The Bloody Mountain

By Matt Rees/Jerusalem

The Palestinian youth in a yellow T shirt teeters on Herod's massive wall, hewn 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 barrage, holding on to his black yarmulke as he runs, 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 last Friday--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, gilded 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 visceral 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 pass 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. For much of the past seven years, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have been creeping close to 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 political 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 nearly 2,000 injured, mostly Palestinians.

Further unrest developed deep in Palestinian territory at the site of the Israeli-controlled Joseph's Tomb at Nablus. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled his soldiers out, supposedly with an agreement that the site would be guarded by Palestinian police. The next day those police joined with rioters in demolishing the old domed structure. A new front opened over the weekend, when Hizballah guerrillas darted over the Lebanese border and captured three Israelis. Barak responded with an ultimatum to the Palestinians to end the clashes within 48 hours.

The violence at the Mount stunned Israelis, whose troops faced widespread gunfire from Palestinian police and militia. Upon hearing the calls of their imams to defend the sacred compound, Israel's Arab citizens answered with rioting throughout the Galilee. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to broker a deal but got only a partial cease-fire that few observed.

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."

That was supposed to shock Barak into helping Arafat. But the Israeli Prime Minister made no response. Angry and isolated, Arafat prepared to send a message Barak couldn't ignore. He held a series of midnight meetings in late September with local leaders of his Fatah party's Tanzim. The Tanzim, which means "organization," is an armed militia that answers to a network of local warlords. "Be ready. We will be facing difficult times," Arafat told the leaders. Officials close to Arafat say he was counting on a tough Israeli response to trouble, followed by international condemnation of Israel.

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators had known the fight for control of the Temple Mount would be fierce, but they prayed it would never come to a real battle. To Jews, the site is revered as the location of the temples built by Solomon and Herod, the latter of which was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Even before that, it was sacred. At its center is the tip of Mount Moriah, where God tested Abraham by demanding the sacrifice of his son Isaac. That rock is where some scholars believe the Ark of the Covenant sat. But it also lies beneath the golden Dome of the Rock, the spot where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven and back. The main mosque in the compound is al-Aqsa--also 1,300 years old. More sacred to Muslims than any place except Mecca and Medina, the Mount is the single most holy spot for Jews as well. Rabbi Haim Richman, who works at the Temple Institute in the Jewish Quarter, explains, "When the Temple is rebuilt, it goes right here and only here."

Richman's researchers have re-created the priestly garments and tools that will be needed in the "Third Temple": a silver mizrak to collect blood from sacrificial animals, even a million-dollar menorah. And Sheik Hassan Barghouti is preparing--in a row of tiny classrooms built into the ancient north wall of the compound. As principal of al-Aqsa School, Barghouti drills 140 young Koranic scholars in the literal divinity of the stones from which their schoolroom is built. "This Jewish temple is a pure lie," says Barghouti. "It's the duty of every Muslim to die to defend al-Aqsa."

Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives is filled with the fruit of Barghouti's teachings. The hospital's operating-room staff worked around the clock all last week on injuries sustained in riots on the Mount. Khaled Warasni, 24, a tailor from Hebron, was shot in the back as he turned to gather more stones to throw at Israeli soldiers. When he felt the bullet, Warasni thought he would die a martyr. He recited his last words, the Muslim declaration of faith. "I wished to die," he says, lying sleepily in his hospital bed, "but, unfortunately, I didn't."

The Palestinian Tanzim militia--which Arafat bankrolls--was reveling in the chaos, using it to try out new tactics. A favored innovation: sneaking up on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the suburbs of Jerusalem to spray automatic-weapon fire. Barak sent Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh to the settlement of Psagot to placate angry settlers. Sneh was met by Ron Schechner. The two are veterans of the 1976 commando operation to rescue Israeli hostages at Entebbe airport in Uganda. As they greeted each other, shots rained from Palestinian buildings nearby. Sneh's bodyguard urged him to take cover. "Look, we were together in more dangerous places than this," Schechner said. He took Sneh indoors, and the meeting went ahead as bullets slammed into the walls.

Barak's nastiest surprise last week may turn out to be the violence among Israel's Arab population. Though Israelis call them "our Arabs," the 1 million Arab citizens of Israel consider themselves Palestinians. The call to defend al-Aqsa brought them out in the thousands. And it highlighted the political problems Barak still faces at home. Without the help of Israeli Arabs, Barak may not be able to cement his power--and Arafat may find himself facing a hard-line Israeli government. U.S. and Israeli officials often talk about how difficult it is to understand what Arafat wants. But it is hard to imagine he intended for the battle to lead to the political deliverance of the group least likely to agree to share the Mount peacefully.

--With reporting by Jamil Hamad and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem

With reporting by JAMIL HAMAD AND AHARON KLEIN/JERUSALEM