Jerusalem: The Biography
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
(London: Phoenix, 2011)
The book has an awful lot of lengthy footnotes. I read them all. There’s some good information in the footnotes. Typical of British writers, Montefiore over-uses the Present Perfect Tense. And he uses way too many comas. Over-punctuation seems to be a British thing. Britons like to sprinkle their writing, like their speech, with little asides, called “adjunct clauses.” It’s bad English so far as I am concerned.
Holiness requires not just spirituality and faith but also legitimacy and tradition.
Page xxvii.
Nothing makes a place holier than the competition of another religion.
Page xxvii.
The city’s past is often imaginary.
Page xxx.
The competition to possess the infectious holiness of others has led some shrines to become holy to all three of the religions successively then simultaneously.
Page xxxi.
In Jerusalem the truth is often much less important than the myth.
Page xxxi.
It is impossible to know Jerusalem without some respect for religion.
Page xxxiii.
The source for the story of David is the Bible.
Page xxxiii.
The discovery of the Tel Dan stele in 1993 proved that King David did exist.
Page xxxiv.
There are said to be seventy names for Jerusalem.
Page xliii.
The rebels were a mixture of religious Jews and opportunistic brigands who had exploited the decline of the emperor, Nero, and the chaos that followed his suicide, to expel the Romans and re-establish an independent Jewish state, based around the Temple. But the Jewish revolution immediately started to consume itself in bloody purges and gang-warfare.
Page 2.
Herod’s Temple was a shrine but it was also a near-impregnable fortress within the walled city.
Page 4.
Ten thousand Jews died in the burning Temple.
Page 8.
Jerusalem was - and still is - a city of tunnels.
Page 9.
The Bible and the oral tradition replaced the Temple.
Page 12.
But now the Temple had been destroyed, the Christians believed that the Jews had lost the favour of God: the followers of Jesus separated for ever from the mother faith, claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Jewish heritage The Christians envisiaged a new, celestial Jerusalem, not a shattered Jewish city.
Page 12.
In the 620s, when Muhammad founded his new religion, he first adopted Jewish traditions, praying towards Jerusalem and revering the Jewish prophets, because for him too the destruction of the Temple proved that God had withdrawn his blessing from Jews and bestowed it on Islam.
Page 12.
… there was security atop these foreboding hills; and there was a spring in the valley beneath, just enough to support a town.
Page 17.
By the time of King David, holiness, security and nature had combined to make Jerusalem an
ancient fastness that was regarded as impregnable.
Page 18.
Prophets were not predictors of the future but analysts of the present - propheteia in Greek means the interpreting of the will of the gods.
Page 24.
David’s musical talents are an important part of his charisma.
Page 24.
The split between Israel and Judah was a schism healed only by David’s charisma.
Page 26.
David chose this stronghold for his capital because it belonged neither to the northern tribes nor to his own southern Judah.
Pages 27-28.
Jerusalem was probably no more than 15 acres, just enough to house about 1,200 people around
the citadel.
Page 28.
Far from being some ideal court of a holy king, David presided over a bearpit that rings true in its details. Like many an empire built around one strongman, when he ailed, the cracks started to show.
Page 29.
As famine and plague spread across the kingdom, David stood on Mount Moriah and saw the angel of death threaten Jerusalem. He experienced a theophany, a divine revelation, in which he was ordered to build an altar there.
Page 30.
It was the authors of the Bible, writing four centuries afterwards to instruct their own tines, who made the imperfect David into the essence of the sacred king.
Page 31.
The Temple was not just a shrine, it was the home of God himself.
Page 33.
Its holiness was such that it was not designed for public worship: In this emptiness resided the austere, imageless divinity of Yahweh, an idea unique to the Israelites.
Page 34.
Jews and the other Peoples of the Book believe that the Divine Presence has never left the Temple Mount. Jerusalem would become the superlative place for divine-human communication on earth.
Page 34.
Solomon’s Temple was a classic shrine of its time.
Page 35.
King Solomon’s mines were long thought to be mythical, but copper mines have been found in
Jordan that were working during his reign.
Page 35.
Sheshonq’s invasion is the first biblical event confirmed by archaeology.
Page 38.
