My 1st friend and the 3rd Temple

Today I made my first new Israeli friend this visit. He was an orthodox Jew in the Old City running athe Museum of the Third Temple. The museum contains a detailed model, based on a prophesy in Ezekiel, of a temple building which the most extreme Jews (and Christians) want to see build on the Temple Mount – of course the Dome of the Rock would need to be demolished first to make way for this.

I had an inkling of all this before I entered, but decided to get to know this person rather than get into a heated argument immediately. So I acted like a curious but fairly ignorant tourist (which I guess I am!) and listened to him explain his opinions in response to my innocent questions. What he had to say was pretty appalling: He always spoke of the “Palestinians” with gesticulated quotation marks (perpetuating the lie that they are not a distinct people, just another bunch of Ay-rabs) and he referred to them as “the enemy”. He said that most Muslims don’t care about Jerusalem, and that those who do only really started bothering after 1967. He clearly felt under attack from all sides, including from fellow Jews. He said that Mordechai Gur, the general who conquered the Old City in 1967, unilaterally decided to let the Palestinians, who had fled, return to their homes because he was aggressively secular and didn’t want religious Jews to be in control of the Old City. My friend said that Ben Gurion (Israel's first Prime Minister), who was secular, had the blood of 1000s of Jews on his hands for blocking the immigration of religious Jews wanting to flee from the Nazis. “Even the US”, he said, “is not really a reliable friend, it is only supporting us now because this is in its self interest, and it would abandon us tomorrow if it felt its interests had changed.”

As we talked, for almost an hour, we moved from politics and I learnt about his family – though he was only 23 he had two children because, like many orthodox Jews, he married young. He told me how he had got engaged to his wife only 5 days after meeting – and how she had actually proposed before he’d had the chance to do so! He talked about how his wife's family had initially been unsure of him, but had finally warmed to him strongly. We talked about his rapid engagement and he insisted that it wasn’t love-at-first sight because he believes love is something that you work at and which develops over time – a position I also agree with. In this conversation I felt connected to his common humanness. Yet perhaps it was some of his friends who beat up my CPT collegues today in at-Tuwani in the South Hebron hills where they were accompanying shepherds blocked from their traditional grazing lands by new militant settlers. What a horrible and wonderful world.