Moshe Kohn is a veteran columnist at The Jerusalem Post

THE ARABS, supported by pro-Arab apologists, claim Jerusaem as theirs
virtually since Creation. Or at least "since Mohammed started preaching in
610," as one such apologist, Prof. Karen Armstrong, put it recently. This
claim is accompanied by the claim that Jerusalem is Islam's third holiest
city after Mecca and Medina.

In fact, the former claim is nonsense. Arabs and their Moslem and other
allies and apologists have raised these claims over the centuries mainly
when it served their political purposes, such as it is now serves them
against the Jews. Otherwise Jerusalem has not mattered to them much more
than Oshkosh.

Let's examine some of the Arab and Moslem chapters in the history of
Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was the Moslems' first kibla. But this was not because the city
that David made the capital of his United Kingdom of Israel, the city that
contained the Temple, the city in whose direction and for whose rebuilding
as the Jewish capital and site of the Temple the Jews fervently prayed
before Mohammed came on the scene. It was, rather, one of several acts
committed by Mohammed to curry favor with the Jews of Medina (Yathrib), who
were an important element there at the time, in an effort to win their
support and their loyalty for his new religion, Islam, and against his
enemies in his native city and former home, Mecca, from which he had earlier
had to flee for his life. As the late-ninth-century-early tenth-century Arab
historian Mohammed al-Tabari wrote "[Mohammed] chose the Holy House in
Jerusalem in order that the People of the Book would be conciliated."

Here is what the Koran (Sura 2, verses 136-141) tells us about the kibla,
reflecting the fact that Mohammed gave up on the Jews and was turning his
back on Jerusalem to face the sacred Arabaian rock in Mecca, the Kaaba:
"...We [Allah] set the kibla that you originally faced [Jerusalem] only so
We might distinguish between those who follow the Apostle [Mohammed] and
those who turn on their heels...but We will turn you toward a kibla that
will please you, and you shall turn your face toward the sacred Mosque [the
Kaaba], and wherever you are that is the direction you shall face....Even if
you should bring every kind of sign to those [the Jews] who have received
the Book [the Tanach, the Jewish Bible], still they will not adopt your
kibla, nor are you to adopt theirs... Those to whom We gave the Book know
him [Mohammed]...but one sector of them conceal the truth despite the fact
that they know it."

A bit earlier (Sura 2:83) the Koran also tells us: "The curse of God is on
the infidels whom God gave a Book [the Koran] confirming what they [the
Jews] had already received [in the Torah], but which they turned their back
on."
Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world's leading expert on Islam and Arabism,
reports that early Moslem theologians opposed assigning any sanctity to
Jerusalem, some of them even characterizing the idea as "a judaizing error
- as one more among many attempts by Jewish converts [to Islam] to
infiltrate Jewish ideas into Islam." (See Lewis's The Jews of Islam,
Princeton University Press Paperback, 1987.)

Lewis cites a story told by the late-ninth-early-tenth-century Arab
historian Mohammed ibn al-Tabari about a visit of Caliph Omar to
Jerusalem, just conquered by the invaders from Arabia: "When Omar came to
Ilya [as the Moslems called Jerusalem till the 10th century]," al-Tabari
wrote, "he ordered his servants to summon Kab al-Ahbar, a prominent Jewish
convert to Islam. When he arrived, Omar asked him: 'Where do you think we
should put the place of prayer?'"

Al-Ahbar replied: "By the Rock" - that is, the so-called Even
Hashetiah/Rock of the Foundation, believed to mark the site of the altar
Patriarch Abraham built on which to sacrifice his son Isaac, later the site
of the Temples Holy of Holies, and eventually the site of the Arab-Moslem
Dome of the Rock, which is erroneously called Mosque of Omar though Omar had
nothing to do with it.

According to al-Tabari, Omar said to Al-Ahbar: "By God, you are still
following Judaism! I saw you take off your sandals [in accordance with
Jewish practice and later Moslem practice at this site]...we were not
commanded concerning the Rock, but concerning the Kaaba."

Later, the 13th-century Arab biographer and geographer Yakut noted: "Mecca
is holy to Moslems, and Jerusalem to the Jews."

As for the Moslem tradition concerning Mohammed's vision of a night journey
to Jerusalem on his horse Burak, reported in the Koran, Sura 17, without any
mention of Jerusalem - the 230-meter Arabic inscription around the Dome of
the Rock, supposedly built to celebrate Mohammed's alleged ascent to Heaven
from that Rock of the Foundation, makes no mention of that alleged journey.

