Love of the Land: Video: Is the Western Wall in Israel? - HR Interviews 'Confused' Tourists

Video: Is the Western Wall in Israel? - HR Interviews 'Confused' Tourists

Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
22 April '10

Not only have some tourists been stranded by a volcanic ash cloud in recent days but their trauma has been multiplied by the revelation that they weren't even holidaying in Israel, their destination of choice. According to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority, an Israeli tourism ad breached rules on truthfulness due to the misleading implication that sites such as the Western Wall could actually be in Israel.

How could so many have been misled for so long? After supplying HR's Yarden Frankl and Pesach Benson with maps and compasses, we sent them into Jerusalem's Old City, seeking out confused tourists to find out which country they thought they were in.



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We tracked hundreds of your e-mails to the ASA, which has, so far, refused to reconsider its ruling. Despite the obvious inversion of reality, the ASA has stated:

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Love of the Land: Video: Is the Western Wall in Israel? - HR Interviews 'Confused' Tourists

Love of the Land: An Arab land

An Arab land

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
05 March '10

Were Israelis to unconditionally submit to ever-mutating Arab historiography, all attachments to the Western Wall and Mount of Olives would have to be abjectly relinquished.

Who says we’re not winning the war for the world’s hearts and minds? Even Arabs seem swayed by the argument that the oldest ties to this land are the ones that bind.

Apparently they were converted to the view that everything boils down to who was here first, who left all the place names of all this country’s towns and villages (including those which conquistador Arabs took over), who embedded this unlikely location in world consciousness and rendered it a cultural/religious byword in the farthest climes, whose national cradle this was, the hub of whose beliefs and aspirations this arid little territorial tract had been from time immemorial.

The Arabs, obviously, haven’t become overnight lovers of Zion. But despite their unabated enmity to the Zionist project – Israel – they commandeer Zionism’s logic and Zionism’s case and put these to their own use with a set of preposterous counterclaims that go spectacularly unchallenged in our postmodern existence. With moral-relativists throwing history to the wind, any absurdity can be propagated with colossal impudence and impunity.

The latest example was just furnished in the Knesset by Israeli-Arab MK Taleb a-Sanaa (Ta’al-Ra’am). In a plenum debate he embraced the premise that the land belongs to its earliest claimants: “You say that Abraham purchased Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, but the man who sold it to him was a Palestinian Arab. Consequently, we were here first and Hebron is eternally ours.”

Thereby a-Sanaa made a huge leap from traditional Arab portrayals of Abraham as an Arab. A-Sanaa now categorizes him as the Israelites’ father and stakes Arab claims on real-estate vendor Ephron the Hittite (although the mosque which Arabs constructed over the second-holiest Jewish shrine is called the Ibrahimi Mosque – Ibrahim being the Arabic pronunciation for the Hebrew Avraham).

THIS ISN’T an irrelevant frivolous footnote. A-Sanaa isn’t the first Arab to reinvent the past to suit current interests. Indeed, this is a long-established vogue. Way before the homicidal agitation of British-appointed Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, it was a widespread Arab sport to hurl human excrement from atop the Temple Mount at Jews praying below. But Husseini decided to usurp the wall’s sanctity for Islam, decreeing it to be the hitching-post where Muhammad tethered his super-steed al-Buraq. That presumably overrode and erased all Jewish associations to the site.

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Love of the Land: An Arab land

Love of the Land: What About the Occupation of the Western Wall?

What About the Occupation of the Western Wall?

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
24 November 09

I’m having a hard time understanding the thinking behind the Obama administration’s decision to criticize construction in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. The administration seems to have decided that Gilo is a settlement, and the international press is of course helping the cause by falsely reporting that Gilo is in (Arab) East Jerusalem. As Maurice Ostroff points out in a must-read Jerusalem Post piece:

The reality is that Gilo is very different than the outposts in the West Bank. It is not in east Jerusalem as widely reported. It is a Jerusalem neighborhood with a population of around 40,000. The ground was bought by Jews before WWII and settled in 1971 in south west Jerusalem opposite Mount Gilo within the municipal borders. There is no inference whatsoever that it rests on Arab land.

Gilo is one of several neighborhoods that sit on land occupied by Jordan from 1948-1967, after the withdrawal of the British Mandate. This border is called the Green Line, and it

refers only to the 1949 Armistice lines established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. … Nor is it fixed, as explained by Justice Stephen M. Schwebel, who spent 19 years as a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, including three years as President. He wrote “…modifications of the 1949 armistice lines among those States within former Palestinian territory are lawful (if not necessarily desirable), whether those modifications are, in Secretary Rogers’s words, “insubstantial alterations required for mutual security” or more substantial alterations — such as recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem.” …

The Palestinians never had sovereignty over the West Bank nor east Jerusalem and Justice Schwebel concluded that since Jordan, the prior holder of these territories had seized that territory unlawfully in 1948, Israel which subsequently took that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense in 1967, has better title to it. Jordan’s illegal annexation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 1948 was recognized only by Britain and Pakistan and Jordan now makes no claim to it.

In terms of international law, between 1948 and 1967 this territory was terra nullius, or “land belonging to no one” over which sovereignty may be acquired through occupation. The concept of terra nullius is well recognized in international law.

Getting back to the Obama administration: what is the principle behind the critique of construction in Gilo? There are many parts of Jerusalem that share its standing. Those places include the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Western Wall, both of which, like Gilo, were controlled by Jordan during the twenty years between the founding of the state and the Six Day War.

