God's Gold (7 page)

As the Muslims were called to prayer from a nearby minaret, Dr. Mazar emphasized that the Waqf's development work breaks the law
because the Haram al-Sharif is subject to Israel's legal system. She considers the physical damage perpetrated to be extreme. Although it would be far too politically insensitive for her as a Jew to monitor the archaeological destruction personally, the Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount has used an eye in the sky—aerial photography—to observe the changes over the past five years. The camera reveals trenches cut up to forty-two feet deep into the ancient Mount.

“Ancient structures have been greatly damaged,” she confirmed. “We calculate that 20,000 tons of ancient fill have been dumped outside, of which we are trying to save about 5 percent. The majority is lost forever among the modern rubbish of the Azariah garbage dumps.” Literally hundreds of trucks unloaded their ancient cargoes into these places and who knows what has been lost. For Mazar, the Temple Mount is a sealed box stuffed with ancient archaeological riches. “The percentage of probability for finding treasure is very high,” she argued. “There is no reason why inscriptions shouldn't be preserved deep among the ruins.”

Surely both sides would have learned from these mistakes now that the scale of the destruction is widely known. But no. “The Waqf couldn't care less,” bemoaned Dr. Mazar. “It doesn't even care about its own Islamic heritage. The goal is religious fundamentalism, and archaeology is absolutely not going to stop them on their way. The Arabs believe they can twist and rewrite history and that a mosque has existed here since the time of Adam and Eve. Their actions are deliberately provocative, a very extreme fundamentalist Islamic approach. Similarly, the Israel Antiquities Authority has to fulfill Israeli law, but it doesn't due to political pressure from the prime minister. This is a boomerang issue.” It was a dilemma that Dr. Mazar was sure would come back to haunt Israel.

The ever-swirling politics make objectivity difficult. Even though I found Eilat Mazar's tone harsh, I sympathized with her frustration born of deep love for all the archaeology of the Temple Mount area. Her words continued to ring in my ears while I plodded back up the hillside
of the City of David: the Temple Mount is the most fantastic site in the world, yet so many scholars won't debate its cultural fate because politics monstrously overshadows all else. Why is UNESCO so impotent in this matter, I wondered, as I set off to confront a worldview that made the archaeological battle for the Mount sound like child's play. Gershon Salomon, director of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement, awaited me in central Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is an ultramodern city in an ancient, battered, and bruised skin. Inspired economically and culturally by its big brother, the United States, Israel swiftly embraced the consumer revolution in the late 1980s. Away from the winding medieval alleys of the Old City bazaar, many of Jerusalem's bars are as hip as those found in Soho. Its youth are more conscious of changing fashions than down-dressing London and, in terms of overall quality and value for money, from breads and salads to seafood, its restaurants put the UK to shame. Israelis love complaining, and skimping on portions or stale servings will buy you an earful of abuse.

The Temple Mount Faithful occupy offices tucked away behind Jerusalem's busiest commercial district. Almost all of the trade around Yafo Street is local these days, and has been since tourists stopped visiting once the Second Intifada kicked off in 1999 and suicide bombers targeted pizza and falafel restaurants. Even local Israelis watch their backs when they go out. As a friend explained, every time you put on a coat, hat, and lipstick, you prepare for a game of Russian roulette: Who will bite the bullet today?

Gershon Salomon's office occupies an old British Mandate–period town house, not unlike a Roman villa with a main corridor and two side wings flanking an open courtyard. Overgrown vegetation droops down the sides of a run-down building, which has seen better days. There is no nameplate, no hint of end-time plans being hatched behind
a closed door. I knocked on a ground-floor door to be greeted by a bemused student who had never heard of the Temple Mount Faithful and was quite sure they didn't operate from his building.

This meeting has taken enormous patience to set up. An endless stream of messages on answerphones, flying faxes, and e-mails seemed to be for nothing. Crestfallen, I left the building's grounds and was about to give up the chase when a dark blue Cadillac parked in the shadows flashed its lights at me. I was being watched. Inside sat the director of the Temple Mount Faithful, Gershon Salomon, cautiously vetting me from a vantage point of quick escape should the need arise. Clearly I passed the test and wasn't considered an immediate threat. Within five minutes I found myself seated in the sanctuary of a rather scruffy office.

