Among the lessons lying in the recent Middle East unrest is the
powerful connection between the Jewish past and current events.
The prospects for peace have been torn asunder on the rocks of
the Temple Mount, a piece of land Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak has refused to concede to his erstwhile peace partners. As
part of their efforts to sway world opinion, the Palestinians
have taken to denying the existence of any Jewish religious or
national claim to the Temple Mount and, by extension, to
Jerusalem as a whole. The chorus of Arab revisionism includes
the Palestinian Authority's top Moslem cleric, declaring that
"the Wailing Wall is not a holy place of the Jews," as well as
Yassir Arafat himself, who asserts that the status of Jerusalem
"is a Palestinian, Arab, Islamic, and Christian issue," but not
a Jewish one, because the First and Second Holy Temples are just
so much myth. Indeed, Palestinian spokesmen have gone so far as
to write off huge portions of early Jewish history -- including
the Patriarchal