THE BLOODY MOUNTAIN

摘要

The palestinian youth in a yellow T shirt teeters on Herod's massive wall, hewn from limestone more than 2,000 years ago, and throws stone after stone at the Israeli riot police. Below him, a middle-aged Jew flees the barrage, holding on to his black yarmulke as he runs, shouting, "Death to the Arabs!" A minute before, these two were praying in the midday heat—one at al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam, and the other 100 yards away at the Western Wall, revered by Jews as the place of prayer closest to the site of their biblical temple. That abrupt transformation from worship to violence—it occurred in a flash last Friday—is sparked by the power that emanates from the place Jews call the Temple Mount and Arabs know as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. These 35 acres, blocked in by ancient walls and topped by the glittering, gilded Dome of the Rock, are a strange and holy place, splattered all too often with blood. "It is," says Rabbi Nachman Kahana, who runs a nearby yeshiva, "the gateway to heaven." And as the world saw last week, a path to unimaginable hell.