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PAGE 10
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 7, 1984
The targets of the most spectacular incidents over the past
months have been Muslim authorities and the area they control in
Jerusalem, but for the most part the people who planned
.2!
par
ticipated in the attacks are the violent fringe of an informal
movement tnat�retcfies from tne United
s
€ates To "'"The Middle
East, ande"ncompasses milITons of evangelical Christians as well
as some Israeli Jews. This unlTkely coalition rests upon�
coiii=
mon belief that the Final Days are upon us. For the Christians,
this means that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent; for the
Jews, the Messiah is about to arrive. Both believe that the cru
cial spot for the fulfillment of the Biblical prophecies is the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem, because that is where the Temple of
Solomon is to be rebuilt. According to the fundamentalist under
standing of Christian prophecy, three great events are required
for the Second Coming: Israel must be a Jewish nation; Jerusalem
must be a Jewish city1 and the Temple must be rebuilt. Today only
the third condition remains to be met. Though most Jews believe
that the building of the Temple will occur after the arrival of
the Messiah, a growing number of deeply religious Jews believe
that efforts to rebuild the Temple, and other steps for its prop
er functioning, should be made before the Messianic Age.
Yet the Temple Mount is under Muslim control, and, according to a
common archeological view, the Dome of the Rock stands on the
site of the Temple itself. To make matters worse, the Muslim po
litical-religious trust which administers the Mount area--the
� aqf--does not permit members of other religions to pray on the
emple Mount; they are permitted access to only a part of the
area, and only for a few hours. On Fridays and Muslim holy days,
the Mount is closed to all but the Islamic faithful. The refusal
of the Muslims to grant Jews and Christians the right to any sort
of religious activity on the Mount has intensified the already
strong passions of the messianic groups, prompting some of them
to violence.
On March 10, 1983, more than forty Jews suspected of planning to
penetrate the Temple Mount were arrested in Jerusalem. Four of
them were armed youths caught trying to break through an under
ground passage to the Mount.
Their legal fees--amounting to
$50,000--� paid
!2.Y
wealthy Christian evangelicals� Tex � s.
Less than a year later, on last January 27, Israel1 secur
1
ty
forces thwarted an assault on the Mount and seized eighteen gre
nades and over thirteen pounds of explosives that had been smug
gled onto the Temple site. The police later found a secret cache
of arms outside Jerusalem that included 107 Claymore mines, 6
anti-tank rockets, and a large quantity of high explosives.
There is good reason to believe that the money for this group,
the so-called Lifta Band, also came from Christian sources in
America••••
Except for a few years during the Crusades, the Temple Mount has
been under Muslim control since the conquest of Jerusalem almost
fourteen hundred years ago. This control was reaffirmed as re
cently as 1967, after the Israeli conquest of the Old City, when
General Moshe Dayan, in a remarkable gesture of toleration and
largesse, ordered the removal of Israeli flags from the Islamic
buildings on the Mount. He promised that there would be no tam-