UPDATE 11 am Sunday:
Six more terrorist rockets struck southern Israel during the last 24 hours. With complete impunity, Hamas fired volleys of rockets at Sderot and the Eshkol region. At least one woman was hospitalized with physical injuries sustained while trying to run to the nearest bomb shelter. Uncounted others were treated for traumatic stress.
This brings to more than 700 the number of rockets that have been fired out of Palestinian Hamas Gaza since three “ceasefires” ago on January 20, 2012. And what is the Israeli government solution to this neverending terrorism?
It was announced this morning that Israel is getting two new Iron Dome systems–passive systems that work sometimes and don’t work sometimes, passive systems that do nothing to lessen the emotional shock of hearing the sirens go off and having to run to a bomb shelter, and passive systems that will not permit southern Israelis to lead a normal life.
The unfortunate truth is that Hamas has made a laughingstock out of the Israel government and the once-vaunted IDF.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Erev Tisha B'Av march around the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem last night. Note the Border Guard to the right (photo source: www.activestills.org).
As has the Islamic Wakf made a laughingstock out of the Israeli government and the Jerusalem police.
Think back 1,942 years ago.
Titus had just destroyed the 2nd Temple in 70 CE in the first Jewish-Roman War. All Jews (those who were left alive) were banished from Jerusalem–a situation that was codified just over 60 years later after the third Jewish-Roman War by Hadrian and continued for the next 500 years off and on through the rule of Constantine and the Christian Byzantines.
There was one exception to this prohibition. Jews were banished from Jerusalem except for one day a year, Tisha B’Av–when we were permitted to return in order to mourn at the ruins of our holiest site, the Temple Mount. We were permitted to return once a year so that we would always remember what we had lost.
Throughout all the centuries we never did forget, and today our Temple Mount is no longer lost.
So imagine the anger that many of us felt yesterday morning when the Jerusalem police commander Moshe Barkat announced the police would “allow Jewish worshipers to enter the Temple Mount during Tisha B’Av, Saturday night and Sunday.”
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Absurdly, we have a situation now in which Israel controls the Temple Mount but the Jerusalem police are enforcing Roman and Byzantine restrictions on Jews. Absurdly, we have a situation in which the Islamic Wakf dictates to the Jerusalem Police what is permissible at Judaism’s holiest site.
It was for this reason that your humble servant and his wife decided to march around the walls of the Old City last night with the Women in Green–in a march that the Jerusalem police tried to prohibit until told they could not do so by the Israel Supreme Court.
On a night in which the Old City was packed with hundreds of thousands of Jews at the Western Wall all lamenting the destruction of the Temples, we met with for a reading of the Megilat Eicha (Book of Lamentations) at Independence Square with hundreds of others, then walked past the New Gate, Damascus Gate, Herod’s Gate to the Lion’s Gate under the Temple Mount— with what seemed like a battalion of Border Guards.
Waving Israeli flags, we were accompanied by catcalls of “Allahu Akbar” from Muslims as we marched along the northeastern walls of the Old City that form the perimeter of part of the Muslim Quarter.
But we wore those calls like a badge of honor, proud in the fact that we were making a statement that Jewish presence throughout the Old City, especially on the Temple Mount, will not be denied. Finally, after listening to speakers discuss the importance of Israel asserting its sovereignty over the Temple Mount, we marched on to the Dung Gate at the southeastern corner of the Old City.
Part of the enormous crowd at the Western Wall last night--all lamenting the destruction of the First and Second Temples.
As we entered through the Gate, we broke off from the group and went to the Wall ourselves, but stopped to give help to a frail elderly man who was shuffling along in the same direction.
Dressed in an old black coat with frayed edges and a dirty, stained shirt that looked like it had been slept in for a hundred nights, with an ancient kipa on his head and long gray peyas dangling unkemptly beside his long scraggly beard, he summed up the evening for us as he thanked us in Hebrew for our help–through his tears and labored breathing–in a way that I will never forget:
“I am waiting for the Moshiah [Messiah] and the rebuilding of the Beit Hamikdash [Holy Temple], may it come speedily and within our days.”
Then he slowly disappeared into the crowd on his way to the Temple Mount.
***Addendum: Sunday morning 11:00 am. The Jerusalem Police have just closed the Temple Mount to all Jewish worshipers–but it remains open to all Muslims celebrating Ramadan. Unbelievable.
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.