Boots in the Mosque

Sheikh Jarrah from the air, 1931. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, via Wikipedia.

How the crisis started, as reported in The Times yesterday:

JERUSALEM — Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

I found myself wondering about a detail: when you enter a mosque, you take off your shoes first, leaving them in a crowd of shoes around the entrance, or for the more fastidious putting them in a bag to carry with you. Were the cops really unlacing their high-top boots and pulling them off before pushing inside, or were they just marching in, profaning the place?

Dr. Google couldn't find any cases of Israeli police explicitly reported entering al-Aqsa with their boots on a specific occasion more recent than 16 January 2020, but they seem to have been doing it over the nights of really violent raids on the mosque last week, starting on the last Friday of Ramadan, when

Literary Corner: The World Will Little Note

US Embassy in Arnona. Photo by Reuters, via Jerusalem Post.

Too Flowery. And He Died.

by Donald J. Trump

Do I get credit for saving a million,
billion bucks? Not really. Someday.
You know when Abraham Lincoln made that
Gettysburg Address speech, the great speech,
you know he was ridiculed? He was ridiculed.

He took the horse and carriage up
from the White House and wrote it
partially in that carriage and partially
at a desk in the Lincoln bedroom which is
incredible by the way in the White House,
and he went up to Gettysburg and delivered that speech.

And he was excoriated by the fake news.
They had fake news then. He was excoriated.
They said it was a terrible, terrible speech.
They said it was far too short. It’s not long,
many of us know it by memory. It was far too short
and it was far too flowery. Four score and seven
years ago, right? Too flowery. And he died.

Fifty years after his death they said
it may have been the greatest speech
ever made in America.

(Text via Grabien. H/t Jordan for title.)

West of Eden: Clueless on Gaza

What Prime Minister Netanyahu likes to refer to as Israel's "eternal, undivided capital", with a stretch of the separation wall that divides it in the foreground (photo by Haaretz/Olivier Fitoussi). It's not eternal either, obviously. It was the administrative-religious center of an Israelite polity for much though nowhere near all of the time from the 9th century BCE to the 1st century CE, most often under the patronage of Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Seleucid, and eventually Roman overlords, but frequently totally destroyed and its inhabitants banished; when Romans or Christians were in charge Jews were not allowed to live there at all, so it was better for the few remaining local Jews, after Muslims were invented in the 7th century, to have them in charge, but the only Jewish state that existed anywhere between the last total destruction in 70 CE and the founding of Israel in 1948 was the kingdom of the Khazars extending from what's now Ukraine south and east to the Caucasus, who whimsically decided to become Jews by religion in the 8th or 9th century and lingered as a power until near the end of the 10th. Let's also remember that these were the days memorialized in the oldest parts of the Arthur cycle and the Nibelungenlied of the great Völkerwanderungen when the Franks pushed the Gauls our of France and the Goths took Iberia and most of Italy and the Saxons and others got Britain and the Finns and Ugrians and Turks pushed into their modern territory and the Mongols seized China for a couple of centuries and Arabs took control of practically the whole Mediterranean and nobody ended up with the homeland they were expecting, just saying.

Praying for Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

Praying for the perhaps many Israelis and Palestinians likely to suffer as this dangerous embassy move blows up.

Furious w/both Israeli and American governments for choosing, once again, power over peace, human dignity, human rights.

— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) May 14, 2018

She's a rabbi, so she has to be kind, but she's allowed to be angry. IDF soldiers have killed at least 58 Gazan demonstrators—reports keep saying they "died", as if the bullets were just hanging there to be wandered into—and shot more than 1,300, attempting to hit them in the legs so that they're merely disabled, putting the Gaza hospital system into terrible crisis, because they're just not equipped to handle that many shooting victims at once. In Washington, deputy press secretary Raj Shah suggests they're dying on purpose, just to make the Israelis look bad:

Toward the state-and-a-half solution

Still from Rona Yefman's 2006 video, "Pippi L. at Abu Dis", depicting Pippi Longstocking, strongest girl in the world, attempting to take down the Wall separating Israel from Palestine.

Has there ever been anything in history quite as overdetermined as Trump's insistence on recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal capital (he didn't say "undivided", which may be a clue that he or his writers didn't mean all that much anyway) of the Jewish state and agreement to move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv at some point in the future? There are so many competing ways of explaining why it had to happen that it might be be more useful to ask what could have stopped it.

First there's Jared Kushner, designated unofficially by the Emperor-elect as Middle East Peace Tsar way back in November 2016—