Kotel tunnel incident, 1996

	KOTEL TUNNEL

What was the Kotel Tunnel incident at the Western Wall in 1996?

Adapted from CNN

Kotel Tunnel Diagram

Following the Arab Legion invasion of the area west of the Jordan River during Israel's War of Independence in 1948-49, Jordanian forces prohibited Jewish visitors to the Western Wall and other holy sites including the Old City of Jerusalem. For 19 years, with little protest from Palestinian Arabs or from the rest of the world, Jordan ruled over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"). The area was liberated during the Six Day War of 1967, after which Jewish archaeologists and tourists once again had access to the area of the Temple Mount, site of the Jewish Temples of the first millennium BC.

The Kotel Hama'aravi, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, is not merely the "Kotel" as we are familiar with today. Indeed, the wall stretches north another 500 meters, buried under the houses of the Moslem Quarter which were built up against it. Beginning in 1967, archaeologists have progressively uncovered the base of the entire wall, by constructing the Western Wall Tunnel, an underground passage that runs the entire length of the Wall, under ground created when King Herod raised the landscape outside the Temple Mount to make access easier.

Although the Waqf (Moslem Religious Authority) has systematically attempted to destroy all visible remains of Jewish history on the Temple Mount, underground excavations have yielded a continuous series of archaeological discoveries as more and more of Jewish Jerusalem from the First and Second Temple periods is excavated.

The Hasmonean Channel (or Tunnel) is an extension of the Western Wall Tunnel, re-discovered at the north end of the Wall in 1987, much to the chagrin of the Waqf. The channel is an aqueduct which dates back to the Hasmonean kings in the 2nd century BC, about 100 years before King Herod. The rock-cut channel is approximately 20 meters in length, making a total of 500 meters of tunnel running in a north-south direction, towards the northern Damascus Gate, along the outside of the Temple Mount, not linked physically to the Temple Mount.

The tunnel was in regular use by the Jewish people until Jerusalem was sacked by Titus and the Roman Legions in 70 AD. Rediscovered in the mid-1900s by the British explorer Charles Warren, the tunnel is less than a meter (yard) wide. For more than 100 years, no one had entered it; it remained forgotten in the depths of the earth, full of mud and water, under houses in the Moslem Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

After the Ministry for Religious Affairs re-excavated the Hasmonian tunnel in 1987, it was connected to the Western Wall tunnel - another tunnel about 500 meters long - revealing the Western Wall along its entire length. The combined tunnel links the Kotel, the holiest shrine of Judaism, with the Via Dolorosa, the route Jesus is thought to have taken on his way to his crucifixion. However, due to its narrow width, the number of visitors was limited because the tunnel entrance was also the exit. The only way to leave the tunnel was by retracing steps back to the south-end entrance.

Between 1987 and 1996, the Israeli Ministry for Religious Affairs tried several times to open up an exit from the north end of the Hasmonean Tunnel up to ground level, near the Temple Mount, but not actually within it. Repeatedly the Waqf and the Supreme Moslem Council set off disturbances, and the plans were disrupted, frozen for years by the decision of the security authorities. Finally, in 1996 a staircase was built up from the tunnel to a point alongside an elementary school on the Via Dolorosa, where only a nondescript stone wall separated it from the street. All that remained was to open the entrance to the Via Dolorosa.

On September 24, 1996 approval was granted by the Natanyahu Government, and within an hour-and-a-half the tunnel was connected to a newly-built gray iron doorway in the stone wall on Via Dolorosa. The Islamic authorities had been consulted on this plan during the Peres government (1984-1986), which merely gives increased access to locals and tourists, and in fact increases the flow of tourists into the Arab business quarter of the Old City. The tunnel otherwise has no connection with rights on or to the Temple Mount. The Hasmonean tunnel is more than two football fields away from Al-Aqsa Mosque, and tens of thousands of tourists have gone through it with no impact on that structure.

Negotiations preceded the opening of the tunnel. In exchange for cooperation on the tunnel exit, in a January 1996 agreement the Israeli government gave the Waqf permission to renovate Solomon's Stables, an area of underground passages underneath the southern end of the Temple Mount, as a mosque for Ramadan prayers. The tunnel opening, in short, took place in the context of negotiations and reciprocity.

When the tunnel connection was opened, Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat claimed that opening the entrance was a "big crime against our religious and holy places." Arafat and the Waqf condemned Israel for trying to "Judaize" Jerusalem. Massive public disturbances followed.

Well organized riots occurred in several places within Israel in late September 1996, encouraged by factual misstatements over the Voice of Palestine radio station, and led by Palestinian officials:

On the Temple Mount itself riots occurred, and Muslims threw rocks and debris down on Jews worshipping at the Western Wall area below. Jewish soldiers were killed by the mob, which included Palestinian Authority police who had been given guns to defend both populations from such violence. Palestinian Arabs were also killed and injured on the Temple Mount; which the Islamic authorities immediately closed to tourists; in honor of their martyrs.
Bethlehem was closed to Jews and Christians; preventing visits to the birthplace of Jesus. Later, Christian pilgrims were forced to transfer from Jewish buses and guides to Palestinian Arab buses and guides to go the last few kilometers to Bethlehem. Finally even the Palestinian Arab buses were canceled entirely, leaving elderly pilgrims to walk to Bethlehem.
In Nablus (ancient Shechem), the site of Jacob's Well, Arab rioters tried to burn down the unoccupied Jewish synagogue, and burn the Jewish holy books found there.
In Hebron, home of the Patriarch's tomb at Machpelah, and where David was first crowned king of Israel, ruling for seven years before reigning in Jerusalem, rioting threatened the very lives of the 400 Jewish settlers living there. Similar riots in 1929, under the British Mandate, resulted in the slaughter of every Jew in Hebron.
In Egypt, President Mubaruk illegally sent Egyptian troops into the Sinai demilitarized zone, testing out his new tunnels under the Suez Canal. He also threatened to cancel the Economic Summit set for November in Egypt.

Further provocative activities were set in motion in Lebanon and Syria, and the King of Jordan also offered ominous remarks about potential involvement.

Among the issues raised to justify the protests against the opening of the Hasmonian tunnel exit. was that Israel had violated the Oslo Accords and follow-on agreements. A careful study of the agreements fails to locate any provision that could be cited to show Israel was in violation, and this ignores the fact that the tunnel had been built with prior negotiation and approval by the Islamic Waqf. Nonetheless, the media generally misreported the Palestinian Arab riots and disturbances as resulting from Israel's alleged insensitivity to Muslims, misrepresented the physical situation by repeating claims that the tunnel ran under Muslim shrines, and bought into Muslim propaganda saying that Israel was trying to "Judaize Jerusalem", a ridiculous claim for a city that had been the Jewish capital city for 3,000 years. The media also managed to miss the story of how the Israel granted control of the Temple Mount to the Waqf -- which they were under no obligation to do after the 1967 war -- and how the Waqf had violated agreements and abused their authority by closing the Mount to non-Muslim visitors and by destroying archaeological evidence of Jewish antiquity.

What was the Kotel Tunnel incident at the Western Wall in 1996?

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