Erdoğan latest threats illustrate anew the danger of allowing divided sovereignty in Jerusalem.- by Jonathan S. Tobin

The point here is not only to bring attention to the revanchist Islamist spirit that Erdoğan’s boasts represent. Nor is it to highlight the fact that even Muslim liberals like Akyol are unable to be honest about the way Judaism’s holiest site was converted into a Muslim shrine that is inviolable in the view of world opinion. Rather, it is to point out the only way Jewish access to holy sites in Jerusalem, as well as that of other faiths, will be preserved is by ensuring that the city is not redivided as advocates of a two-state solution with the Palestinians insist must happen.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
20 July '20..

To understand just how dishonest the discussion about Jerusalem is conducted in venues where Israel is regarded with hostility like The New York Times, you need to start by discussing events in Istanbul, Turkey.

Last week, the regime of Turkish authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan moved to turn the clock back to 1453, when the Muslim Ottomans besieged the city then known as Constantinople. It was all that was left of the once-mighty Byzantine Empire that ruled much of the region as the successor to ancient Rome in the eastern Mediterranean. When the city fell after a 53-day siege, the attacking forces engaged in an orgy of murder, rape and destruction. But in the aftermath of the battle, the Ottoman Turks not only made the city their capital over which their empire would rule until the end of World War I. They also converted the city’s largest cathedral—the Hagia Sophia, which was the center of Eastern Orthodox Christian worship—into a mosque.

The action was typical of conquerors in that era, as well as in ancient times, in which the symbolism of triumphant imperialistic Islam was obvious. But in the 20th century when Turkey became a secular republic after the fall of the Ottomans, the Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum as part of secularist-leaning Kemal Atatürk and his efforts to put Islamic extremism in the past.

A century later, Erdoğan is determined to consign such enlightened attitudes to the dustbin of history. The Turkish leader’s ambition to be the leader of the Islamic world is also motivating him to engage in the sort of gestures that will prop up notions about maintaining Islam’s domination of the region.

In the same statement, he added that the reimposition of Muslim worship on the Hagia Sophia is “the harbinger of the liberation of Masjid al-Aqsa [the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount].” That’s a call for throwing Israel out of Jerusalem and the spot holiest in Judaism. That this incendiary comment came during the period when religious Jews begin the period of mourning for the destruction of the ancient Temple culminating on Tisha B’Av is probably coincidental but still chilling.

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