Reaping Sharon's harvest

The Intifada returned to its source on Sunday and augured a future of religious -- and therefore insoluble-conflict. Graham Usher reports from Jerusalem's Old City
There was a sense of dèja vu in Jerusalem last Sunday. Ten months ago, Ariel Sharon, then merely Likud party leader, opened the Old City's ancient Al- Magharbeh Gate to enter the Haram Al- Sharif compound and walked amid the Al- Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques, Islam's third holiest site. It was a "demonstration of Jewish sovereignty" that triggered -- in folklore if not in fact -- the anti-colonial revolt known as the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Ten months on, hundreds of Israeli police again flanked the Al Magharbeh Gate. They were blocking an attempt by a minuscule Jewish messianic group, the Temple Mount Faithful (TMF), to place a cornerstone "near" the site where religious Jews believe are buried the ruins of the two Jewish Temples. The site houses the Haram Al-Sharif and the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, known to Muslims as Buraq Wall.
The TMF did not get to their preferred location. In line with an Israeli Supreme Court order, the 4.5-ton cornerstone was brought to a car park outside the Old City walls and then whisked away. But the TMF did not need to lay the stone. In the charged atmosphere produced by site, memory and uprising, even the symbolic act of laying the foundation of the "Third Temple," and portending thereby the obliteration of the Haram Al-Sharif, was akin to tossing live matches on tinder.
Things had already been smouldering the night before. Around 4,000 Israelis, most of them Jewish settlers, many of them armed, marched around Jerusalem's Old City baying "the Temple Mount is ours!" A few members of the ultra- nationalist and outlawed Kach movement tried to breach the police barriers and enter the mosque compound.
In response, Fatah, Hamas and Israel's own Islamic movement urged "Muslims everywhere" to converge on Jerusalem the next morning and "block with their bodies" any attempted TMF incursion. Despite a massive dragnet thrown in and around the Old City by the Israeli police, some 3,000 Palestinians made it to the compound, held a protest rally and the smoke became a fire.
At around noon -- as a score or so of the TMF tried to enter the Old City's Muslim Quarter -- rocks were thrown from the mosque compound onto the Western Wall, scattering hundreds of Jewish worshippers, most of whom had no affiliation at all with the TMF. Some huddled against the Wall. Others fled using upturned plastic chairs as shields.
And 400 Israeli policemen poured through the Al-Magharbeh Gate and stormed the Haram Al-Sharif compound, spraying the Palestinians inside with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets. Around 40 Palestinians were injured and five hospitalised, after being barred treatment from Palestinian ambulance crews by the police for almost an hour. Fifteen Israeli policemen were also wounded, mainly from stones.
Skirmishes flared in the compound for the rest of afternoon, as guards from the Islamic Waqf and Palestinian medical teams formed buffers between police and protesters and 150 Palestinians took shelter in the Al-Aqsa mosque. At one point the police broke through the lines, arresting 26 Palestinians.
Following negotiations between the police, Arab Members of the Knesset, the Palestinian Authority and US and European Union representatives, the besieged Palestinians were eventually allowed to leave the compound without harassment. Given the police's panoply of cameras and other surveillance around the compound, they will almost certainly be harassed later. "Calm has been restored," said Israel's Jerusalem police chief, Micki Levy.
It hadn't. On news of the police's incursion into the Haram Al-Sharif armed exchanges and demonstrations erupted in Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron and Gaza, leaving a dozen or so Palestinians wounded. A car bomb rocked an underground garage in the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev in occupied Jerusalem. Another blast occurred Monday morning in a supermarket in West Jerusalem with no injury, and an orthodox Jew was stabbed near the Old City's Damascus Gate.
Nor were the tremors from the raid confined to Jerusalem or even the occupied territories. In Jordan the largest opposition party
(mainly Palestinian) Islamic Action Front exhorted the Arab and Islamic armies to "do their duty and defend Jerusalem." It called for a "day of rage" on Friday throughout the Arab states and urged the convening of Arab and Islamic summits "without delay."
The PA and much of the Arab world held the Israeli government responsible for this latest violation of Islamic sacred sites and sensibilities. It is an absolutely accurate charge given that it was the Israeli Supreme Court that granted the TMF the "symbolic" right to lay the cornerstone in the first place and the Israeli police who invaded the Haram Al-Sharif compound.
Yet it is also clear Israel did not want another scandal in Jerusalem, least of all on the Haram Al-Sharif. In fact, Israeli politicians, jointly with the US, spent most of Saturday transmitting calming messages to Arab and Islamic states that "no Jewish ritual would be permitted on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound."
And this perhaps is the real danger. For this Israeli government -- like the previous one -- appears wilfully blind to the reality that its actions in Jerusalem and the occupied territories have consequences that Israel itself cannot control. This was the warning served by Palestinian lawmaker and Arab League Information Commissioner Hanan Ashrawi.
The same could be said about Sharon's original incursion onto the Haram Al- Sharif last September. Did he really intend that act to produce an armed conflict that has so far cost 523 Palestinian and 125 Israeli lives and brought the region to the brink of war?
Probably not. He sowed the wind on the Haram Al-Sharif rather to further Israel's colonial ambitions in Jerusalem and the West Bank and his own political ambitions in the Knesset. On Sunday he, and the region, reaped the harvest: a conflict that, by the day, is becoming less a national struggle between Israel and Palestine and more a religious war between Jew and Muslim. The first conflict is soluble. The second is not.
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