The Israelites flourished only while the great powers were in abeyance.
Pages 38-39.
The growing wealth of the Temple made it a tempting prize.
Page 40.
The modern Jews are descended form the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah. The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck.
Page 42.
Jews somehow transformed this catastrophe into the formative experience that redoubled the sanctity of Jerusalem and crated a prototype fort the Day of Judgement. For all three religions, this inferno made Jerusalem the venue of the Last Days and the coming of the divine kingdom.
Page 54.
At the same time as Homer’s poems were becoming the national epic of the Greeks, the Judeans
started to define themselves by their own biblical texts and their faraway city.
Page 55.
Judeans developed new laws to emphasize that they were still distinct and special … Away from Judah, the Judeans were becoming Jews.
Page 55.
Cyrus had a fresh vision of empire. While the Assyrians and Babylonians built empires on slaughter and deportation, Cyrusoffered religious tolerance in return for political dominance to ‘unite peoples into one empire’.”
Page 59.
The Septuagint Bible changed the history of Jerusalem and later made possible the spread of Christianity. Thanks to Alexander, Greek was the international language; now, for the first time, the Bible could be read by virtually everyone.
Page 68.
The two daily sacrifices of a male sheep, cow or dove without blemish at the Temple altar, morning and evening, always accompanied by an offering of incense on the altar of perfumes, were the chief rituals of Jewish worship.
Page 71.
The city must have smelt of the Temple altar, the censers with their delicious cinnamon an cassia mixing with the reek of burning flesh. Small wonder the people wore much myrrh, nard and balm as perfumes.
Page 71.
Jews, from Babylon to Alexandria, now paid an annual tithe to the Temple, and Jerusalem was so rich that her treasures intensified power struggles among the |Jewish leaders and started to attract the cash-strapped Macedonian kings.
Page 72.
This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided.
Page 72.
To the Jews Herod was a Roman stooge and Idumean mongrel.
Page 93.
Herod dug down to the foundation rock and built from there, so he would have destroyed any remnants of Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s Temples.
Page 103.
The courts of the Temple led in diminishing size to ever-increasing sanctity.
Page 103.
About 70,000 people lived in Herod’s city but during the festivals hundreds of thousands arrived on pilgrimage.
Pages 104-105.
Judaea became a Roman province, and Jerusalem was ruled from Caesarea on the coast by a series of low-ranking prefects; it was not that the Romans held a census to register taxpayers. This submission to Roman power was humiliating enough to provoke a minor Jewish rebellion and was the census recalled by Luke, probably wrongly, as the reason that Jesus’ family came to Bethlehem.
Page 113.
Although the first three decades of Jesus’ life are unknown to us, it is clear that he was steeped in knowledge of the Jewish Bible.
Page 116.
Jesus left now writings and his teaching have been endlessly analyzed, but the four Gospels reveal that the essence of his ministry was his warning of the imminent Apocalypse - Judgement Day and the Kingdom of Heaven.
Page 116.
Jesus was most concerned with the world after the Last Days: he preached social justice not so much in his world as in the next.
Page 117.
Jesus was especially popular among women, and some of these were Herodians - the wife of Herod’s steward was a follower.
Page 118.
He probably entered the city, like many visitors, through the southern gate near the Siloam Pool and then climbed to the Temple up the monumental staircase of Robinson’s Arch.
Page 119.
Power was found in money, rank and Roman connections. But the Jews did not share the Roman respect for military kudos or cold cash. Respect in Jerusalem was based on family (Temple magnates and Herodian princelings), scholarship (the Pharisee teachers) and the wild card of divine inspiration.
Page 120.
The Gospels cite the Pharisees as Jesus’enemies, but this probably reflected the situation fifty years later when their authors were writing.
Page 122.
He did not call himself the Messiah, emphasizing the Shema, the basic Jewish prayer to the one
God, and the love of his fellow men: he was very much a Jew.
Page 122.
Nails from crucifixion victims were properly worn as charms, around the neck, by both Jews and gentiles to ward off illness, so the later Christian fetish for crucificial relics was actually part of a long tradition.
Page 128.
The aim was not to kill Jesus too quickly but to demonstrate the futility of defying Roman power.
Page 128.
