Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman

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      The vertical schizophrenia of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. Illustration: Walter Boettger, Eyal Weizman 2003.

      The Temple Mount is the site of the First and Second Temples. Haram al-Sharif is where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located. Both sites share the same location – a flattened-out, filled-in summit supported by giant retaining walls located by the eastern edge of the Old City of Jerusalem. The western retaining wall of the compound is believed to be the last remnant of the Second Temple. The Wailing Wall is the southern part of this retaining wall.

      The issue of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif was the most contentious one in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in July 2000. Although most Israeli archaeologists would agree that the Second Temple stood on a platform at the same height of today’s mosques, US mediators seemed to have believed in another, more politically convenient archaeological-architectural explanation. They argued that the upper parts of the Wailing Wall were originally built as a free-standing wall, behind which (and not over which) the Second Temple was located at a depth of about sixteen meters below the level of the water fountain between Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The theory originated with Tuvia Sagiv, a Tel Aviv based architect and amateur archaeologist. Sagiv spent much of his time (and money) surveying the site, and even overflew it several times with helicopters carrying ground-penetrating radar and thermal sensors. Sagiv’s report determining that the remains of the Temple are located under the mosques were submitted in 1995 to Ariel Sharon, then an opposition Knesset member, together with an architectural proposal that aimed to resolve the problems of Jews and Moslems praying on the same site by dividing it vertically, in different floors. According to Sagiv’s architectural proposal, a giant gate would be opened in the Wailing Wall through which Jews could reach a subterranean hall at the level of the Temple, under the level of the mosque. Via Sharon, Sagiv’s proposal reached the attention of the American administration which asked the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to obtain a copy. Clinton thought that if remains of the Temple are indeed, to be found under the present level of the mosques, the issue of sovereignty could be resolved along the outline of Sagiv’s architectural proposal. Clinton delivered his proposal – geopolitics performed on an architectural scale – orally so that it could be withdrawn at any point. In a daring and radical manifestation of the region’s vertical schizophrenia he proposed a stack of horizontal sovereign borders. The first would have passed under the paving stones of the compound. There the border between Arab Al-Quds and Israeli Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical. Palestinians would gain sovereignty over the platform of the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Under the paving of this platform would be a layer of 150 centimeter deep UN zone. This zone will be uninhabited but will function to separate the parties. Israeli sovereignty would comprise the volume below this layer to include the Wailing Wall and the sacred ‘depth of the mount’, where the Temple is presumed to have existed, extending further down to the centre of the earth. Furthermore, the airspace over the site, just like that over the entire heavenly city would remain in Israeli sovereignty. This startling proposal of stacking sovereign volumes in layers, earned it, as Gilead Sher lightheartedly told me, its nickname – the Arkansas ‘Big Mac’. Since Israeli sovereignty would extend over the entire area around the compound, Barak, who claimed, for the purposes of negotiation, that he was only ‘willing to consider the proposal’ but in effect fully embraced it, suggested ‘a bridge or a tunnel, through which whoever wants to pray in Al-Aqsa could access the compound’. This special pedestrian bridge would have connected the Palestinian areas east of the Old City with the religious compound, otherwise isolated in a three-dimensional ‘wrap’ of Israeli sovereignty in all directions. The bridge, on which Palestinians would have received full sovereignty, was to have itself spanned a section of the Mount of Olives and the ancient Jewish cemetery there on which Israeli sovereignty would be internationally recognized. The Palestinians, long suspicious of Israel’s presence under their mosques, wary of Israel’s presence in the airspace over them and unreceptive to the idea of their capital woven together with bridges, flatly rejected the plan. Arafat, somewhat bemused, asked Clinton whether he would have accepted ‘a foreign sovereignty under the paving of Washington DC’. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister and chief negotiator in Camp David dryly summed up Palestinian demands that ‘Haram al-Sharif … must be handed over to the Palestinians – over, under and to the sides, geographically and topographically’.