Accommodate Jewish prayer

To hear Gershon Baskin tell the story (“Making the holy places holy again,” May 6), Israeli police hurled tear gas canisters at Palestinians who were praying peacefully at al-Aqsa Mosque, causing the worshipers to interrupt their prayers and start throwing stones at Jews praying at the Western Wall. Anyone who knows the history of Jordan’s two-decade, illegal occupation of the Old City of Jerusalem, and Israel’s actions concerning the Temple Mount after the Six Day War, knows that Baskin’s version of the events is absurd.

Instead of helping the Arabs of Palestine achieve the autonomy offered by the UN Partition Plan, Arab nations went to war to prevent the establishment of a modern Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

The Old City of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria, fell into Jordanian hands. The Jordanians banned all visits to the Old City by people from the Israeli side of the Green Line, while also ethnically cleansing the areas of their Jewish populations, destroying synagogues and desecrating Jewish graves. In 1967, after Jordanian troops fired on Israeli western Jerusalem, Israel managed to liberate the lands Jordan had dubbed “The West Bank.”

To everyone’s surprise, partly because Israel’s rabbis at the time felt that modern Jews were not in the state of purity that would allow them to tread on holy ground, Israel agreed that the Jordanian Wakf would continue to administer the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. Jews would be allowed to visit the Temple Mount under certain circumstances but would not be allowed to pray there. The Western Wall would be Judaism’s holiest site at which Jews could pray.

Long before some religious Israeli Jews began visiting the Temple Mount, even managing to pray quietly, and maybe even thinking of reintroducing the sacrificial cult, Palestinians were desecrating al-Aqsa Mosque, using it to store rocks, fireworks and other weapons which they used to harass Jews worshiping at the Western Wall.

To answer Mr. Baskin’s question, we make the holy places holy again by respecting the fact that the sites are holy to many different faith groups. The Palestinians need to stop spreading lies that Jews are trying to destroy al-Aqsa. The Wakf needs to reciprocate Israel’s graciousness in allowing the Wakf to administer al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock by working with Jewish groups to arrange to accommodate Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.

And the Wakf needs to exercise its authority to prevent Palestinians from continuing to desecrate Muslim holy sites as they have been doing, by using the mosque in their attacks on Jews.

TOBY F. BLOCK

Atlanta

Gershon Baskin as usual inverts the facts to write a very disturbing article.

Tell me, Mr. Baskin, had the dear poor maligned Palestinians not gone on a rampage and murdered 19 innocent people in the latest wave of terror, would the police have killed or arrested anyone?

Had the poor Palestinians gone to al-Aqsa to pray and not to throw rocks and fireworks at the Jews, would the police have had to go in with tear gas?

What is the matter with you? Since when is praying by Jews on the Temple Mount synonymous with the death penalty for Jews? After 74 years of statehood, we are still being slaughtered just for being Jews?

And you Gershon Baskin are making excuses for the excessive violence of the Arabs, buying into their lies. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Our boys died to liberate the Old City and you have the audacity to claim that “small groups” of Palestinians attempted to claim ownership and that it was “greatly exaggerated” by the press?!

What alternate universe is Baskin living in? I am amazed that The Jerusalem Post would even print such blatant lies for the enjoyment of all the Lavrovs of the world.

FREYA BINENFELD

Petah Tikva