On Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital

Sar Shalom

So it looks like President Trump will actually do something positive and recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Predictably, every Palestinian and Arab potentate is complaining that doing so will prejudice the peace negotiations and threatens Islam's holy sites. Also predictably, most of the West's chattering class is taking the Arabs' claimed reason for their objection at face value.

What we need to do is repeat more often the actual reason that the Arabs are so enraged by the impending recognition. It is the same reason why the Arabs responded to a group of Jews sitting down in front of the Western Wall on Tisha B'Av in 1929 with a pogrom in Hebron. In both cases, the "provocations" are attacks on one more manifestation of Islam's supremacy of Judaism. They have accepted the loss of many such manifestations. However, each time a new loss looms, they threaten to, or actually do, erupt in rage.

The pundits could invoke Occam's razor to say that the simplest explanation for why the Arabs claim their sentiment for Jerusalem is the reason for their rage is that their sentiment for Jerusalem is the reason for their rage. To demonstrate that the real reason for that claim is because western do-gooders would have more sympathy for that claim than for their real motivation of lording Islam's supremacy over Judaism, some history is needed. Islam's veneration of Jerusalem started in 682 when a rebellion cut off the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus from Mecca. In order to maintain the ability to fulfill the requirement of Haj while cut off from Mecca, Umayyads built the mosques in Jerusalem and invented the story of Muhammed's travel there to justifying substituting Jerusalem for Mecca as the destination for the Haj. Within a few decades, the Islamic world was reunified, allowing all Muslims to go to Mecca, and Jerusalem was ignored until the Crusades. During the Crusades, the reconquering Muslims revived the tale of Muhammed's travel in order to rile up their population to join the effort to retake Jerusalem. Once the Crusades were ended, the Muslims ignored Jerusalem again until the British took Palestine following World War I until Jordan's conquest of eastern Jerusalem during the Independence War. Following Jordan's conquest of eastern Jerusalem, Jerusalem was again ignored by the Islamic world until Israel conquered it from Jordan, at which point Jerusalem became of "supreme importance" to the Islamic world until today.

What this timeline shows is that when Islam's ability to lord its supremacy over Judaism and Christianity by excluding them from Jerusalem is not challenged, Jerusalem was ignored. However, when that ability is challenged, the Muslim world waxes poetic about how important Jerusalem is to their faith.