Back home in England I had steeled myself to dislike Mr. Salomon. I had no sympathy with a political mind-set obsessed with ridding the Haram al-Sharif (Judaism's Temple Mount) of Islam and seeing God establish a Third Temple on the Mount. I couldn't see how it could work peacefully and firmly believed that this was a political problem, not to be resolved through direct religious channels. The way the Faithful went about their business also disturbed me. Publicly dragging cornerstones for a new Temple to the edge of the Old City, and searching out unblemished red heifers to revive Temple ritual based on sacrifice, isn't a very subtle way of negotiating your business. However, having been firmly shown the door by the Vatican and Israel's politicians, I was relying on Gershon Salomon to give up the golden key to unlock the “undeniable facts” proving the Temple treasure of Jerusalem to be imprisoned in Rome's Vatican City. To uncover these facts I was prepared to sup with the devil.

To my great surprise I ended up rather liking Mr. Salomon. Contrary to the image of the man I had envisaged—someone who was loud, self-opinionated, and arrogant—he neither dressed nor spoke like a fanatic. Perhaps it was the way he hobbled with a cane after surviving a life-threatening military skirmish as a youngster, or the glimpse of a broken man, weary from a lifetime battling for a cause he believed in
heart and soul. Gershon spoke eloquent words with passion and without ego. His eyes shone like an evangelical prophet as he outlined dreams of the Promised Land he hoped to create.

Gershon Salomon established the Temple Mount Faithful movement immediately after the Six-Day War of 1967 with the objective of returning Israel to a biblical nation, a kingdom of priests. He was born of old Zionistic stock, whose family emigrated to Jerusalem from Vilnius in Lithuania in the late eighteenth century. The newcomers dreamed of forging a messianic revolution, and his forefathers believed that the messiah would arrive in 1840. So the dream of a biblical nation has been in Gershon's heart since childhood; he drank this idealism with his mother's milk.

Just before the Six-Day War, he experienced a revelation that would transform his life. At the age of nineteen he was serving as a commander in northern Israel, defending kibbutzes and villages from Syrian attack. A mere three days before he was due to finish his tour of duty, his unit was caught in a terrible ambush and attacked by thousands of Syrians during an eight-hour battle.

“God saved my life,” Gershon maintains. “A tank drove over my body and I lay in the corner of the field of battle, more dead than alive. At night the Syrians surrounded me, but as they prepared to shoot, they suddenly turned and ran back to the mountains. Illuminated by a shining light from the God of Israel, lying there, I felt the presence of the spirit of God around me in my heart, as if he were telling me, ‘You still haven't finished your work, you still have something great to accomplish in your life.'” Salomon was taken to hospital in a coma.

After a few weeks he reawoke to the world and tried to make sense of his surreal experience. Eventually, United Nations officers fed back to him a firsthand report from the Arab officer who had commanded the battle against his unit.

“Why didn't they shoot me?” inquired the bemused Israeli soldier. Apparently they had harbored every deadly intention of finishing him off, but simply couldn't. At the exact moment when they were ready to inflict the coup de grâce, thousands of angels appeared out of thin air
and surrounded his body. The Syrians fled in horror back to the Golan Heights.

Gershon Salomon spent a year in the hospital contemplating what God planned for him. Despite his severe injuries, he returned to his unit and participated in the liberation of the Temple Mount in 1967. He told me how he stood with his troops inside the Dome of the Rock weeping, and heard God tell him, “For this moment I brought you here. Build my house, build Israel as a kingdom of God, a biblical kingdom.” A historical circle had closed.

At that date, when the world's spotlight was firmly on Israel and the entire Arab world was up in arms, the commander of Jerusalem's liberation, Moshe Dayan, chose to return the keys to the Temple Mount to the Jordanians. Although many Israelis still denounce him as a senseless traitor for this single act, Dayan knew that even with the aid of America, Israel would never know peace if it retained the Mount. The image of 1.5 billion Muslims descending on Israel from surrounding countries was enough to make him gamble on returning the keys to the House of God.

Salomon remains intensely bitter at this action. Thousands of Jews may recognize the Western Wailing Wall as the holiest site to Judaism, but for the leader of the Temple Mount Faithful it symbolizes exile and destruction: “As long as the Temple Mount is not liberated and does not become a Jewish site with a Temple, as long as our mentality will not change to become a free biblical nation, never will there be peace in this land. What they call peace is a false peace. Actually the country will be cut up, piece after piece.”

