DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS – January 22, 2020
The Western Wall belongs only to Muslims and must be defended even to the death, Palestinians living in the West Bank were told during a filler piece between programs on official Palestinian Authority TV and in a news article in the official PA newspaper.
In a short video broadcast on November 29, an official PA TV narrator told viewers: “The historical documents in the possession of the Palestinians of Jerusalem testify that Jerusalem is a city of Arab origin for thousands of years, and its history and culture are Islamic. Since Islam’s conquest [in the 7th century], the al-Buraq Wall [the Western Wall] has remained an Islamic waqf [an inalienable religious endowment in Islamic law]. The Muslims have the absolute right to it and there is not even one rock there that dates back to the period of King Solomon, as the Jews claim.”
The voice over was set to images of daily life within Jerusalem’s Old City, and of the Western Wall, which is part of Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. The wall is a remnant of a large retaining wall built by King Herod to support the mount for the Second Temple; no part of Solomon’s First Temple remains, although artifacts from that period have been found in the area.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, a research institute that studies the PA’s messages to its people, the Western Wall is referred to by Muslims as al-Buraq, because the prophet Mohammed is said to have traveled to al-Aqsa mosque and tied his flying horse, named al-Buraq, to a stone or rock. In the 1920s, Arab Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini identified that rock as the Western Wall, and Muslims adopted the name for it.