And as for Jerusalem's being an Arab capital - the closest it ever came to
that status was during the caliphate of of Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan
(685-705). During his reign, while the anti-caliph Abdullah Ibn Zubayr
briefly controlled Mecca, Ibn Marwan forbade Moslem pilgrims to go to Mecca,
declared the Rock of the Foundation to have been Mohammed's takeoff point on
his flight to Heaven, built the Dome of the Rock over it, and made Jerusalem
his seat till Ibn Zubayr was defeated in 692.

THE TANACH (Jewish Bible) doesn't tell us exactly where and when the Torah
was given. But it and the Talmud and Midrash clearly tell us, numerous
times, from where its message is to be broadcast and its light to be
radiated. The best known statement, chanted every time the Torah is to be
removed from the Ark for reading during the synagogue service, is: "For out
of Zion shall come forth the Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem"
(Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2).

These are just two of the 823 times that Jerusalem and Zion appear in the
Tanach - Jerusalem 669 times and Zion, usually synonymous with Jerusalem
though sometimes referring to the Land of Israel as a whole, 154 times.

In the Christian New Testament, Jerusalem appears 154 times and Zion seven.
This is natural, considering that the protagonist and most of the other
personae were Jews, and that some of the central events, including the
culminating event. took place in Jerusalem/Zion.

In the Koran, on the other hand, "Jerusalem" and "Zion" appear as
frequently as they do in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Taoist Tao-Te Ching,
the Buddhist Dhamapada and the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta. This, too, is only
natural, since nothing of Islamic significance happened in Jerusalem/Zion
before the Arab conquest in 638, and, of course, nothing of Hindu, Buddhist,
Taoist or Zoroastrian significance ever happened here. It was only after
that conquest that the Arabs invented an Islamic history for the city.

Indeed, until the tenth century the Moslems called Jerusalem "Ilya." This
was an Arabic abridgment and corruption of "Aelia Capitolina," the name
the Roman emperor Hadrian Publius Aelius gave it. He renamed the city after
himself and the Roman God Jupiter Capitolinus after crushing the Bar-Kochba
Revolt in 135 CE. He razed Jewish Jerusalem, installed a shrine to Jupiter
on the ruins of the Temple's Holy of Holies, and in general strove to
erase from Jerusalem every Jewish vestige. (And except for the idolatrous
touch, the Jordanians under Kings Abdullah I and Hussein treated the city
similarly between 1948 and 1967.)

From the tenth century on the Moslems called the city by names of Jewish
origin:Beit al-Makdis, the Arabic version of the Hebrew name for the Temple,
Beit Hamikdash/House of the Sanctuary; Al-Kuds, Arabic for the (Ir)
Hakodesh/(City of) Holiness; and even Siyyun, Arabic for the Hebrew
Tziyon/Zion.

IT IS instructive to note how a Christian (Catholic) and a Moslem
monarch once expressed themselves regarding this city over whose sanctity
representatives of those two faiths have initiated the shedding of so much
blood and spokesmen of both have perpetrated so much verbal violence.

On February 18, 1229, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of the House of
Hohenstauffen, who led the Sixth Crusade, concluded a treaty with the
Egyptian Sultan al-Kamil that gave him Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Lod
and several other places in Eretz Yisrael and beyond, and ten years of
peace.

Pope Gregory IX denounced Frederick for acquiring Jerusalem in this fashion,
saying that Moslems are to be fought, not negotiated with.

Frederick, who had earlier crowned himself King of Jerusalem, said: "If I
did not fear to lose my prestige in the eyes of the Franks, I should not
have sought to impose all this on the sultan."

Al-Kamil, for his part, said: "I have ceded nothing but churches and
ruins."

Jerusalem, Islam's "third holiest city," nothing to a Moslem ruler -
"nothing but churches and ruins."

In 1244 the Moslems retook Jerusalem. "Now the city lapsed into
obscurity, and the Moslem shrines on the Temple Mount were abandoned and
became dilapidated," Daniel Pipes, publisher and editor of the
Philadelphia-based Middle East Quarterly, has written ("If I Forget Thee:
Does Jerusalem really matter to Islam?" in The New Republic, April 29,
1997).

"The Jewish political revival in Jerusalem in our century, spurred by the
Zionist movement, and the British Mandatory control of the city galvanized
Moslem passion for Jerusalem," Pipes continued. "But when Jordan occupied
eastern Jerusalem in 1948, the Moslems quickly lost interest. Jordan's
Hashemite rulers had little affection for Jerusalem, and they made a
concerted effort to diminish the holy city's importance in favor of their
capital, Amman.... No foreign Arab leader came to Jerusalem between 1948 and
1967, and even king Hussein visited only rarely."

As for Yasser Arafat and Jerusalem - the Palestinian National Covenant, the
PLO's murderous founding document, never mentions the city.