Contents,
Spring 2001
Related Articles:
"Two
Cheers for the Pilgrimage", Religion in the News, Summer 2000
"Covering
Israels Religious Wars", Religion in the News, Fall 1999
Other articles
in this issue:
Palestinians and Israelis:
Rites of Return
Palestinians and Israelis:
Oh, Jerusalem!
Faith-Based Ambivalence
Ten Issues to Keep an Eye On
What Would Moses Do?:
Debt Relief in the Jubilee Year
Hide, Jesse, Hide
Faith in Justice:
The Ashcroft Fight
Aum Alone
Left Behind at the Box Office
The Voucher Circus
Puffing Exorcism

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From the
Editor: Sacred is as Sacred Does
by Mark SilkIf
the collapsed Oslo peace process accomplished anything in the past year, it was to frame
the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in more overtly religious terms than ever before.
Jerusalem had always been, religiously speaking, the elephant
in the parlor. By seeking a comprehensive settlement, Israels now ex-prime minister
Ehud Barak forced both sides to consider what the worlds most important religious
locality meant to them.
Jerusalems own Jerusalem is the dusty protuberance
where (Jews, Christians, and archeologists believe) the Second Temple stood until it was
destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.the Temple Mount. It is now partially occupied by
the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, and is known to Muslims (some of whom claim
no Jewish Temple ever existed there) as Haram al-Sharif, the "noble sanctuary."
As Yoel Cohen shows in this issue, Israeli Jews (as distinct
from Israeli Arabs) found the idea of surrendering the Temple Mount to Palestinian
sovereignty very hard to swalloweven though Orthodox Judaism holds that the place is
too holy for any Jew to set foot on (yet). Meanwhile, for the Palestinians, the right of
refugees to return to their former homes inside Israel assumed a sacred significance equal
to the imperative to control Haram al-Sharifeven though (or, as Rachel Stroumsa
argues below, precisely because) such a right of return is unattached to any
particular religious tradition.
This is not a simple situation.
The American news media readily acknowledged the religious
core of the Jerusalem issue. Indeed, it became a commonplace: The Temple Mount / Haram
al-Sharif was a site "sacred to both sides." But it was not often that anyone
tried to unpack this assertionin part, perhaps, because neither side possessed a
single position. Just how was Haram al-Sharif sacred to the Christian Palestinian
minority? Just how was the Temple Mount sacred to the secular Israeli majority?
By contrast, acknowledgement of a sacred Palestinian right of
return came slowly and reluctantly. The sacralization of this dimension of the struggle
was picked up during Pope John Paul IIs visit to the Holy Land last year by Deborah
Sontag of the New York Times and Deborah Trounson of the Los Angeles Times.
In March 23 dispatches both took note of the fact that Yasir Arafat contrived to chat with
the pope in a school courtyard in a West Bank refugee camp under a banner that read,
"The right of return is a sacred right." Two days later Sontag noted, "In
Mr. Arafats oratory, the right of return of the refugees is still a sacred and
primary demand."
But American correspondents, Sontag included, took the view
that this was merely a bargaining positionthat in the end Arafat and company would
compromise on it in order to achieve their Palestinian State. That, however, seemed less
likely when Arab leaders meeting in Cairo at the beginning of January themselves embraced
the claim that the Palestinian right of return was sacred.
Even so, the reporters declined to accord this right of
return full religious honors. Generally it was hedged between quotation marks indicating
the direct discourse of Palestinian intervieweesas in Palestinian negotiator Ahmed
Qoreis comment to the Boston Globes Charles Sennott January 28:
"Our position is very firm that the right of return is sacred."
In a word, there is sacred and then there is sacred. The
sacredness of the Palestinian right of return can be understood as something akin to
George Washingtons injunction, in his Farewell Address, that the Constitution be
"sacredly maintained." That is, it a civil religious matter, very seriously
taken up and even something to die for, but not "real religion."
The same cannot exactly be said of the Jewish "right of
return" to the Israeli State, upon which the Palestinian claim is in some measure
modeled. Coming back to the Land of Israelwhether from Egypt or Babylonis a
central motif in the Hebrew Bible, and in Rabbinic Judaism Jews look forward to the
messianic age when they will return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. And thats
to say nothing of the Christian apocalyptic belief that the ingathering of the Jews in the
Holy Land is a necessary precondition for the Millennium.
The Jewish right of return would thus seem to belong to the
same species of sacred as the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharifexcept, of course, when
it comes to Palestinian Christians and secular Israelis, for whom the place is merely,
well, sacred.
If it makes any difference.
See companion articles:
Related Articles:
"Two
Cheers for the Pilgrimage", Religion in the News,
Summer 2000
"Covering
Israels Religious Wars", Religion in the News, Fall 1999
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