Is the Jewish Quarter a settlement? Is the Western Wall occupied? Is Israeli construction in them inimical to the peace process? Someone should ask these questions of Robert Gibbs at the next press conference. By the administration’s Gilo logic, the answer to all three would have to be yes.

Love of the Land: What About the Occupation of the Western Wall?

Love of the Land: Israel Plans Major Excavation at Western Wall

Israel Plans Major Excavation at Western Wall

Samuel Sokol
IsraelINN.com
11 November 09

Israel is planning a major archaeological dig under the Western Wall (Kotel) plaza, opposite the Temple Mount, officials announced Thursday. The excavations will create an archaeological park directly underneath the area where worshippers currently stand while praying at the Kotel.

The current prayer area will remain open, supported by pillars, while a new area will be added underneath, at the level at which worshippers at the ancient Temple stood in the past.The dig may be met with harsh reactions from Muslim and Arab leaders in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, many of whom have accused Israel of attempting to damage the Al-Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount. Jerusalem-area Muslims recently rioted for several days after it was rumored that “Jewish settlers” had planned to pray on the Temple Mount.

The Government Press Office gave foreign journalists a tour of Kotel-area excavations this week. The tour, ostensibly an apolitical opportunity to view new historic findings, appeared to be aimed at countering Muslim criticism of Israeli excavations as well. See drawing of planned archeological park

Kotel Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch met with the journalists and criticized religious leaders who use the Kotel excavations as an excuse for violence. When asked, the rabbi said that he was referring to Sheikh Raed Salah, among others. Sheikh Salah, leader of the extremist Islamic Movement, has been involved in many of the anti-Israel riots centered around the Temple Mount.

Rabbi Rabinovitch informed the reporters that Jewish law forbids digs directly underneath the Temple Mount, where the Al-Aksa mosque is located. Digs take place around the mount, not beneath it, he said.

The journalists also met with engineers and others involved in the archaeological digs, who assured them that despite accusations to the contrary, Israel's excavations do not cause harm to structures in the area. In fact, they explained, the excavations have improved structural stability in the Temple Mount area, as they led to discovery and strengthening of areas in which there was a danger of collapse.

Maayana Miskin contributed to this report.

Love of the Land: Israel Plans Major Excavation at Western Wall

Love of the Land: Exposing the Western Wall Tunnels

Exposing the Western Wall Tunnels

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation

In the nineteenth century, the most distinguished Jerusalem scholars were already trying to determine the precise measurements of the Western Wall and describe the methods used in its construction. However, their information was incomplete, mainly because they were unable to discover the wall's entire length. Nevertheless, British researchers Charles Wilson, in 1864 and Charles Warren, in 1867-1870, uncovered the northern extension of the Western Wall Prayer Plaza. The shafts that Charles Warren dug through Wilson's Arch can still be seen today.

Immediately after the Six Day War, the Ministry of Religious Affairs began the project of exposing the entire length of the Western Wall.

It was a difficult operation, which involved digging beneath residential neighborhoods that had been constructed on ancient structures from the Second Temple period and were built up against the Western Wall. Some residents used underground spaces as water holes or for sewage collection. The excavations required close supervision by experts in the fields of structural engineering, securing subterranean tunnels, archeology, and of course, Jewish Law.

After almost twenty years, and despite enormous difficulties, the Western Wall Tunnels were excavated. This lengthy project unearthed many archeological finds which can only be described as remarkable. These finds revealed new and unknown details about the history and the geography of the Temple Mount site.



When the Western Wall Heritage Foundation was established, it was given the responsibility of continuing the excavations, which revealed ancient Jerusalem in all its glory, and bringing them to the public’s attention by opening the tunnels to visitors.

Due to the great delicacy of the Western Wall and its environs and the complexity of the excavations, they were carried out with great caution and under constant rabbinic and scientific supervision. Thus, slowly but surely, a magnificent Jerusalem from over 2,000 years ago was rediscovered. The process of these complicated excavations was decided upon after much deliberation and care, while taking into consideration aspects that are not characteristic of other archeological excavations.



The excavators were faced with complicated engineering problems, such as maintaining the stability of the structures above them while ensuring that the courses of Western Wall stones that had been uncovered would not be damaged in any way. They also had to divert the sewage from the houses above them, which on occasion flushed down unexpectedly on top of the archeologists in the tunnels, into the general sewage system.

Advancing at a snail's pace, they uncovered genuine treasures. As time went on, the tunnels became a time tunnel, transporting anyone in them to the heyday of Jerusalem, in the first century c.e., the greatest days in the history of the city.

They found enormous courses of distinctively carved stone that were remarkably well preserved. There were also remains of the Herodian road which ran alongside the Temple Mount, ancient cisterns, impressive construction efforts from the Muslim era, and a Hasmonean period aqueduct that had been blocked by Herod’s construction of the Western Wall.

All of these amazing portholes to the past can be seen at the Western Wall Tunnels, which is why visiting them is so thrilling. A visit to the Tunnels is not just an awe-inspiring journey through time, but also a fascinating lesson in Jewish history and in the archeology and topography of Jerusalem.

Opening the tunnels to the public required complicated and unique engineering and safety solutions to allow safe and enjoyable access. It was a long process, which included the development of walking paths, air conditioning, signs and lighting, and insuring that the site is wheelchair accessible and can accommodate visitors with disabilities. Audio/visual aids were developed and guides were trained to help visitors explore the mysteries of the Tunnels.

The work is far from completed. Much more still lies hidden than has been revealed at the foot of the Temple Mount.

Love of the Land: Exposing the Western Wall Tunnels