- It's nearly impossible
to summarize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict concisely.
But if you're looking for the most potent symbol
of the conflict, this place right behind me wins.
Hands down.
Palestinians call it the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound.
Jews know it as the Temple Mount.
It's the holiest site in Judaism
and the third holiest site in the Islam,
which makes it some
of the most contested real estate in the world.
Its every ancient stone uses proof
either of Israeli or Palestinian legitimacy.
So who actually owns this land
and how did this site become the biggest flashpoint
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
(upbeat music)
No place encapsulates Jerusalem's turbulent history
quite like the Temple Mount
whose iconic golden dome
has come to define the city skyline.
This is where the stories
and hopes and aspirations of three faiths converge.
But if everyone claims it as their own,
who does it really belong to?
To answer that, we have to start at the beginning
and I mean the beginning.
In Jewish tradition, the large flat stone in the middle
of the Temple Mount complex is the center of the universe.
This is where God breathed life into Adam,
where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son,
and where the Israeli King Solomon dedicated temple
to God 3,000 years ago.
Temples were a dime a dozen in the ancient world
but not for the Jews who had a single portable temple,
known as the mishkan,
which had been with them for hundreds of years
since their wanderings in the desert after leaving Egypt.
Solomon wanted to turn that portable temple
into a permanent temple
that could draw pilgrims from all over.
See, at that time,
the Israelites were the world's only monotheists
and their beautiful temple served
as excellent PR for the one true God.
So the king invested considerable resources
to make the Jewish temple the destination
for pilgrims of all nations.
Solomon got his wish.
Emperors and kings flocked to Jerusalem with offerings,
and gifts, and weapons,
and imperial ambitions, and violence.
Now it's starting to sound like the Jerusalem we're used
to hearing about.
For 400 years, Solomon's temple served
as Judaism's focal point.
Its fame extended to the distant corners
of Europe and Africa.
If Jerusalem was a prize situated at the crossroads of Asia
and Africa, then the temple was its crown jewel.
Here's the thing about prizes though, everyone wants one,
including the Neo-Babylonians who set their sights
on Jerusalem in sixth century BCE.
The Jews weren't jazzed about submitting to a larger empire
but the Neo-Babylonians didn't take kindly to being denied.
They sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple,
and hauled off huge numbers of Judeans into exile.
But then something amazing happened, the Persian ruler,
Cyrus the Great, rose to power and allowed the Jews
to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple.
71 years after the first temple's destruction,
the second temple was open for business.
Like its predecessor,
the second temple was magnificent,
especially once the Roman puppet king Herod
started expansions in the first century BCE.
But Herod's renovations didn't last very long
because history repeats.
Another empire had its eye on Judea,
and just as they had before, the Jews refused to submit.
So in 70 CE, the Romans borrowed
from the Babylonian playbook, burning Jerusalem,
destroying the temple, and deporting Judeans
to Roman in chains.
In a final insult,
the Romans used the temple mount as a garbage dump.
Literally.
The Jew's holiest place reduced
for centuries to a heap of trash.
All that was left
of the once great temple included sections
of the retaining walls.
A small part of the western retaining wall became a site
of Jewish pilgrimage in prayer,
a symbol of both Jewish pride and Jewish tragedy.
Why did Jews flock there?
Why worship among refuse and ruins?
Because it was never about the wall.
The wall was merely the closest the Jews could get
to the foundation stone, the holiest place on Earth.
So what changed?
Who built this gorgeous dome behind me?
That would be the Muslims.
The holiest site in Islam is Mecca,
which is a smooth 17-hour road trip
if we get in the car right now.
But the prophet Muhammad didn't drive.
According to Muslim tradition, he made the journey
from Mecca to Jerusalem in a single night
on the back of a magical winged creature called the Buraq,
and from there he ascended
to heaven to meet and pray with the other prophets.
So yeah, this site is a big deal for Muslims too.
Islam spread quickly through the Levant
and by the seventh century,
the Holy Land was part of the growing Arab empire.
To commemorate Muhammad's night journey,
the Umayyad caliph built this beautiful shrine
behind me right on top
of where the Jewish temple's innermost sanctuary,
the Holy of Holies had once stood,
the center of the universe for Jews,
the place where all three Abrahamic faiths agreed
that Abraham nearly sacrificed his son.
Speaking of the Abrahamic faiths,
you might have noticed I've been pretty silent
about our other cousins, the Christians.
So what's their relationship to the site?
Roughly 500 years after Muhammad's night journey,
Christian crusaders marched
from Europe to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims.
When the Crusaders encircled Jerusalem in 1099,
the city's Muslims
and Jews banded together to hold off the threat.
But the Crusaders won the day,
slaughtering thousands of Jews and Muslims,
and turned their holy sites into churches,
including this one, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque right there.
For 88 years, it served
as the headquarters of the Knight's Templar
but the Crusaders didn't hold Jerusalem for long.
In 1187, Saladin routed the Christian forces
and the Temple Mount has been in Muslim hands ever since.
Well, sort of because last I checked,
the Temple Mount is in Jerusalem, the capital
of the Jewish state, which brings us back to today.
So who owns it now?
Muslims or Jews?
Like everything in the Middle East, it's complicated.
Jews have been praying at the base
of the Western Wall for 2,000 years
but as Jews returned to their homeland in the 1900s,
Muslim authorities did their best to restrict Jewish access
to the wall.
Clerics whipped up their people of lies claiming
that the Jews were planning to take over
and destroy Muslim holy sites.
