The Al Aqsa Libel: A Brief History

alRepeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, and Abbas’s calls for Palestinians and other Muslims to take action to defend Al Aqsa and “purify” the Temple Mount, have been a key factor in the latest spate of deadly Arab assaults on Israelis.

Other PA officials have echoed and elaborated on Abbas’s message, with some calling explicitly for murdering Jews in response to supposed provocations against Al Aqsa. Palestinian Authority media have conveyed the same message, punctuated by cartoons depicting Jews attacking Al Aqsa and Palestinians defending it.

A number of those involved in the assaults against Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere have asserted that they were acting in response to the calls of their leaders to protect Al-Aqsa.

The false claims of Jewish threats against or damage to Al Aqsa have a long pedigree. They have been made by Abbas many times in the past and were a staple of Yasser Arafat’s screeds against Israel and against Jews more generally. Arafat labeled the terror war he launched in 2000 the “Al Aqsa Intifada.” He did so to cast the onslaught not as an aggressive campaign of mass murder of Israelis but as a struggle in defense of the Islamic holy site and to render the war not simply one of Palestinian pursuit of Israel’s destruction but as an Islamic fight against hostile, Al Aqsa-defiling non-believers.

But such anti-Jewish libels have a still older history, pre-dating Arafat, pre-dating Israel’s gaining control over the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, even pre-dating Israel’s creation.

In 1929, during the British Mandate, the rabidly anti-Jewish, British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, claimed that Jews were threatening Al-Aqsa and sought to end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (a Temple Mount retaining wall, which had become a place of Jewish prayer in the context of Jews being barred from ascending to the Temple Mount itself – the site of the First and Second Temples – for much of the preceding 2,000 years). According to the Mufti, the Western Wall was an Islamic holy place and Jewish prayer there was both an affront to Islam and a step towards Jewish attacks against Al-Aqsa. The Mufti is also reported to have distributed doctored photographs showing a damaged Al-Aqsa, with claims that the Jews were responsible.

The Mufti’s incitement was accompanied by calls for the murder of Jews as revenge. Ensuing attacks by Arab mobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Mandate territory resulted in the death of 133 Jews and major injury to over 200 others. The most severely affected community was that of Hebron, where 64 Jews were slaughtered and another 85 injured.

British authorities did virtually nothing to stop the attacks. They did evacuate the surviving Jews from Hebron. They also exonerated the Mufti from any responsibility for the murders and took almost no steps against those who actually carried out the carnage.

(Only in 1937,when The Mufti began to instigate attacks against British forces, did the authorities seek to arrest him. El-Husseini, however, escaped and fled the Mandate, eventually making his way to Berlin, where he spent much of World War II as Hitler’s guest. Among his activities while in Europe were recruiting Balkan Muslims and Muslims in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory to Nazi SS units and broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East and north Africa calling on Arabs to support the Nazis and to destroy the Jews in their midst.)

Abbas has praised the Mufti as an inspiring hero of the Palestinian cause worthy of emulation.

In reality, far from threatening Al Aqsa, Israel has repeatedly bowed to Arab claims of exclusive rights on the Temple Mount. In the wake of Israel’s gaining control of the Old City and the Temple Mount in 1967, the Israelis, with then defense minister Moshe Dayan delineating the policy, granted the Muslim religious authority, the Waqf, control over the Temple Mount. Jews would be allowed access to the Mount but forbidden to pray there. Christians and other non-Muslims would also be allowed access. The Israel Antiquities Authority was to oversee any construction or other physical changes on the Mount that would have an impact on this most sensitive of archaeological sites.

The prohibition of Jewish prayer on the Mount has been strictly enforced by Israeli governments. While there is increasing support among Israelis for a small area of the Mount – far from Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock – to be set aside for Jewish prayer, no such arrangement has won government backing. Furthermore, Jewish and other non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount have commonly been harassed by Waqf guards and other Muslims, and Israeli officials have responded typically not by countering such harassment but by restricting non-Muslim access.