The sun set over the Old City and against the backdrop of an Israeli flag unfurled across Gershon's office wall we discussed the dreams and fears of the Temple Mount Faithful. Salomon is convinced that we are living in an exciting end-time and that a Third Temple will be built within his lifetime. He calls this event “the biggest in the history of mankind and Israel. This event is irreversible. God wants a different kind of life, not based on materialism or chasing after physical achievements.”

As it turns out, the prophetic promise of the red heifer story was actually somewhat premature. For the animal to be certified for sacrificial purity rites, it has to remain red for the first three years of its life. Those reported in 1992 failed this test by turning white and brown after a few months. However, in recent years at least three red heifers raised on a Texas ranch owned by a fundamentalist Christian pastor have passed the test.

So why isn't he eagerly reestablishing biblical sacrifice? For obvious reasons, it turned out. The Israeli government has blocked delivery of the red heifers to Israel for sacrifice on the Mount of Olives because this act is considered excessively provocative. The Faithful's ideology also runs contrary to Orthodox Judaism's belief that a spiritual messiah, not a secular human, will redeem Israel. Opponents of a Third Temple are fearful that the red heifer has apocalyptic repercussions.

After hearing Gershon Salomon's side of the story, I asked the million-dollar question about the whereabouts of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem. Certainly in his mind, Gershon has no shadow of a doubt that the menorah and other Jewish symbols of faith looted by Titus in AD 70 languish deep in the Vatican. He finds the lack of a formal denial from the Vatican deeply suspicious.

But what about evidence to back up these claims? He reeled off the names of medieval travelers who documented Jewish customs across the Mediterranean basin and personally claimed to have seen the Temple treasure in Rome. Now we were getting somewhere, although it was becoming clear that Gershon was good on the big picture but poor on detail. To be fair, however, why should he be? He is neither an academic nor an historian. The main sources, it turned out, were Benjamin of Tudela, Benjamin II, and David Hareuveni, all of whom traveled to the Vatican, saw the sacred vessels, and recorded their experiences in travelogues. Regrettably, Gershon Salomon didn't have the evidence on hand, but relied on the expert advice of an enigmatic Jewish bookseller in Canada who possesses the relevant papers and historical books. I was informed that the president of Israel also personally holds a copy of the incriminating evidence.

So my meeting with the leader of the Temple Mount Faithful passed off successfully. I had new leads from unfamiliar sources and a frightening firsthand impression of a biblical future that hoped to turn the world on its axis. The objectives of the Faithful were pure dynamite, incapable of being realized without immense suffering and bloodshed. Yet the individuals leading the movement's battle are far less dangerous than the waves of fanatical Islamic suicide bombers who have plagued Israel in recent years. The main weapon of the Temple Mount Faithful is the spoken and written word.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Gershon Salomon's warriors as a minority fringe movement. The Faithful receive donations from India, at least two Arab countries, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and almost every country in Africa. Gershon has been invited to lecture across the world from Norway to the Congo and claims that a revolution is spreading across the world. I pushed for statistics about what percentage of Israeli society the Temple Mount Faithful speak for and raised my eyebrows at the response. Apparently a Gallup poll taken eight years ago showed that more than 60 percent of Jews supported the movement's ideas. Its leader claims that it has grown increasingly since then to represent 80 percent of Israeli Jews.

“We are the only surviving idealistic movement left in Israel,” Gershon Salomon concluded as I prepared to leave. “Israel is in a very deep spiritual and idealistic crisis and we give the nation hope. Emptiness looks for something to fill it.”

I left the shadowy backstreet of central Jerusalem promising to read Isaiah 2:1–5, and Zechariah, chapter 8, from which the movement draws its inspiration. My head spun with thoughts and ideas. New names now preoccupied my quest: What exactly did Benjamin of Tudela, Benjamin II, and David Hareuveni see in Rome, and could their testimony be trusted? Would the president of Israel release his documentation to me?

Walking back to the nineteenth-century quarter of the German Colony where I was staying, I passed restaurants and shops all defiantly open to the world but from behind iron barriers patrolled by eagle-
eyed security guards determined to thwart suicide bombers. This is the real face of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this hypersensitive volcano that blows its stack at the smallest provocation. I was just a visitor to Jerusalem and so could escape home to my comparatively cozy world. And as I traveled home, Gershon Salomon's final words echoed in my mind: “I believe that when the Vatican basement is opened, all the world will be shocked by what we find there.”