c. 2000 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon, the man widely blamed for triggering the initial outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian disturbances three weeks ago, said Friday (Oct. 20) the Oslo peace process is dead and at best Israel demands a long period of “non-belligerency” before entering any future peace negotiations.

In his first major appearance since the violence began, Sharon, speaking before a group of some 4,000 evangelical Christians from around the world, also expressed no regrets for his Sept. 28 visit to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque compound, revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, which many say helped trigger the spate of violence.

“The land of Israel is holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims but it was promised by God only to the Jews,” declared Sharon, appearing upbeat and at ease before the crowd of Christians gathered here for an annual “Feast of the Tabernacles” celebration. The crowd, some wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls, jumped to their feet cheering the hardline Israeli leader, waving Israeli flags and shouting “amen.”

Sounding more like a revivalist preacher than a politician, as he touched on biblical themes and used biblical phrases, Sharon said Jerusalem had been the capital of the Jewish people for the last 3,000 years and would remain “the undivided capital of Israel forever.”

“You can hold the Bible in your hand, you don’t need any guide or explanation,” Sharon said to the accompaniment of rippling applause and cheers. “And you who know the Bible know that Jerusalem is mentioned 667 times as Jerusalem, and another 154 times as Zion. Without saying anything bad about any other faith, Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran even one time.

“We defended Jerusalem in the war for independence and liberated the Temple Mount in the 1967 war … and after all of these years, we have to defend Jerusalem again and we need your support.”

Sharon said there are a number of lessons to be learned from the violence, including that it has demonstrated free access to Jerusalem’s holy sites can be guaranteed to Jews, Christians and Muslims only if Israel remains fully sovereign over the city.

“The Oslo agreement, which was very dangerous from the beginning, and almost impossible to implement _ now everyone understands that nothing can come out of it,” he said.

He said he placed full responsibility for the collapse of peace talks on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

“The man … who violated every paragraph of every agreement was Arafat. The Oslo agreement doesn’t exist anymore. It is null and void.”

Given the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, Israel should take tough security measures to halt the civil revolt now under way in the West Bank, and then seek to achieve a very long-term, open-ended, “interim” agreement with the Palestinians, rather than a more ambitious permanent settlement, Sharon said.

“Written agreements aren’t worth the paper they are written upon. In order to see what can be done, we need a longer period, something like non-belligerency, during which we’ll have to check the development of relations between us and the Arabs, the Palestinians.”

While Sharon’s blunt and blustering style, as well as his involvement in Israel’s blunders during the 1982 Lebanese war, have long made him the focus of controversy within mainstream Israeli society, he was clearly at home among the evangelical Christian crowd, which he described as “some of Israel’s best friends.”

Johann Luckhoff, chairman of the militantly pro-Israel and Jerusalem-based International Christian Embassy, which sponsored the event, said Sharon had been unfairly blamed for triggering the recent Israeli-Palestinian disturbances.

“So much of what has happened here in the last weeks was blamed on him, but Mr. Sharon, the people here cannot be fooled,” said Luckhoff, whose organization claims to represent millions of evangelical Christians.

Luckhoff said Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa compound was intended to pave the way for Jews and Christians to eventually pray on the ancient Jewish Temple Mount, now forbidden by Islamic authorities who have controlled the site for some 1,400 years.

“Our support of Israel’s sovereignty over a unified Jerusalem includes the area where the temple once stood. And if you went ahead to establish the right of every Jew and every Christian to worship on that area, then we thank you,” Luckhoff told Sharon.

Israeli Arab and Palestinian Christians, for their part, have reacted with horror both to Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa compound, and to the defiantly pro-Israeli stance adopted by Christian Zionist groups like the Christian Embassy, which are supported primarily by churches overseas.

“We feel that everything that has happened has stemmed from the provocation of Sharon. It was part of an orchestrated move by Sharon to further a certain political agenda,” said Naim Ateek, a former Anglican Church official in Jerusalem who now runs a Palestinian Christian organization known as “Sabeel,” which promotes a liberation theology approach to Palestinian rights.

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“Unfortunately, Sharon knows how to talk to fundamentalist Western Christians, and use their vocabulary, their language, by emphasizing the biblical Old Testament themes of the Jews as the chosen people, and Israel as the promised land for the Jews,” said Ateek.

“But these Christian Zionists, negate Palestinian rights. They are, in my opinion, buying into a kind of `state’ theology which no Old Testament prophet would have supported,” he said.

“In biblical history, the prophets always (criticized) state theology, and spoke on behalf of God’s theology of justice, mercy and peace. The Palestinian Christian community in this land, too, is looking for true justice. And that can only be achieved (with) an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, a sharing of Jerusalem, and the acceptance of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.”

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