JERUSALEM/WASHINGTON: The Palestinian government has removed a report claiming that Jerusalem's Western Wall isn't holy to Jews from an official website, after it provoked furious reaction. The five-page report has been condemned by the US and Israel as incorrect and provocative. "We strongly condemn these comments and fully reject them as factually incorrect, insensitive, and highly provocative," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told a briefing. "We have repeatedly raised with the Palestinian Authority leadership the need to consistently combat all forms of delegitimization of Israel, including denying historic Jewish connections to the land." The reaction came days after an article was posted on the website of the Palestinian information ministry, prompting a furious reaction from Israel. The author, deputy information minister Mutawakel Taha, refused at the time to say whether his statements reflected the official Palestinian stance on the Western Wall. The article is a lengthy exposition on the history of the Western Wall, which is revered by Jews as the last remnant of the Second Temple and is Israel's biggest tourist attraction. It contended that "the Al-Buraq Wall is the western wall of Al-Aqsa, which the Zionist occupation falsely claims ownership of and calls the Wailing Wall or Kotel." Above the Western Wall is the area known to Muslims as the Haram Al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, which houses the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam. The Western Wall fell into Jewish hands for the first time since the Roman era during the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel occupied and annexed east Jerusalem. Crowley said US officials waited and consulted over several days before responding "to make sure that statements made in recent days were firm before we were commenting." He added that the longstanding US position is that "the status of Jerusalem must be resolved in final status negotiations between the parties." "We recognize that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue to Israelis and Palestinians, to Jews, to Muslims, and to Christians everywhere," he added. The latest dispute comes with peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians still stalled, in part over questions about Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem. US Representative Howard Berman, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, offered similar comments. "I strongly condemn the recent report... which states that the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem has no religious significance to Jews," he said in a statement. Berman said Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad "know the spiritual importance of the Western Wall to the global Jewish community. To deny the Jewish connection to the Western Wall is to be deliberately provocative and inciteful."
