CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By MATT REES/Jerusalem

The Palestinian youth in a yellow T-shirt teeters on Herod’s massive wall, created from limestone more than 2,000 years ago, and throws stone after stone at the Israeli riot police. Below him, a middle-aged Jew flees the attack, shouting, "Death to the Arabs!" A minute before, these two were praying in the midday heat—one at al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam, and the other 100 yards away at the Western Wall, revered by Jews as the place of prayer closest to the site of their biblical temple. That abrupt transformation from worship to violence—it occurred in a flash—is sparked by the power that emanates from the place Jews call the Temple Mount and Arabs know as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. These 35 acres, blocked in by ancient walls and topped by the glittering Dome of the Rock, are a strange and holy place, splattered all too often with blood. "It is," says Rabbi Nachman Kahana, who runs a nearby yeshiva, "the gateway to heaven." And as the world saw last week, a path to unimaginable hell.

To walk in this sacred place is to understand the hold it has on Jews and Muslims. It doesn’t take long. You can pace from one side to the other in five minutes. But what worlds you pass in a handful of time! On your way in, you may see old, tired Jews leaning for support and planting kisses on the Western Wall as if they were caressing their grandchildren. Moments later, you skirt by a Muslim scholar, a white turban wrapped around his scarlet fez. He is bent double in the shade of a pine, scrubbing his feet and hands as he prepares to pray in al-Aqsa Mosque. The air is alive with the sacred mumblings of Hebrew and Arabic. It smells like dust and cumin and cardamom. And the gold of the Dome’s roof—vibrant 1,300 years after it was built—reflects the sun back into the sky and reminds you, no matter what your faith, that there is a force larger than man.

How strange, then, to find this silence so regularly broken by screams and sirens and shots. But the problem with the Temple Mount is that it is so holy that it transcends politics. The pilgrims drawn into and around this sacred area include some of the most religious Muslims and Jews—precisely the people who are least likely to believe that there is any worldly solution to the question of who should have sovereignty over God’s Mount. It is a question that some of the young mullahs and rabbis who study in the shadow of the Mount sometimes feel is best answered by their God, who will deliver his verdict in blood.

It should be no surprise that it has been impossible to find an expression in ink that can solve the problem. Since 1993, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have been inching toward agreement on many issues, but not this one. When Israeli right-winger Ariel Sharon visited the site two weeks ago in a bid to boost his political support and reassert Israeli rights to the land, Arabs saw it as an act of such arrogance that it could only trigger an outburst. In what Arabs call the "Aqsa intifadeh," the uprising of al-Aqsa Mosque on the Mount, at least 80 people have been killed and some 2,000 injured, mostly Palestinians.

The seeds of the violence were planted this summer. At Camp David, Barak proposed that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat get control over the mosques—but not sovereignty. Arafat wanted sovereignty to boost his status with Muslims, so he rejected the proposal. He warned left-wing Israeli supporters that if he compromised on Haram al-Sharif, fundamentalists might oust him. "You Israelis will lose me," Arafat said, according to senior aides. "The peace process will be buried."

—TIME, October 18, 2000

Questions
1. Why did violence erupt at Temple Mount?

2. The writer states that Temple Mount "is so holy that it transcends politics." Explain

TIME CLASSROOM