From Howard Sachar’s A History of Israel:
“Ariel Sharon Takes a Walk
Its vortex was Jerusalem, traditionally the most explosive ingredient in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse; and its catalyst was Ariel Sharon, the perennial loose cannon of Israeli politics. A year earlier, following Netanyahu’s electoral defeat, the Likud party had overwhelmingly selected Sharon as its new chairman. Since then, Sharon had escalated his personal campaign against Barak’s suspected territorial concessions to Arafat. Sharon’s views on Jerusalem were uncompromising. As minister of housing in the Shamir government, he had vigorously promoted and subsidized Jewish settlement in the eastern part of the city. In 1992, with much fanfare, he had made a point of buying himself a home in the heart of the Arab Old City. Now, eight years later, on September 28, 2000, the day before the onset of the Jewish New Year, Sharon set about making another point, this time in a location that both Jews and Moslems regarded as a sanctum sanctorum. He would pay a walking visit to the Temple Mount.
If the substructure of the Second Temple comprised the most venerated site in the world of Jewish Orthodoxy, that site also impinged on the site of the Dome of the Rock, the fabled setting of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven for his visitation with the Archangel Gabriel. Moreover, on the same thirty-eight-acre Haram es-Sharif esplanade stood the Dome’s close neighbor, the al-Aqsa Mosque. Both these buildings were among the most sacred shrines in Islam. Indeed, on June 17, 1967, in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan had assembled the city’s Moslem religious authorities, and reassured them that the entire Haram es-Sharif plaza would be respected by the Israeli government. Although Jews could visit the site, they would not be allowed to pray there. The Moslem dignitaries were mollified. Over the ensuing years, all Israeli governments respected the Moslem character of the Haram es-Sharif, and cooperated with Palestinian clerics in declaring its shrines under Moslem religious administration.
But now, on September 28, 2000, Sharon ostensibly had cleared his visit in advance with Ehud Olmert, the mayor of Jerusalem and a respected Likud stalwart. Olmert in turn had consulted with Jibril Rajoub, director of the Palestine Authority’s security services in the West Bank. The latter foresaw no problem if the visit was brief and if Sharon did not actually enter the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Similarly alerted, Ehud Barak understood full well the political advantage Sharon hoped to score with his ‘walk.’ Not to be outflanked, however, at a time when he was under growing public criticism for alleged weakness in his negotiations with Arafat, the prime minister decided to allow the visit, and even to provide a police escort for Sharon, Olmert, four accompanying Likud politicians, and a half-dozen news reporters. The visit in any case lasted no longer than twenty-five minutes. None of the group entered the al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock, although Sharon and Olmert momentarily approached the mosque’s newly reconstructed entrance. Finally, just before leaving the Haram es-Sharif plateau, Sharon declared to the press: ‘I think we can live together with the Palestinians. I came to see what is going on here… I have not committed any act of provocation.” But evidently he had, and Barak, in permitting this visit by a man of Sharon’s convictions and temperament, a figure anathematized by the entire Arab world as the ‘butcher of Sabra and Shatila,’ had committed perhaps his most egregious tactical error.
The next morning, Friday, September 29, Moslems began to congregate for worship at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Routinely, a cordon of Israeli police was on hand to keep Jewish passerby from straying onto the Haram es-Sharif on a Moslem holy day. But suddenly about twenty young Arabs began stoning the police. When the violence grew, police reinforcements were summoned, and soon opened fire with tear gas, then with rubber bullets. The rioting lasted several hours. Before it subsided, 4 Arabs had been killed and 164 wounded [some Israeli soldiers were wounded as well, as shown in the AP video]. At this point, spontaneous demonstrations erupted in major towns of the West Bank. Although under the provisions of ‘Oslo II’ these urban centers had been returned to Palestinian security control, hundreds of Israeli police, supported by Israeli army units, were dispatched to suppress the unrest. In turn, they encountered the resistance of PA security forces. By the end of the day, 6 more Arabs had been slain, and some 400 had been wounded. That same evening, in Ramallah, Marwan Barghouti, a trusted Arafat lieutenant, issued orders for the demonstrations to be enlarged under the direction of the Palestine Authority’s reigning Fatah party. So began Palestine’s second intifada, ‘the al-Aqsa intifada,’ with the name ‘al-Aqsa’ adding a powerful religious symbolism to the Palestinians’ long-held nationalist frustrations. Sharon’s visit had essentially provided the spark.”
