The Political Instrumentalization of Religious Architecture: The Wailing Wall

An excerpt from, “Rethinking the Status Quo: The British and Islam in Palestine, 1917-1929″ By Nicholas E. Roberts, New York University, January 2010, Pg. 305 – 312:

The event that transformed the SMC’s relationship with the government and transformed its position in Palestine was the struggle between Arab and Jewish groups over the Western Wall in 1928-1929. This struggle began with a dispute over the use of a screen during Jewish prayers at the Western Wall on Yom Kippur 1928 that developed into a year-long contest between the Jewish and Muslim communities over their rights at the Western Wall, leading in October 1929 to violent attacks (mostly by Arabs against Jews) in Jerusalem, Safad, and Hebron. This conflict, which caused 133 Jewish and 87 Arab deaths, ended eight years of relative peace that the country had enjoyed since the Jaffa riots of 1921 and served as a brutal reminder to British officials that the Arab population of Palestine had not been reconciled to the construction of a Jewish national home.

The Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929, more commonly known as the Shaw Commission report, concluded that the events of 1929 did not result from a straightforward contest over religious rights but were caused by what it identified as the “racial antipathy” that existed between Arabs and Jews. While “racial antipathy” was an overblown description of what was at base a national conflict, the report was correct in its assessment that neither Arabs nor Jews had accepted the political aspirations of the other side. As the report put it:

From the beginning the two races had no common interest. They differed in language, in religion, and in outlook. Only by mutual toleration and by compromise could the views of the leaders of the two peoples have been reconciled and a joint endeavour for the common good have been brought about. Instead, neither side had made any  sustained attempt to improve relationships. The Jews, prompted by eager desire to see their hopes fulfilled, have pressed on with a policy at least as comprehensive as the White Paper of 1922 can warrant. The Arabs, with unrelenting opposition, have refused to accept that document and have prosecuted a political campaign designed to counter Jewish activities and to realize their own political ambitions.

This frank and pessimistic assessment (which laid the blame squarely at the feet of the two protagonists and not at their government) was much bleaker than the optimistic opinions of British officials in the early 1920s. The events of 1929 were a wake-up call for the Palestine government, which could no longer hope or pretend that the Arab and Jewish populations could work together. Or, as Bernard Wasserstein has put it, “there was no immediate dramatic change in the balance between the rival political forces in Palestine after 1929. But the riots had a marked effect on the political outlook of the three main protagonists, the British, the Arabs, and the Jews, the combined long-term consequences of which spelt the doom of the mandatory structure of politics. Although it took until 1937 for the colonial authorities to propose partition, it was in 1929 that the one-state solution died.

The roots of the Western Wall confrontation can be traced back a decade earlier to the beginning of the mandate period when the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann approached the O.E.T.A. authorities with a proposal to purchase the wall from the Muslim community. Weizmann was not religious, but like other secular Zionists he saw the wall as a national symbol. As he explained in a letter to Lord Balfour, the wall was the only religious site in Palestine that was “in some sense left to us” and was frustrated that in 1918 the “Wailing Wall is not really ours.” For Weizmann the purchase of the wall would not only ensure that the Jewish community would own one of the few concrete symbols of the Jewish heritage of Palestine but would also be a great victory for Zionism that would help to rally “all the Jews, especially the great masses of orthodox Jewry in Russia, Galicia and Roumania, as well as England, Germany and America round the platform which we have created, namely a Jewish Palestine under British auspices.” In other words, Weizmann and other Zionists viewed the Western Wall in much the same way as the Arab communitythought of the Haram al-Sharif, as a site that had transcended religion to become a universal nationalist symbol.

Weizmann was well aware that his proposal challenged the religious status quo. Although the wall is what remains of the western wall of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and as such is the holiest site in Judaism, it is also a retaining wall of the Haram al-Sharif and is considered part of the Haram complex. The Haramhas been under Muslim control since the seventh century, except for a brief period when the Crusaders controlled Jerusalem in the twelfth century. Muslim ownership of the wall was formally recognized by Muslims, Christians, and Jews and would therefore be protected by the British commitment to the status quo. Weizmann, however, had little interest in protecting the status quo, even though he conceded that this is what governed British policy:

The British Administration here is guided by one fundamental principle laid down in the Hague convention, that in Occupied Enemy Territory the status quo has to be preserved. It is not for me to express an opinion on the advisability of applying to Palestine rigidly a formula which has been violated by every belligerent Power during this war, and has lost all relation to reality. We have only to accept the fact and to see what we can achieve within the limits set by the status quo.

To work within those limits, he proposed that the concept of the religious site be reinterpreted, so that there would be a clearer delineation between sacred and profane space at the site. This was explained by Weizmann in a statement that he made before the Zionist Commission on March 14, 1918,

The Jews do not wish to touch the Christian and Moslem sanctuaries. We should however like to feel that Palestine was not wholly composed of holy places. There must be territorial limits placed to these holy places, so that we should know exactly what they are. The Jews should retain the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and [we] would like the Commission to fence it round, and to mount a Jewish guard round it… 

Weizmann’s proposal to buy the wall in 1918 was an attempt to put this plan into action by legally separating the wall from the Muslim site. This view ignored both the religious significance of the site to the Muslim community and the connection that local Arabs had with the neighborhood at the base of the wall. The wall, known to Arabs as al-Buraq, was not only a retaining wall of the Haram al-Sharif but also the site where Muhammad stabled his horse (al-Buraq) before his Night Journey to heaven. At the same time, the wall abutted an Arab neighborhood that had been established as the Abu Madyan waqf during the reign of Saladin, to accommodate Moroccan pilgrims to Jerusalem. This had led the neighborhood to become known simply as the Maghribi neighborhood, from the Arabic term for Moroccan. In proposing his takeover of the wall, Weizmann made clear that this neighborhood was a blight that needed to be removed.

. . .Competition over the site between the Arab and Jewish communities was not ended with the failure of Weizmann’s proposal. This failure did not change the fact that that Muslim rule in Palestine had been replaced by a Christian administration sympathetic to the Zionist project, which encouraged Jewish leaders to expect that the site would eventually end up as Jewish property. The fact that the Palestine government had initially been receptive to Weizmann’s proposal acted as further encouragement because it suggested that the government was open to a reevaluation of religious rights at the site. 

As a result, competition between the Arab and Jewish communities over the wall would continue unabated throughout the 1920s.

Mary Ellen Lundsten’s article, “Wall Politics: Zionist and Palestinian Strategies in Jerusalem, 1928,” offers a useful discussion of the way in which the wall became a political cause for the two communities. She points out that one of the more important ways in which the wall became significant was as a symbol in ZZionist fundraising. According to Lundsten, “the Jewish National Fund issued stamps in booklets portraying Jewish symbols at the Wall and signifying the relationship between Jewish jurisdiction over the ‘Holy Places’ and Zionist land acquisition throughout Palestine.” Other Jewish publications were even more provocative, with foreign Jewish newspapers publishing pictures of the Dome of the Rock with a Star of David on top, an image that suggested that the entire haram would eventually come under Jewish ownership. As we have seen this mirrored the use of holy sites in fundraising by the SMC, in fact these very same images were used by the SMC to prove that Jews planned to take over the Haram al-Sharif.