The quickest ways to expedite death was to break the legs. The body weight was then borne by the arms and the victim would asphyxiate within ten minutes.
Page 129.
Crucifixion was a slow death from heat stroke, hunger, suffocation, shock or thirst. … It may
actually have been the spear that had killed him.
Page 129.
Jesus’ Passion - from the Latin patior, to suffer …
Page 130.
The Apostles elected Jesus’ brother as‘Overseer of Jerusalem’, leader of those Jewish sectaries known as the Nazarenes.
Page 132.
The small sect of Jesus was now split between its Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and its gentile followers in the wider Roman world.
Page 140.
‘The Apostle to the Gentiles’ believed that ‘for our sake’ God had made Jesus ‘a sin offering, who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God’. Paul focused on the Resurrection, which he saw as the bridge between humanity and God. … his ‘Israel’was any follower of Jesus, not the Jewish nation. … contrary to the harsh ethos of the ancient world, he believed in love, equality and inclusiveness…. His vision was boundless, for he wished to convert all people.
Page 141.
Paul’s Syrian converts in Antioch wer the first to be known as ‘Christians’.
Page 141.
The Christians remained a dynasty: Jesus and James were succeeded by their cousin or half-brother Simon.
Page 143.
Josephus was a priests son, descended from the Maccabeans, a Judean landowner, raised in Jerusalem, where he was admired for his learning and wit.
Page 144.
Peter was said to have been crucified head down; Paul beheaded. Nero’s anti-Christian pogrom earned him his place in the Christian Book of Revelation, the last in the canon of what became the New Testament: Satan’s ‘beasts’ are Roman emperors and 666, the number of the beast, probably a code for Nero.
Page 145.
To most Romans, the Masada suicide confirmed Jews as demented fanatics.
Page 157.
The growing number of gentile Christians around the Mediterranean no longer revered the real Jerusalem. The defeat of the Jews separated them for ever from the mother-religion, proving the truth of Jesus’ prophecies and the succession of a new revelation.
Page 159.
Jews continued to live in the countryside, but Judea itself never recovered from Hadrian’s ravages.
Page 165.
Jerusalem had o natural industries except holiness.
Page 166.
The Jewish longing for Jerusalem has never faltered.
Page 167.
Roman emperors, like Greek kings, always identified themselves with divine patrons. … But the choice of Christ was not inevitable - it depended purely on Constantine’s personal whim.
Page 174.
The new faith suited Constantine’s new style of kingship. Christianity had from the earliest days of James, Overseer of Jerusalem, developed a hierarchy of elders (presbyteroi) and overseers / bishops (episkopoi) in charge of regional dioceses. Constantine saw that Christianity, with its hierarchy, paralleled the organization of the Roman empire: there would be one emperor, one state, one faith.
Page 174.
Now that the Church was established, Christology became paramount, more important than life
itself, for the right definition of Christ would decide whether a man would achieve salvation and enter heaven.
Page 175.
When the Romans worshipped many gods, the tolerated others, providing they did not threaten the state, but a monotheistic religion demanded the recognition of one truth, one god.
Page 179.
All that matters in Jerusalem is what is believed to be true.
Page 184.
Empresses tended to be described by chauvinistic historians as hideous, vicious whores or serene saints.
Page 185.
Justinian, the last Latin-speaking emperor of the east …
Page 192.
Jerusalem and the Temple are never actually mentioned but Muslims came to believe that the
Furthest Sanctuary was the Temple Mount.
Page 205.
In 632 Muhammad, aged about sixty-two, died and was succeeded by his father-in-law, Abu
Bakr.
Page 206.
The Arab armies had no technical advantages, but they were fanatically motivated.
Page 210.
The Dome’s beauty, power and simplicity are equalled by its mystery: we do not know exactly why Abd al-Malik built it - he never said. It is not actually a mosque but a shrine.
Page 218.
It was not just the Temple Mount: the Muslims came to revere anything associated with David.
Page 222.
Political instability intensified religious competition.
Page 229.
It was the changes in Christendom that helped make Jerusalem so alluring for Franks from the east, Greeks from the east. The Christianity of the Latins under the Catholic popes of Rome and the Orthodox Greeks under the emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople were now dramatically different…. Orthodoxy, with its icons and elaborate theatricality, was more mystical and passionate; Catholicism, with its concept of original sin, believe in a greater, divide between man and God.