Also, particularly between 1999 and 2001, the Waqf, in the context of establishing and expanding additional places of Muslim worship on the Mount and seeking to destroy evidence of historic Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Mount, brought heavy earth-moving equipment onto the Mount and dug up and hauled away thousands of tons of material. This material contained the remains of structures and other relics from pre-Muslim epochs, most notably from the First and Second Temple periods. In the context of any archaeological excavation of such a sensitive and historically rich site, the work would have been approached with archaeologists’ hand trowels and brushes. Yet the Israeli government – led for most of this period by Ehud Barak – did nothing to block this desecration of the Temple Mount, and the Israel Antiquities Authority likewise did nothing. A broad coalition of Israelis, drawn from across the nation’s political and religious spectra and including such luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, formed “The Council for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount” and urged the Barak government to stop the desecration, but to little avail.

So the Al Aqsa libel stands truth on its head: Muslim supremacism on the Temple Mount has not only been maintained since Israel gained control of the Old City, but has been expanded through aggressive Muslim actions and general Israeli acquiescence.

Bur the anti-Jewish libel lives on, because it, and the violence it generates, serve its purveyors. Abbas uses it to build up his own anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bonafides against the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians. He also employs it to draw wider Arab attention away from the bloody chaos enveloping much of the Arab world, chaos that has led some Arab leaders to at least temporarily relate to Israel as an ally confronting shared threats. Abbas seeks to resurrect the focusing of Arab enmity on Israel.

Abbas is also using the Al Aqsa libel and the accompanying bloodletting to advance his pursuit of UN and European “recognition” and international pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions, particularly withdrawal to the indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines. Abbas, like Arafat before him, seeks to achieve Israeli withdrawal while avoiding any bilateral agreement with Israel that would entail formal acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy within any borders.

The Grand Mufti’s Al Aqsa libel and his incitement to the murder of Jews ultimately served him well. An investigating commission sent from London found the Arabs fully responsible for the bloodshed but then recommended steps be taken against the Jews so as to assuage Arab hostility, steps that violated Britain’s obligations to the Jewish community under the terms of its League of Nations mandate.

European and some American media coverage of the recent violence, and the reactions of United Nations officials, various European governments and, with rare exception, the Obama administration, downplay or ignore entirely Abbas’s cynical use of the libel and incitement of murderous violence. Some distort the realities surrounding the violence into an indictment of Israel. And so again the libel and its murderous fallout redound to the perpetrator’s gain.

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.

  • Bamaguje

    “Muslim supremacism on the Temple Mount has not only been maintained
    since Israel gained control of the Old City, but has been expanded through aggressive Muslim actions and general Israeli acquiescence” – Kenneth Levin.

    That’s the problem… Give them an inch they’ll want a mile.
    Instead of demolishing Al-Aqsa mosque as Muslims would have done if the situation was reversed; Israel fed Islamic supremacism by giving Muslims exclusive access to Judaism’s holiest site.
    Muslims are not wont to appreciate and reciprocate such nice tolerant gestures. They see it as weakness of we infidels, and it feeds their misguided supremacism.

    • Cristinascar

      If the situation was reversed? It was all Jewish books were written in Iraq, as recently as 100 years the entire press of Iraq was Jewish owned, modern Iraqi secular letterature was a field compltely started by Jews 200 years ago, there is not one single Jew in Iraq today. The first set of laws upon independence of the League of Nations Mandate given to Britain to create a Jewish national home in Palestine formerly Ottoman Syria’s Southern region, after the British completely lied aND STABBED THE GOOD GUYS, THE jEWS IN THE BACK, SIGNED BY lAWRENCE, AND THE NEW MONARCHY EXTRACTED FROM OIL ARABIA, SAYS NO jEWS ARE ALLOWED TO EVER BE CITIZENS OF THE NEWLY INVENTED COUNTRY JORDAN. They had ethnically cleansed every Jew first.

    • Hi there

      Precisely.
      A woman told me that she remembers getting onto a bus shortly after the 6-day war. She was 9. An elderly Arab man got up to give her his seat.
      There was widespread Arab fear (and perhaps a grudging respect) of the Israelis after their miraculous victory.
      Liberal Israelis blew it by chastising themselves for remaining alive, offering back all the land they gained by surviving, instead of thanking God for the miracles. It was like the Chanukah miracle of ‘many in the hands of few’ but instead of appreciating it, they were embarrassed by it.
      The Arabs quickly got used to Israeli dhimmitude. Very quickly.

