �the Palestinian people are our people wherever they are. Muslims are Muslims. The Green Line, for your information, is just a figment of Israeli propaganda.�
In Umm al-Fahm, deputy mayor Eghbariyah had boasted that Al-Aqsa is �a united Muslim effort but the organization is mostly ours.� Husseini, less eager to hand out compliments, said only �If they deserve credit it should come from God, not me.�
Without prompting, Husseini insisted that the Islamic Movement of Israel �accepts all our instructions and doesn�t impose on us,� adding that the renovations are a joint venture between the movement, the Waqf and �people from here.� He was similarly vague on numbers of workers. Asked to confirm Eghbariyah�s claim of 1,000 volunteers a week, he replied: �We�re not counting. But they try to be involved, and we appreciate their efforts.� Incidentally, Husseini put the number of worshipers that the Marwani Mosque can hold at 6,000-7,000 � less than half the number cited by Eghbariyah.
IT�S NOT THAT NOBODY SAW A crisis coming, says Tel Aviv University�s Rekhess, who also serves as an advisor to the inter-ministerial committee for Arab-Israeli affairs headed by Minister of Sports and Culture Matan Vilnai. �But it was down the priority list,� he says. �The Arabs in Israel pose an insoluble problem, as many Jews see it. Who wants to deal with that sort of thing till it blows?�
Noting that serious damage has been inflicted on both sides, he says that for Israel�s Jews and Arabs alike, �maybe this was what was needed to make people wake up.� The internal Arab issue has, he says, been �much neglected. We need to stop sweeping it all under the carpet.�
He defends the Barak government to a degree, stating that it �has absolutely� put the Arabs in Israel on its agenda, and points to a four-year development plan aimed at improving services in the Arab sectors, to be introduced from the beginning of the next budgetary year. With a budget of 4 billion shekels, it will begin to alleviate some of the worst symptoms of the neglect. But that alone will not be enough, warns Rekhess, who says it�s not just a matter of money, but attitude. �What I�m calling for is a comprehensive approach that would adapt government policy to a new reality, toward a new vision for Jews and Arabs in this country. We need to educate for coexistence, for democratic norms, for respect for the other,� he pleads.
Salem Jubran, for his part, a long-time advocate of coexistence, hesitates to pronounce on whether the newly shattered vessel can be repaired to its former state. �What�s needed now is action to calm down the situation,� he says. �Coexistence can�t come from words, but is a result of behavior. Only if the Israeli government starts to relate to the Arab population as equals, with proper respect, can we start to speak of coexistence.�
For Israelis � Jewish and Arab � woke up to a new reality in early October. And they found that it isn�t Al-Aqsa that�s in danger, but the delicate fabric of Israeli society itself.
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With reporting by Gershom Gorenberg
Israel
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