Page 240.
The Crusade had been the idea of one man. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II had addressed a gathering a grandees and ordinary folk at Clermont to demand the conquest of Jerusalem and the liberation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Page 248.
The Crusades offered personal adventure, the removal of thousands of troublemaking knights and freebooters, and escape from home. But the modern idea promoted by Hollywood movies and in the backlash after the disaster of the 2003 Iraqi war, that crusading was just an opportunity for enrichment with sadistic dividends, is wrong.
Page 249.
A spirit was abroad that is hard for modern people to grasp: Christians were being offered the
opportunity to earn the forgiveness of all sins.
Page 249.
Fortunately the Europeans were attacking a region that was fatally divided between warring caliphs, sultans and amirs, Turks and Arabs, who placed their own rivalries above any concept of Islamic solidarity.
Page 250.
The Templars started as nine guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa but grew into a crack military-religious order of 300 knights, wearing the red cross granted them by the pope, and commanding hundreds of sergeants and thousands of infantry.
Page 262.
As so often in Jerusalem’s history, religious fervour was inspired by political necessity.
Page 266.
Jerusalem combined the rough edges of the frontier town with the luxurious vanities of a
royal capital.
Page 269.
Jerusalem was a necropolis where old or sick pilgrims were content to die and be buried until
the Resurrection.
Page 271.
The Arabs used poetry to show off, to entertain and to spread propaganda … while Crusader knights spun poems of courtly love. Both knight and faris lived by similar codes of noble behaviour and shared the same obsessions - religion, war, horses - and the same sport.
Page 276.
The sadder Jerusalem seemed to the Jews, the more sacred it became, the more poetical.
Page 333.
Europeans did not feel that the Crusades were over - after all, the Catholic reconquest of Islamic Spain was a Crusade - but while there were no expeditions to liberate Jerusalem, all Christians felt they knew Jerusalem even if they had never been.
Page 340.
Pilgrims found the Church resembled a bazaar-cum-barbershop with stalls, shops, beds and large quantities of human hair: many believed that illness would be cured if they shaved themselves and placed the hair in the Sepulchre. …
Some pilgrims were convinced that children conceived within the Church were specially blessed, and of course there was alcohol, so that the dark hours often became a candlelit, hard-drinking orgy in which good-natured hymn singing gave way to ugly brawls.
Page 341.
Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples)
Page 357.
… Sephardic Jews (Sepharad being Hebrew for Spain) …
Page 353.
Virtually every position of honour in Jerusalem was hereditary.
Page 370.
The Christians hated each other much more than they hated the infidels … Each of the sects relished every squalid discomfort and penurious humiliation suffered by their rivals in the Church.
Page 371.
The French Revolution was trying to destroy the Church and replace Christianity with reason, liberty and even a new cult of the Supreme Being. However, Catholicism had endured and Napoleon aspired to heal the wounds of Revolution by fusing together monarchy, faith and
science.
Page 373.
As would happen so often in the Middle East, the Europeans expected the orientals to be
grateful for their well-intentioned conquest.
Page 374.
The more miserable Jerusalem was the holier and more poetical she became.
Page 382.
As the real Jerusalem decayed, the imaginary Jerusalem ignited Western dreams.
Page 384.
The Jews were in urgent need of British protection because the competing promises of tolerance
issued by the sultan and the Albanians provoked a deadly backlash.
Page 399.
The separation of Church of state liberated American faith and generated a blossoming of new
sects and fresh millennial prophecies.
Page 404.
In 1776, some 10 percent of Americans were church-goers; by 1815, it was a quarter; by 1914, it was half. Their passionate Protestantism was American in character - gritty, exuberant and swashbuckling. At its heart was the belief that a person could save himself and accelerate the Seocnd Coming by righteous action and heartfelt joy.
Page 404.
The first American missionaries believed that the Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel and that every Christian must perform acts of rigfhtwoousness in Jerusalem and help the Return and Restoration of the Jews.
Page 404.
The Europeans started to build hulking imperial-style Christian edifices in a Jerusalem building boom.
