TEL AVIV, 20 September 2004 — The Security Service is haunted by a terrible fear: That another Israeli prime minister will be assassinated. They also entertains an even greater fear: That a Jewish terror group will bomb the mosque on the Temple Mount.
The Security Service believes that this action is intended to put an end to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan. Bombing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and/or the Dome of the Rock would inflame the whole Arab and Muslim world and perhaps ignite a fundamentalist revolution throughout the region. In such a situation, who would think about evacuating settlements?
All this is true, but it does not touch the roots of the conspiracy. The bombing of the Haram Al-Sharif mosque is an enterprise that goes well beyond topical issues — it is an act that would change the Jewish religion itself. From the point of view of the potential bombers, that is the main thing.
In Israel, Jewish history is divided into three “houses”, meaning three temples:
The First Temple was supposedly built by King Solomon in the tenth century BC and destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the year 568 BC. The building of the Second Temple was finished in 516 BC. It was renovated and expanded by King Herod around 20 BC and destroyed by the Roman Gen. Titus in 70 AC.
The Third Temple does not exist, but the new Jewish community that started to establish itself in Palestine in 1882 often calls itself the “Third House”. (When Moshe Dayan became hysterical at the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, he started lamenting the “Destruction of the Third House”). But this is only a symbolic term — not one of the Zionist movement’s Founding Fathers or any of the founders of the State of Israel, dreamed of building a new temple.
The reason for this is rooted in the events of 1934 years ago. When the Romans besieged Jerusalem, before the town fell and was destroyed, a leading rabbi, Yokhanan Ben-Zakkai, was smuggled out in a coffin. He approached the Roman commander and succeeded in getting permission from him to establish a Jewish religious center in Yavneh, between Jaffa and Asdod.
That was the beginning of a revolution in the Jewish religion.
“The First House” was a rather insignificant edifice. The “Second House”, too, began as a rather insignificant affair, as attested by a contemporary prophet, but it spread in the course of time. King Herod, a great builder, tried to win the hearts of his detractors by converting the temple into a magnificent structure.
Jesus, a Jewish revolutionary, rebeled against the commercialization of the temple, as did many of the Pharisees. The Hasmonean dynasty, which was based on the priestly aristocracy, considered the Pharisees its enemies and executed many of them.
All this changed when the temple was destroyed. The structure disappeared, together with the cult of sacrifices. The Jerusalemite aristocracy was eliminated, the priests lost everything. The Jewish religion changed course.
From then on, the rabbis, successors of the Pharisees, were dominant in the Jewish community and its religion. Long before the destruction of the Second Temple, the great majority of Jews lived outside Palestine. Until the advent of modern Zionism, Jews never once tried to return en masse to Palestine — indeed, this was explicitly forbidden by their religion.
Zionism came into being as a part of the nationalist revolution in Europe and as a reaction to its generally anti-Semitic character. It originated the theory that the Jews are a nation like other European nations, and that this nation must set up its own state in the country now called Palestine. But when the Zionist community in Palestine established a state, something happened to Judaism there. The connection with the territory, the soil, changed the face of the religion, as it did to all other parts of national life. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Jewish religion in Israel underwent a mutation, which has become more and more extreme in recent years.
A religion with a universal message became a tribal cult.
The new cult of the temple is the climax of this process. The practical preparations for the destruction of the mosque and the restoration of the temple, together with animal sacrifices and other temple cults, constitute a break with the last two thousand years of Jewish religion. It is a religious revolution of historic dimensions.
If this tendency becomes dominant in the State of Israel, it will not, I believe, lead to the building of the Third Temple but to the destruction of the “Third House”.
— Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist and peace activist. His essays are included in The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.
