Clashes
over the Jerusalem holy site can tip a political battle between Israelis and
Palestinians into a religious battle between Jews and Muslims. The Old City of
Jerusalem is that fortunate one-third of a square mile in the world where holy
sites of the three major monotheistic religions are intimately contained. In
its four quarters are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Via Dolorosa, the
Western Wall, and the Temple Mount, upon which sit the al-Aqsa Mosque and the
Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine and one of the Middle East's most
recognizable buildings.
It
certainly doesn't help that the holy places in Jerusalem also play an integral
part in the Armageddon narrative among evangelical Christians. I'd say that's
another story altogether, but it's really not. Should the centerpiece of the
conflict continue to zero in on the supernatural, a political reconciliation
naturally gets harder to manage. As Ibish explained: The danger is that these
narratives seem to push this conflict away from being an ethno-national
struggle between two competing ethno-national projects over land and power in a
given area, which is a resolvable struggle, into being a religious conflict, a
religious apocalyptic confrontation over the will of God and the nature of
reality and the holy places, which is not nearly as resolvable. Read the
complete article at -- http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/the-dangers-on-the-temple-mount/382787/
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