The Dangers of the Temple Mount

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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