Above: Palestinian civilians joined the attack on the Israeli soldiers.
Right: Israeli policemen hustle an Orthodox Jewish man away from
stone throwing at the Western Wall.

the Temple, but of the massive re-
taining wall Herod erected when he
expanded the mount on which the
Temple stood. Herod was an Idu-
maean, a Roman client king, who
was concerned as much for his own
glory as for the faith of his Jewish
subjects.
The Western Wall is the exposed
stretch of a much longer rampart.
By digging under the Muslim Quar-
ter to the north, the rabbis were
opening another 400 yards of the
same wall. But does that make it
equally sacred?
There is no ancient tradition of
devotion there. The retaining wall
is not inherently holy. No one prays
against its southern face (above the
City of David) or its eastern face (op-
posite the Mount of Olives), though
both are fully visible.
A walk through the contentious
tunnel is interesting, exciting in a
claustrophobic way, but it has more
to Flo with sightseeing than devo-
tion.
The main length of tunnel re-
veals a gigantic stone estimated to
weigh 570 metric tons; vaults and
arches built by the 14th-century
Muslim Mamluk rulers; a few
strides of a paved Herodian street;
two pillars of a shop facade from

Temple times; a blocked gateway
to the Temple Mount, reconstruct-
ed by early Muslim inhabitants and
discovered a century ago by the
British archaeologist Charles War-
ren; a quarry from which the stones
of the wall are said to have been

al Sharif. Al Aqsa mosque, the third
holiest site in Islam, is far to the
south.
The main tunnel was completed
in 1985 and has been open for a
decade. What changed the night af-
ter Yom Kippur was that the Has-

The sober focus on interests and grievances

offers a sliver of hope, though the prospects

are still farfrom rosy.

hewn; and, yes, a few yards of
bedrock.
Beyond the buried wall a new,
shorter tunnel has now been
opened. It is an aqueduct through
which the Hasmonean kings 2,200
years ago piped water from a huge
cistern into the city.
As for Mr. Arafat's religion, the
tunnel neither intrudes nor burrows
under any Muslim holy place. It fol-
lows the outside of the retaining
wall, but nowhere cuts under the
Temple Mount, the Muslim Haram

monean tunnel was opened and an
exit door was cut on to the Via Do-
lorosa. The idea was to let visitors
go in one end and out the other, in-
stead of going back down the tun-
nel, in places barely a yard wide.
The Tourism Ministry estimates
that this would increase the flow of
visitors, paying about $3 a head,
from 70,000 a year to 400,000.
The Muslims objected to the idea
that the Israelis could pre-empt ne-
gotiations and do whatever they
liked with an Arab quarter of the

Old City. The exit could have been
opened three years ago, but Yitzhak
Rabin and later Shimon Peres chose
not to provoke the Palestinians.
Eitan Haber, Rabin's bureau
chief, testified last weekend: "Ra-
bin, who loved Jerusalem, wanted
to open that door, but the security
people warned him, 'You will ignite
a fire.' Rabin decided it was not
worth the blood that would be
spilled."
Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert,
a Likud member, claimed there had
been a gentlemen's agreement last
January between the Peres ad-
ministration and the Muslim au-
thorities. Israel would accept
Muslim demands to pray in
Solomon's Stables, an ancient site
on the Temple Mount; in return, the
Palestinians would not object to the
tunnel door.
But this is denied by Yossi Beilin,
the minister responsible for the
peace negotiations under Mr. Peres.
He said that the idea had been float-
ed to the Palestinians, but they had
never accepted it.
"Whenever I met them," Mr.
Beilin said, "they reiterated that
they were against opening the tun-
nel."111