In August of 1929, after months of incitement,
Arab mobs descended on the Jews of Jerusalem,
Chevron, and Tzfat,
massacring and mutilating over 133 Jews.
The fight over this holy site
has powered this conflict ever since.
After Israel declared independence in May of 1948,
the Arab world came calling,
confident that they could stamp the tiny new state
out of existence.
As we know, they failed.
But the Old City, including the Jewish Quarter,
fell to the Jordanians who pointedly ignored
that pesky clause in the ceasefire agreement
that guaranteed Jews access to their religious sites.
From 1948 to 1967,
no Jew could approach the Western Wall.
All that changed when tensions exploded in 1967.
The resulting war was brief
but it permanently altered the Middle East.
Within six days, Israel dramatically expanded its borders
and regained control of the Old City.
No Israeli alive then will ever forget the IDF chief
of Staff Motteh Gur's announcement,
(Motteh speaking in foreign language)
"The Temple Mount is in our hands."
My uncle Yoram was there that day.
He had the honor of hanging the Israeli flag
above the Western wall on the Temple Mount,
and he wasn't the only one overcome with joy.
Within a week, a quarter of a million Jews
had flocked to the wall.
After 2,000 years of waiting,
the Temple Mount was once again under Jewish control
or was it?
Muslims all over the world weren't too happy
with the prospect of Jews controlling the Temple Mount.
Plus, Jewish law has quite a lot to say
about who's allowed to enter the complex
and where they're allowed to go.
Even in the days of the temple,
ordinary Jews were barred from entering certain areas.
This hadn't been an issue for 2,000 years.
With the Temple Mount in Jewish hands once more,
Israeli authorities had some decisions to make.
The miraculous victory of 1967
had opened up a whole new world of complexity.
Ultimately, Jewish tradition
and Muslim pressure prevailed, and since 1967,
Jews have not been allowed to pray on the Temple Mount.
The only Jews regularly allowed
on the sacred complex are soldiers
and other security personnel, and for good reason.
The mere hint of a change in the status quo can
and has set the entire country a blaze.
I've seen that tension firsthand.
For almost three years,
I served as a border policeman
in the Israeli army, patrolling the Temple Mount,
and its surrounding neighborhoods.
Under the leadership of my commanding officer,
an Arab Muslim from Haifa,
my unit protected worshipers of all ethnicities and faiths.
Along with these innocent pilgrims,
we were attacked too many times
but even the ugliest violence can't detract
from the holiness of this place.
As I know all too well,
Israeli forces can enter the Temple Mount
at any time for security reasons, but control
and maintenance of the site ultimately rest
with a Jordanian-funded Muslim trust known
as the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf,
which means that Judaism's holiest site
is under the third holiest site in Islam,
located in a territory controlled by Israel and entrusted
to a Muslim religious organization that's funded
by another country.
Simple, right?
Shocking that there's been any controversy here.
The Waqf and the Israeli authorities
have had some pointed disagreements over the years
about everything from archeological research
to the presence of metal detectors.
For example, in 1999,
the Waqf decided to build an emergency exit
in one of the mosques on the Temple Mount.
Sounds fun, right?
Safety first, except they used bulldozers to clear an area
of four stories deep into the ground,
carting away literal tons of soil embedded
with ancient artifacts.
As Israeli historian Eyal Meiron put it,
"A toothbrush would be too large
for brushing that soil, and they did it with bulldozers."
You can guess what happened next.
Jews accused the Waqf of destroying archeological evidence
of the ancient Jewish presence on the site.
The Waqf's chief archeologist responded by snapping.
"Every stone is a Muslim development.
If anything was destroyed, it was Muslim heritage."
The controversy encapsulates
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
with the Temple Mount serving as shorthand
for each side's legitimacy,
a symbol of the worst kind of zero sum thinking.
It's like everyone is afraid to admit
that the other side might have a historical claim
or connection to the site,
as though admitting someone else's connection
somehow takes away from the validity of your own.
Under that all-or-nothing mentality,
there's literally no such thing as compromise.
You're either a winner or you're a loser
and no one wants to be a loser, especially the Middle East.
That's why so many Palestinians refuse to admit the Jews
have a claim to the site,
ignoring mountains of historical evidence.
In 1929, a Waqf historian wrote that it was beyond dispute
that the Temple Mount was the site of Solomon's temple.
Yet in 2010,
the Palestinian Authority released a study claiming
that the Kotel wasn't the Jewish Holy site at all
but a part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Here's a quote.
"This wall was never part of the so-called Temple Mount,
but Muslim tolerance allowed for the Jews to stand
in front of it and weep over its destruction."
Nice, right?
Do these guys write textbooks?
I could stand here and laugh
at the PA's blatant attempt to erase the inconvenient fact
the Jewish presence here predates the Arab Empire's conquest
of Jerusalem by well over 2,000 years.
But the PA's rhetoric,
just like the rhetoric that incited the massacres of 1929,
trickles down to ordinary folks with violent consequences.
Today, Muslims and non-Muslims alike refer
to the entire complex,
not just the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as al-Aqsa.
These three syllables have served
as a rallying cry, inciting Muslims against Jews.
"It's all Al-Aqsa," one young Arab man seethed
during the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas
in May of 2021.
It's all Al-Aqsa.
There it is.
The whole conflict stuffed into one 35-acre complex.
So who owns the Temple Mount?
I think that under the politics,
under the wars, under the fighting, every Jew,
and every Arab would agree that there's only one true owner.
But in the absence of a sign from heaven,
it's our responsibility to figure out
how to share this holy space.