Are the Jews too late to stake their historical and religious claim to the land of Israel? True, many of the locations in which biblical events took place are in the west bank areas likely to be eventually part of a Palestinian state, while the coastal areas that are within the pre-1967 State of Israel were historically less significant to the Jews. That aside, has Israel been too passive for too long while the Arab world has asserted its religious dominance over the Jewish homeland?
Two days ago the Israeli government announced plans to include the Ma'arat Hamachpela (Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb in Ramallah on a list of Israeli national heritage sites. This has had a predictably provocative effect on Palestinian Arabs, including Palestinian Authority president Mahmound Abbas, who see this as an assertion of a long term legal claim to these areas. I don't think that the Netanyahu government is literally signaling an intention to annex Hebron or Ramallah, but is seeking to establish a reciprocal principle of respect that the Moslems have never begun to accept.
Hearing calls from Hamas and others for Palestinians to rise up against this "insult" is unpleasantly reminiscent of the purported response to Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, eventually known as the Second Intifada. That an Israeli government expression of the Jewish religious claim to these holy sites should provoke accusations of identity theft by Palestinian Moslems is disappointing, if not surprising.
The Hebron site is holy to Moslems and Jews, since both regard it as the burial place of their common patriarch, Abraham. For the Jews, however, the cave within also entombs Abraham's wife Sarah, and the next two generations of Jewish patriarchs, Isaac and Jacob, along with their wives, Rebecca and Leah. Jacob's more beloved wife, Rachel, was buried along the road to Bethlehem after dying in childbirth. The site of Rachel's Tomb in Ramallah has been marked in its present location since at least the Fifth Century. As Prime Minister Netanyahu's office noted, both sites have been holy to the Jewish people for over 3,500 years. Each has been the site of a mosque, even though Rachel's Tomb has no inherent religious significance to Moslems.
And then there is the Temple Mount. The center of Jewish religious and national aspiration since at least the founding of the First Temple, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE - more than 1200 years before Mohammed. Even if we only went back to the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70, this is still many centuries before Mohammed. Yet possession by the Moslem world was for many centuries thereafter worth a great deal more than history, and the Temple Mount is now home to one of the world's most beautiful buildings, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and is claimed by Moslems as their number 3 holy site. Remarkably, although Israel gained control of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six Day War in 1967, it has truly ceded control over the Temple Mount to the Palestinian Arabs, and since the mid-1990s, the Palestinian Authority.
Yes, as is so often noted, these places are holy to the three major western religions. But it is only for the Jews that this land was the center, the home, the promised land, and earned that special status many centuries before Jesus and Mohammed. Whether one believes the veracity of the biblical claim, or details of the biblical narrative, one can only deny the Jews' foremost attachment to this land through a process of wholesale whitewash.
The rights and access of other religions to their holy sites has never been as strongly protected as they have been by the Israelis. This was never the case when Jordan controlled the west bank, and the Jews have every reason to be concerned about the protection of their access and freedom of worship in a Palestinian state. Perhaps more important even than that is the long-continued strategy of delegitimization of Israel's historical and religious attachment to the various places in and around modern-day Israel.
Netanyahu's action in staking a historical claim to the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb comes very late, and at a politically awkward time in view of the efforts underway by George Mitchell to get Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But it is not a moment too soon for Israel to draw the proverbial line in the sand - to make nonnegotiable its historical and religious position in the region. And by so doing, he might possibly be able to get on the table the principle that each side in this conflict must accept that the other will have political sovereignty over some of its holy places, and respect one another's rights to religious visitation.