Page 418.
After the Crimean War, Jerusalem was once again an international object of desire: Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs and British princes vied with one another to combine the new science of archaeology with the old game of empires.
Page 423.
In the mid-nineteenth century, archaeology suddenly became not just a new historical science to study the past but a way to control the future. No wonder archaeology was immediately political - not only a cultural fetish, social fashion and royal hobby, but empire-building by other means and an extension of military espionage. It became Jerusalem’s secular religion and also, in the hands of imperialist Christians such as Dean Stanley, a science in the service of God: if it confirmed the truth of the Bible and the Passion, Christians could reclaim the Holy Land itself.
Page 425.
It was American Christians who really crated modern archaeology.
Page 425.
Like the space race in the twentieth century with its heroic astronauts, archaeology quickly became a projection of national power with celebrity archaeologists who resembled swashbuckling historical conquistadors and scientific treasure hunters.
Pages 425-426.
Jerusalem had at least two faces and a multiple personality disorder: the gleaming, imperial edifices, built by the Europeans in pith helmets and redcoats as they rapidly Christianized the Muslim Quarter, existed alongside the old Ottoman city where black Sudanese guards protected the Haram and guarded condemned prisoners whose heads still rolled in public executions.
Page 428.
The tourists, whether religious or secular, Christian or Jewish, Chateaubriand, Montefiore or Twain, were good at seeing where gods had stood but almost blind when it came to seeing the actual people who lived there. Throughout her history, Jerusalem existed in the imagination of devotees who lived faraway in America or Europe. Now that these visitors were arriving on steamships in their thousands, they expected to find the exotic and dangerous, picturesque and authentic images they had imagined with the help of their Bibles, their Victorian stereotypes of race, and, once they arrived, their translators and guides.
Page 430.
The real Jerusalem was like a Tower of Babel in fancy dress.
Page 431.
In 1892, the railway finally reached Jerusalem, truly opening up the city to tourism.
Photography developed alongside tourism.
Page 436.
Two million Jews left Russia between 1888 and 1914, but 85 percent of them headed not for the Promised Land but the Golden Land of America. Nonetheless thousands looked to Jerusalem. By 1890, Russian Jewish immigration was starting to change the city: there were now 25,000 Jews out of 40,000 Jerusalemites.
Page 444.
In 1896 and Austrian journalist published the book that would define twentieth-century Jerusalem: The Jewish State.
Page 445.
There was nothing new about Zionism - even the word had already been coined in 1890 - but Herzl gave political expression and organization to a very ancient sentiment.
Page 450.
Herzl believed in a Zionism, not built from the bottom by settlers, but ranted by emperors and financed by plutocrats.
Page 452.
Ben-Gurion believed, like most of his fellow Zionists at this time, that a socialist Jewish state would be created without violence and without dominating or displacing the Palestinians Arabs.
Page 460.
Lawrence had no military training and the spirit of an ascetic poet, but he understood that the beginning and end of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
Pages 487-488.
The line between racist conspiracy-theory and Christian Hebraism was a thin one.
Page 495.
Zionism was a German-Austrian idea and until 1914, the Zionists had been based in Berlin.
Page 496.
The promises to the Arabs and the Jews were both the result of short-term, ill-considered and urgent political expediency in wartime and neitherwould have been proffered in other circumstances.
Pages 497-498.
The Declaration was designed to detach Russian Jews from Bolshevism but the very night before it was published, Lenin seized power in St. Petersburg. Had Lenin moved a few days earlier, the Balfour Declaration may never have been issued.
Page 498.
Syria was the prize and Faisal was happy to compromise to secure it.
Page 510.
Woodrow Wilson, the first U.S. President ever to leave the Americas while in office.
Page 513.
On 8 May 1920, Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria (including Lebanon and Palestine).
Page 515.
Ben-Gurion refused to recognize Arab nationalism: he wanted Arab and Jewish workers to share ‘a life of harmony and friendship.’
Page 517.
It was David Ben-Gurion who emerged as the strongman of the Jewish community just as the
mufti became the strongman of the Arabs.
Page 527.
By 1936 there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem compared to 60,000 Christian and Muslim Arabs.
Page 528.