      • Atikva

        What dhimmitude? Israel is still there and flourishing after almost 70 years of uninterrupted war and its population grows steadily. This God given land wouldn’t inspire that much hatred to the muslims if it had crumbled before them. Actually, they are enraged to see that after all these years and in spite of the Israelis civilized attitude toward their enemies (which naturally these savages see as weakness), they have failed and they will continue to fail to destroy it.

  • Cristinascar

    Your history is way too short, Nathan Weinstock showed evidence of bloods libels in the Jerusalem area of Ottoman Syria in the 1860s. You need to start with Eastern Byzantian laws only allowing “known Jews” to enter Jerusalem to publicly cry one day a year, then humiliate them and symbolically force them out again between 400 and 600 AD, thats where I would have started, one of the rare examples of the ubiqioutous antisemitism in laws of that period until the end of the Ottoman Empire which was not censored, once doing things like that was considered unethical..

  • John Pallyswine

    ” British appointed ” – this term says it all.

  • http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/ Jason P

    Let’s get some context. The #1 site in Orthodox Christianity is the Church built by Constantine and Justinian: Saint Sofia. It was turned into a mosque in 1453AD but Ataturk made it a museum for all to visit in the 1930s. It’s a world historical site.

    The #1 site in Islam is the black rock in Mecca. Al-Aqsa is claimed to be #3 at best and that’s propaganda. Given the history and archeological significance, we should take the lead of Ataturk and make it a museum and world historical site for all to visit.

    • StanleyT

      Al Aqsa only become the 3rd most important site in Islam when the Jews reclaimed Jerusalem in 1967. Before then, Jerusalem was a backwater, ignored by most of the Arab and Islamic world.

      • Cristinascar

        Proof of that are the giant holes in the then led, dome of the Remotest (Asque itself means remote or backwater) Mosque. The Mufti began the project of replacing it with gold colored bronze right after the 1929 riots he fomented and started making conspiracies with British antisemites, then Hitler.

        http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/04/Temple-Mount-undated.jpg

        In fact a Mosque with the same name in Turkey then also called the remote or Asque Mosque was prettier and more well kept, the Saly Mosque in Pakistan is much nicer and was then, than the remote mosque, the Mosque inKazakhstan built over a lava crater is nicer too.

    • PAthena

      The cathedral in Istanbul, Agia Sophia (in Greek), means “Holy Wisdon,” not “Saint Sophia.”

  • StanleyT

    Just a somewhat pedantic point. The photograph shows the Dome of the Rock, not al-Aqsa, which is a rather boring building. Not that it matters.

  • joe kulak

    This triumphal mosque was placed on the mount as a constant reminder of the dhimmitude of christians and jews. “Mr. Abbas, tear this mosque down!”

  • Tradecraft46

    And Al-Aqsa is still standing because…. What ever have they done anything about anything?

  • William James Ward

    Israel must act for self preservation and allowing the murder of
    it’s citizens and playing the negotiation game will only bring
    about increased misery which will make the necessary needed
    much worse. It seems and all out war will be soon with Iran
    being allowed the time to finish it’s nuclear arms program,
    gratis Mullah Obama. It will be so good to see the end of evil,
    this is the destiny of Israel, bring the Islamist villainy to and
    end………………William

  • Skip V. Patel

    Other than the al-Aqsa mosque, the rest of the site — including the Dome of the Rock — contains no religious significance to the worshippers, he added.

    When they pray, facing Mecca “their backsides face the Temple Mount,” he said. “So what are they doing on the Temple Mount? (IDF Chief Rabbi)

    Amen to that!

  • Atikva

    What a lot of BS! Muslims’ interest in the Temple Mount before the socialists trained them in mass indoctrination and myth creation was practically non-existent. As can be seen from the photos below dating the first one from 1890 and the second from 1950, the site was left unkempt, almost abandoned, the pavement invaded with weeds and the al-aqsa mosque itself crumbling for lack of maintenance. These guys have no shame left, what they now call their 2nd holy place wasn’t mentioned even once in their coran.