That quote in bold from Sharon caught my attention because I felt that he must have said something more inflammatory considering what happened next.
So I picked up my copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine to see what he had to say:
“The worsening situation for the Palestinians after Oslo, the fading prospect of statehood, and the intense rivalry between the PLO and Hamas combined to produce the flammable material that erupted into the Second Intifada in September 2000. It required only a match to set it off. A provocative visit by Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif, surrounded by hundreds of security personnel, provided that match. The Haram—known to Jews as the Temple Mount—had been a focus of nationalist and religious passions for both sides at least since the bloody events of 1929, when a flag-waving demonstration by rowdy Zionist Revisionist extremists at the adjacent Western Wall set off days of violence all over the country with hundreds of casualties on each side [1929 Palestine Riots]. Palestinian concerns were heightened immediately after the 1967 conquest of the eastern part of the city, when the occupation authorities destroyed an entire neighborhood adjoining the Haram, Haret al-Maghariba, the Maghribi quarter, together with its mosques, shrines, homes, and shops, in order to create a vast esplanade adjoining the Western Wall. Many of the sites destroyed during the night of June 10-11 by Israeli bulldozers were waqfs, like the Madrassa al-Afdaliyya, established in 1190 by the Ayyubid ruler al-Malik al-Afdal, son of Saladin. Another, destroyed two years later, was the ancient Zawiyya al-Fakhriyya, a Sufi lodge immediately adjacent to the Haram.
With the city now closed to West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and Israeli settlers’ ongoing expansion into East Jerusalem, residents feared that they were about to be supplanted. In 1999, one year earlier, Israel had opened a tunnel running beneath much of the Old City and adjoining the Haram, causing damage to properties above in the Muslim Quarter, and sparking widespread demonstrations. Sharon’s visit, coming soon after the failed Camp David summit, could not have happened at a worse moment. Sharon, who was campaigning to follow Barak as prime minister, heaped fuel on the flames, declaring ‘the Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands.’ Given Sharon’s reckless and opportunistic record, it seems clear that he intended to exploit the volatile context to better position himself to win the upcoming elections, which he succeeded in doing a few months later.
The result of his provocation was the worst upsurge of violence in the Occupied Territories since 1967, violence which thereafter spread inside Israel via a wave of deadly suicide bombings. The increase in the level of bloodshed was striking. During the eight-plus years of the First Intifada, some 1,600 people were killed, an average of 177 per year (12 percent of them Israelis). In the calmer four years that followed, 90 people died, or about 20 per year (22 percent of them Israelis). By contrast, the eight years of the Second Intifada left 6,600 dead, an average of 825 per year—about 1,100 Israelis (just under 17 percent) and 4,916 Palestinians, who were killed by Israeli security forces and settlers (over 600 Palestinians were also killed by other Palestinians). Most of the Israelis who died in the latter period were civilians killed by Palestinian suicide bombers inside Israel, while 332, just under a third of the total, were members of the security forces. This striking increase in the number of those killed during the Second Intifada gives a sense of the sharp escalation of violence.”
I could find a video of Sharon saying a similar quote to the one in Sachar’s excerpt, but no source for that particular quote and Sachar does not provide one.
Rashid Khalidi’s Sharon quote comes from a Guardian news article written by award-winning journalist Suzanne Goldberg on that same day of September 28th, 2000.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a full transcript of Sharon’s speech…
It’s interesting to compare these passages because Ariel Sharon probably said both quotes, but Sachar and Khalidi are each choosing the quote that best supports their narrative. Sachar seems generally center-left on Israel, but here he gives the impression that Ariel Sharon didn’t say or do anything provocative on that day and the Palestinian reaction was due mainly to the symbolic meaning of his stepping foot on the Haram al-Sharif. Khalidi uses a more negative quote that supports his more negative view of Sharon and of Israel.
Khalidi doesn’t mention Jibril Rajoub giving Ariel Sharon the green light before or Marwan Barghouti calling for larger protests after Sharon’s visit. I like that Sachar gives that context, but by picking a more positive quote from Sharon he doesn’t quite present an unbiased view of the situation. This illustrates how important it is to read, compare, and fact-check multiple sources on contested history like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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