In 1930 she got her first world-class hotel. The majestic King David Hotel, backed by wealthy Egyptian Jews and the Anglo-Jewish financier Frank Goldsmith (father of Sir James), which instantly became the city’s stylish hub, noted for its ‘biblical style’ with Assyrian, Hittite and Muslim ornamentation…. The hotel elped make Jerusalem a luxury resort for the rich Arabs of Lebanon and Egypt, whose decadent royal family were often in residence.
Page 529.
The British public schoolboys, raised on the complexities of their own aristocracy, revelled in the hierarchies of Jerusalem, especially the social etiquette required for dinner parties at Government House.
Page 530.
This thriving new Jerusalem, with 132,661 inhabitants by 1931, proved that British rule and Zionist immigration did help create a thriving economy.
Page 530-531.
Surely, Ben-Gurion argued, Palestine was like a sofa: there was room for both.
Page 536.
Jerusalem was a favourite refuge for exiled kings - George II of Greece, Peter of Yugoslavia and the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie all stayed at the King David.
Page 548.
The King David Hotel was the secular temple of Mandate Jerusalem, and one wing had been requisitioned by the British administration and intelligence agencies. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun, disguised as Arabs and hotel staff in Nubian costumes, stowed milkchurns filled with 500
pounds of explosives in the basement.
Page 558.
Altogether 600,000-750,000 Palestinians left - and lost - their homes. Their tragedy was the Nakhba - the Catastrophe.
Page 568.
Nineteen fifty-six was the twilight of British Middle Eastern imperium and the dawn of American ascendancy.
Page 589.
In 1964, King Hussein regilded the lead of the Dome of the Rock that had been a dull grey for
centuries in preparation for the pilgrimage of Pope Paul VI.
Page 590.
… the possession of Jerusalem gradually changed Israel’s ruling spirit, which was traditionally secular socialist, modern, and if the state had a religion it was as much the historical science of Judean archaeology as Orthodox Judaism.
Page 603.
It was not only Jews who were affected: the much more numerous and powerful Christian evangelicals, especially those of America, also experienced this instant of almost apocalyptic ecstasy. Evangelicals believed that two of the preconditions had been met for Judgement Day: Israel was restored and Jerusalem was Jewish. All that remained was the rebuilding of the Third Temple and seven years of tribulation, followed by the battle of Armageddon when St. Michael would appear on the Mount of Olives to fight the Anti-Christ on the Temple Mount. This would culminate in the conversion or destruction of the Jews and the Second Coming and Thousand Year Reign of Jesus Christ.
The victory of the small Jewish democracy against the Soviet-armed legions of Arab despotism convinced the United States that Israel was its special friend in the most dangerous of neighbourhoods, its ally in the struggle against Communist Russia, Nasserite radicalism and Islamicist fundamentalism. … American evangelists believed that Israel had been blessed by Providence.
Page 604.
The conquest encourages Israelis of all parties, but especially nationalists and redemptionist Zionists, to secure the conquest by creating ‘facts on the ground’; the building of new Jewish suburbs around Arab east Jerusalem began immediately.
Page 606.
Yasser Arafat and his Fatah took over the PLO in 1969.
Page 606.
Begin knew little of the Arab world, remaining the son of the Polish shtetl, a harsh nationalist with a Manichaean view of the Jewish struggle, and emotional attachment to Judaism and a vision of biblical Israel.
Page 607.
It was not only the Israelis who politicized their archaeology: history was paramount. The PLO banned Palestinian historians from admitting there had ever been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem - and this order came from Arafat himself.
Page 611.
Jerusalem’s history is a chronicle of settlers, colonists and pilgrims.
Page 614.
When they are not in conflict, Jews, Muslims and Christians return to the ancient Jerusalem tradition of ostrichism - burying their heads in the sand and pretending The Others do not exist.
Page 616.
Israel’s rule over al-Quds has intensified Muslim reverence.
Page 617.
The Temple Mount is difficult to divide. The Haram and the Kotel, the Dome, the Aqsa and the Wall are all part of the same structure.
Page 620.
… each must recognize the Other’s sacred modern narratives of tragedy and heroism. This is a lot to ask since both of these stories star the Other as arch villain.
Page 621.