Arab party accuses Israel of fomenting war

TIMES OF ISRAEL – As tension rises in Jerusalem, Joint List chief says site ‘belongs to the Muslims,’ government instigating ‘religious conflict’

Muslim Knesset members from the Joint List of Arab parties ascended Tuesday to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, where interreligious tensions have flared in recent days.

Joint List leader MK Ayman Odeh asserted that clashes at the site Sunday between Palestinians and Israeli police were due to Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel’s visit there that day — and not, as authorities claim, a premeditated riot on the part of Muslims at the site.

Odeh, an opposition politician, termed Ariel’s visit “provocative,” saying, “He’s a minister, not just a settler. He’s a government representative, and the government isn’t condemning” his visit.

“This means,” he continued, “that the government wants to turn the political issue in Jerusalem into a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews. We reject that approach, which will lead to a bloody war.”

Some Israeli Jews have been seeking to circumvent a police ban on Jewish prayer designed to minimize interreligious friction at the site, where the first and second Jewish temples stood.

The Temple Mount, considered the holiest site in Judaism, is the site of the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and is the third-most sacred shrine to Muslims.

Noting the presence of the mosque atop the Mount, Odeh said, “Nothing is more natural than the mosque belonging to the Muslims. The synagogue belongs to the Jews, the church belongs to the Christians – that’s the most trivial, natural thing.”

Dozens of masked Palestinian protesters hurled rocks, Molotov cocktails and firecrackers at police officers on the Temple Mount Sunday morning before being pushed back into the al-Aqsa Mosque by security forces who were rushed to the area.

The skirmishes and visit by hundreds of Jews to mark Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning for the destruction of the two Jewish temples, were roundly condemned by the Palestinians and by Jordan, which administers the site.

Odeh claimed Tuesday that “at bottom, [the Temple Mount] is a political issue” and accused the Israeli government of seeking to inflame religious war there.

Further stoking tensions, a far-right Israeli woman was filmed last week declaring “Muhammad was a pig” to Muslims in the Old City. Aviya Morris, 20, of the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, told Channel 2 TV that she had hurled the insult in the face of abuse from Palestinian demonstrators.

An Israeli youth was arrested Monday after he, too, declared that “Muhammad is a pig” near the Temple Mount.

The Joint List’s MK Masud Ganaim, who was among the lawmakers to visit the Temple Mount on Tuesday, denied this week that a Jewish temple had ever existed at the site.

“As a history teacher I know this… Perhaps it is known [that there was a temple somewhere], but not there, not there. You are welcome to go look for the Temple in a different place, at a different time,” he said in a radio interview Sunday.