UPDATES
7 pm Israel time, Wednesday, May 6 2015
Happy Lag B’Omer!
**The countdown is on. Benjamin Netanyahu has exactly 4 hours and 59 minutes left to present a government to President Rivlin. If he fails, the task will fall to Isaac Herzog.
What Netanyahu needs is for Naftali Bennett and his 8-legislator Jewish Home party to sign the coalition agreement. Those 8 seats would give Netanyahu the requisite 61 vote majority in the Knesset.
Slowly, Bennett seems to be getting on board the coalition train. Likud has apparently agreed for Bennett cohort Ayelet Shaked to become Israel’s Justice Minister; however, Likud is insisting that her powers in that position be limited.
Likud does not want Shaked to be involved in the inner security cabinet nor do they want her to be involved in the selection of judges, religious or otherwise. The problem is that all of these powers have traditionally been assigned to the Justice Minister–and some of them are even laid out in law. In other words, to restrict her powers would necessitate a change in law.
To make matters even more complicated, Uri Ariel–the number 2 person on the Jewish Home list–is now threatening to quit the party if Shaked receives the Justice appointment instead of him.
How all of this will play out in the coming hours is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: the Israeli “left” is terrified of Ayelet Shaked.
**The eastern Lebanese border with Syria (which is a few hundred kilometers north of the border with Israel) continues to be the scene of intense fighting today with both the Nucera rebels and Hezbollah claiming to have made inroads into the other’s territory.
What seems clear at the moment is that Assad’s already tenuous grip on Syria is growing even more tenuous by the minute. Hezbollah is suffering heavy losses–currently estimates are that around 2000 Hezbollah fighters have died in Syria, and Iran is continuing to fly in Iranian Revolutionary Guards and mercenaries from Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere to shore up Assad’s depleted forces.
**The situation around Gaza also continues to degrade with three armed Palestinians being killed by the Egyptian Army as they emerged from a Gaza tunnel into Egypt this afternoon, and an IDF patrol in Israel coming under fire along the Gaza border shortly thereafter.
At least two missiles were fired out of Gaza toward the Mediterranean Sea this afternoon, and explosions were heard in northern Gaza.
**The IDF released some interesting statistics today on chayal bodedim (lone soldiers) in Israel’s military service. Lone soldiers are what the name inplies–soldiers who are fighting in the IDF who have no family in Israel.
In the last year, there were approximately 2000 such soldiers. Nearly 850 came from Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union; while another 300 came from the United States.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Yesterday’s blog detailed how a seemingly innocuous recent event, the changing of the carpets in the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, has once again raised the issue of the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant.
The removal of carpets in the cave below the Foundation Stone (on which rested the Ark) revealed the marble slab which blocks the entrance to a deeper network of caves and rooms underneath. According to one stream of Jewish tradition, it is in this network of caves and rooms that King Josiah hid the Ark when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE.
This network is inaccessible from the Dome of the Rock because of the Muslim belief that it leads to the underworld–and because of Jewish and Muslim beliefs concerning Noah’s flood.
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But there might be two other ways to explore this area.
In a little noticed story last week, a left-wing, European-funded, archaeological NGO, Emek Shaveh, petitioned the Israel Supreme Court that control over the excavation of a tunnel in Jerusalem be taken away from the Ir David Foundation (Elad).
The tunnel is not just any tunnel.
In this overhead shot, 5 is the location of what used to be the Givati parking lot–now a full fledged archaeological excavation site. “Western Wall” is the Western Wall Plaza. The black and white dotted line is the tunnel. 2 is the area directly west of the Kipat HaSela (Dome of the Rock) and an area that has been extensively excavated. The dotted black and white line is the wall around this section of the Old City. The building below the “Temple Mount” caption is the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Back in 2009, excavations at the Givati Parking Lot (see map) revealed that a tunnel extended toward the Old City wall. In the six years since then, the tunnel has been excavated under the Old City wall all the way to the Western Wall–and not merely, excavated but nearly restored to its original state. It is not open to the public for reasons that are obvious from the photographs below:
One of the few pictures available of the tunnel. Note that the stones on the wall to the right are part of the Western Wall.
Another picture:
A larger picture.
Where the tunnel currently ends:
Note the metal bars surrounding a hole in the walkway in the foreground–the current exit point of the tunnel from the Givati parking lot. Also note that the current end of the tunnel is very close to the Mughrabi ramp–the structure just past the rubble after the metal bars. The minaret in the background is very close to the Kipat HaSela (Dome of the Rock).
So what is the point of all of this? Israeli archaeologists are zeroing in on the cave network under the Foundation Stone from two directions–from the Area numbered “2” in the first picture above, and from the direction of the Givati tunnel excavation.
The mystery of whether the Ark of the Covenant still rests on the Temple Mount may actually be solved in the coming years.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.