Arab Group: Kotel is a Muslim Site, And Jews Don't Belong There

Mike L. 

An Israeli Arab group says, Israel is “defiling the holiness" of the Kotel - as defined by Islam - by conducting Jewish prayers there.

An Israeli Arab group, “The Al-Aqsa Heritage Institute,” on Thursday issued a statement demanding that Israel halt its plans to bring more Jews to the Kotel (Western Wall) – which, the group claims, is holy not to Jews, but to Muslims.

In fact, the group says, Israel is “defiling the holiness of the site” by conducting Jewish prayers there.

In Jewish tradition, the Kotel is the outer retaining wall of the Holy Temple, which stood on the Temple Mount, approximately at the same location as the Al-Aqsa Mosque. When the Holy Temple was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, Jews were prohibited from worshipping on the Mount, first by the Romans and then by the Muslims, and proscribed from doing so by Jewish law – and adopted the Kotel as a place of prayer, as it was the closest place to the Holy Temple as the could get.

This is part of the ongoing Arab-Muslim theft of Jewish history and identity.  The truth of the matter, of course, is that Jerusalem is not even mentioned in the Koran.

We must come to understand, or so it seems to me, that the ones who are "occupied" in the Middle East are not the Arabs, but the Jews.  It is our brothers and sisters in Israel who are under siege and they have been since the 7th century.  Jewish rights to the land of Israel (which is to say, the land of the Jews) is based on history not legend or "tradition" or, even, religion.  Israel is Jewish in the same way that China is Chinese or France is French.  Others may live there and have something very close to full and equal rights to citizenship, but they do not get to usurp Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

The fact of the matter is that Arab-Muslim citizens of Israel have more civil liberties than do Arabs anywhere else in the entire Middle East.  When Arabs throw rocks at Jews they are not doing so because the Jews are mean to them.  They do so for the same reason that the majority population has always thrown rocks at the Jews, out of a truly malignant religious and racial bigotry toward us.  Furthermore, if they do not appreciate Jewish means of self-defense, such as check points or the security barrier, which is what they call the "occupation," then they need to teach their children that throwing rocks at Jews is not very neighborly.

We've allowed ourselves to be entirely bamboozled.  The Arabs claim that the Jews are evil and the international left, essentially, believes them and thereby repeats the lies.  Over and over and over again they tell one another that the Jews "stole the land" or that Israel is "occupying" Arab land, despite the fact that a goodly portion of this so-called "Palestinian" land was known for thousands of years as Judea.

The truth is that all of Judea and Samaria is Jewish land and it represents only a very tiny percentage, under 1 percent, of the Middle East which the Arabs stole for themselves when they came marching out of Saudi Arabia shortly after the death of Muhammed.  If the Israelis think that carving out a huge chunk of our historic homeland as a gift to the Arabs will bring peace they are mistaken.  There will be no peace in the Middle East so long as Jews are in the Middle East and so long as Muslims control the vast reaches beyond Israel.  Nonetheless, Judea and Samaria is where the Jews come from and if we wish to give away a large part of our land to the Arabs in order to gain peace then I would not object.

The problem is that it simply will not bring peace.  The two-state solution will not bring peace and for "progressive Zionists" to malign our friends and relatives who live in areas of the country where neither Mahmoud Abbas, nor Barack Obama, want them to live is a desecration.  It is to be bigoted against one's own people.

And this is why progressive-left Jews refused to support Tamar fogel, the young girl whose family was slaughtered by "Palestinian" Jihadis.  It is because the Fogels dared to live in Itamar, beyond the green line.  They honestly believe the kind of Arab-Soviet propaganda that seeks to delegitimize the Jewish presence on Jewish land and in this way they justify Arab-Muslim genocidal racism toward their fellow Jews.

This may not be their intention, but it is their effect.