The 100-kilogram stone that dislodged from the Western Wall this week and came crashing down on a plaza 2 meters away from a Jewish woman in prayer has raised questions over stability of the entire Temple Mount edifice.
It's possible, say scientists and archaeologists, that the stone was weakened from its moorings by water that seeped through the soil fill behind the wall or by vegetation growing within the wall itself.
But it is also possible that the waqf, the Muslim religious trust that oversees the Temple Mount, caused the near-catastrophe. It continues to conduct illegal digging projects and unsupervised underground renovations on the Temple Mount.
"We need to find out what is happening on the other side" of the wall, said Professor Eilat Mazar this week. While the use of tractors, trucks and heavy machinery is ostensibly forbidden there, "every time they use an industrial tool – even for drilling – it influences the walls," she explained.
Mazar, of the archaeology institutes at the Hebrew University and Shalem College, has published a monumental survey of every single stone that makes up the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, and she currently leads digs in the Ophel, south of the Mount.
She feels that the massive Herodian-built Temple Mount superstructure is relatively stable overall, but that there are sections that require closer inspection and preservation. This is especially true of the southeastern corner of the wall, situated in the Davidson Archaeological Park. Mazar has warned for several years that a big bulge is protruding from the stone wall in this section.
The Israel Antiquities Authority plans a scan of the southern and eastern sections of the Temple Mount walls, but it has not yet been carried out because everything related to the Temple Mount is diplomatically sensitive. The mere agreement on who is responsible for inspecting and fixing stones is in itself complicated.
But the matter is urgent. Can you imagine what the Muslim and global reaction would have been if a 100-kilogram rampart stone had fallen into the Temple Mount and onto a plaza where Muslims gather or pray? Israel would be excoriated by the U.N. Security Council, unjustifiably of course, for "demolishing Muslim shrines" – and no consideration would be given to the fact that out-of-control waqf excavations may be to blame.
It's hard to avoid the feeling that the State of Israel has been criminally negligent in supervising the digging and construction on the Temple Mount over the past two decades as well as today.
The troubles began when in 1999, the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel and the waqf violently and illegally plowed with heavy machinery into the ground below Al-Aqsa mosque to turn "Solomon's Stables" into a vast underground prayer area, now known as El-Marwani mosque.
Without any scientific supervision whatsoever, they bulldozed 9,000 tons of the most valuable dirt on the globe and unceremoniously dumped close to 400 truckloads of it as "garbage" in the Kidron Valley.
It's clear the Islamists were seeking not only to expand their prayer space but to purposefully destroy any traces of Jewish history on and under the Mount. Furthermore, the waqf has proclaimed its intent to turn the whole Temple Mount plaza – a vast compound – into a prayer zone, thereby precluding any possibility in the future of allocating even a small corner of the Mount for Jewish prayer.
In the summer of 2004, the High Court of Justice stepped in (too little, too late) to protect residual Temple Mount antiquities. The justices ruled in favor of a petition filed by the Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount (which included personalities such as the late Justice Meir Shamgar, writer A.B. Yehoshua and former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek), forcing the government to prevent removal from the Mount by the waqf of another 3,000 tons of archaeological rubble.
"The mounds of dirt must not be taken outside the walls of the Temple Mount [compound] before they have been sifted under the supervision of a professional archaeologist, in situ," the court ruled.
Unfortunately, the waqf has never allowed that rubble to be professionally sifted by archaeologists. And last month, under the cover of Ramadan (when non-Muslims are banned from the Temple Mount and the Israel Police take a step back), hundreds of Muslims actively began picking through the supposedly protected rubble, taking stones to build terraces.
Some of these stone slabs are believed to be over 1,000 years old, and some bear ancient inscriptions. Only the vigilance of archaeologist Zachi Dvira, founder and leader of the Temple Mount Sifting Project (and who lightly surveyed the residual rubble in 2013), caught the waqf red-handed.
Acting on Dvira's warning, the Israel Antiquities Authority and police stepped in to halt the waqf's unapproved earthworks, but their hands are clearly tied by the government in attempting to enforce the Antiquities Law on the Temple Mount.
For 13 years, Dvira and fellow archaeologist Israel Prize laureate Professor Gabriel Barkay, with nearly 200,000 volunteer workers, wet-sifted the soil that the waqf gouged out of the Mount – at a facility they established in nearby Emek Tzurim.
Their painstaking work has brought to light some 1 million finds from the First and Second Temple eras, as well as the late Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and Islamic periods. The finds include fragments of pottery, glass vessels, metal objects, bones, stones, jewelry, 6,000 ancient coins, arrowheads and other weaponry, weights, garments, game pieces and dice, furniture decorations, pillars, mosaic floors, frescoes and wall tiles. Their research has been published in top scientific journals and transformed our understanding of Temple Mount history.
Among the amazing finds are a seal from a First Temple priestly family; a Second Temple silver half-shekel coin that depicts a chalice from the Temple and three pomegranates surrounded by the words "Jerusalem the Holy"; and a coin with the phrase "For the freedom of Zion" from the First Revolt against the Romans that preceded the destruction of the Second Temple.
Unfortunately, the Temple Mount Sifting Project – one of the most important archaeological projects in modern Israel – is out of money. The project needs 8 million shekels ($2 million) over the next four years to resume sifting of Temple Mount soil and to continue researching and publishing its findings.
It is time for the Netanyahu government to back the project generously. It's the least the government can do as penance for its malfeasance in the face of ramped-up Palestinian "Temple denial" and archaeological destruction.
At the same time, Israel should act with determination to counter Palestinian-Islamic aggression against Jewish history in Jerusalem, and, of course, ensure the stability of Temple Mount walls.
