A Fuss about a Ramp
Impartial observers of the Middle East conflict roll their eyes and shake their heads sadly over the bloody obtuseness, intransigence and folly shown by both sides. Any moral advantage gained by one side because of some horrendous terrorist outrage by the other is speedily lost when the first side perpetrates its retaliation and yet more innocent lives are lost.
Unfortunately, the same attitude is shown in the field of archaeology.
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| The disputed ramp can be clearly seen in this night-time shot of the Haram and the Western Wall. |
A couple of years back the earthen ramp by which tourists gained access to the Haram ash-Sharif (otherwise known as the Temple Mount) suffered a partial collapse following heavy rain. A temporary structure of wood and scaffolding poles was raised on top of it, but this was neither satisfactory nor permanent.
A simple solution, of course, would be to abandon the small and inconvenient Moghrabbin Gate (opened by the Muslims themselves in the 1920s) and allow tourists to enter via one of the other large gates into the Haram, but the Waqf, the Muslim authorities, resolutely refuse the idea. Curiously, once inside, tourists can wander more or less at will over the whole Haram and even leave it via one of these other gates: you just can't enter by one of them.
The Israeli authorities, therefore, have drawn up plans to build a permanent ramp up to the Moghrabbin Gate and, acting entirely properly, have ordered that the present ramp be removed by archaeologists rather than construction machinery. The response by Palestinian Muslims, almost entirely predictable, has been to raise a howl of protest and claim that this is part of a deep-laid Zionist plot to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque and even the entire Haram.
A moment's thought by any rational person will show what a load of nonsense that is. Not only is the al-Aqsa mosque several hundred yards distant from the ramp and would be entirely unaffected by any collapse that might result from the removal of the ramp, but the only structure that is - conceivably - supported by the ramp is the Wailing Wall, the holiest site in Judaism and the idea that the Jews might be conspiring to destroy their own holy site is ridiculous.
Facts, logic and reason, however, play a very small part in Arab thought processes and there have been so many riots, protests, tear-gassing and police actions that UNESCO has actually appointed a commission to look into the matter and archaeological work has been suspended until the UN reaches a conclusion.
Meanwhile the Israeli archaeologists bitterly point to the hypocrisy of the Waqf who cheerfully destroyed huge swathes of the precious archaeology of the Haram when they recently used bulldozers and heavy construction machinery to dig foundations for an extension to the al-Aqsa mosque. Among the objects retrieved from the Jerusalem rubbish dump was an inscription indicating that the Romans erected a triumphal arch on the Temple Mount and it is possible that the foundations - if not more - of that arch were among the artefacts destroyed and lost by Muslim vandalism.
While true, the Israeli indignation would carry more weight were it not for the fact that the ramp itself is merely all that is left of ground level after the Israeli bulldozers moved into the area following the Six-day War of 1967 and cleared tons of interesting if not valuable archaeological debris in order to create the present Western Wall Plaza.
And so things carry on: charge and counter-charge, tit-for-tat acts of vandalism, pompous protests of injured innocence by both parties. Ebeneezer Scrooge summed it all up most accurately: Bah! Humbug!
© Kendall K. Down 2009
