As seen through multiple recent events, the nations of the world are increasing their efforts to weaken or remove Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem. Is this a fulfillment of Zechariah 12:3’s prophecy that, at the End of Days, the nations of the earth will gather against Jerusalem?
In the 1920s, the Muslims began calling the Kotel (Western Wall) the Al-Buraq Wall and the Kotel Plaza the Buraq Plaza. According to Muslim tradition, Al-Buraq was a horse with wings that carried Muhammad back and forth between Mecca and Jerusalem.
Historically, the Kotel is a part of the outer, western retaining wall of the Second Holy Temple that was destroyed in the year 70 CE. It has been sacred to Jews and Christians for 2,000 years. The millenia-long holiness of the Kotel derives from its association with the Temple Mount, where the two previous Holy Temples stood.
Recently, the Palestinian Authority, sponsored by six Arab states, submitted a resolution to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) seeking to claim the Kotel as a Muslim holy site, wresting the Kotel from the Jewish nation and claiming it as its own. In the proposal, the PA refers to Jerusalem as “the occupied capital of Palestine.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry vowed to fight the resolution, saying that it “is a clear endeavor to distort history, in order to erase the connection between the Jewish people and its holiest site, and to create a false reality.”
Riyad Mansour, the PA envoy to the UN, has also asked the UN Security Council to step in and assist Palestinian Arabs. Speaking to reporters after a Security Council meeting on Friday, October 16, painting Israel as the aggressors in the current wave of Islamic terrorism in Israel, Mansour said, “The situation warrants providing protection for our people in the occupied territory starting in the Old City of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa mosque.” In this statement, Mansour clearly refers to the entire Old City of Jerusalem as “occupied territory”.
In response to Mansour’s claims that his people are being threatened by Israel, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported on Saturday that France is drafting a proposal to station international troops on the Temple Mount. Israel’s UN representative Danny Danon said that Israel will never agree to allow an international force to occupy the site of the two Biblical temples.
International involvement in the status of Jerusalem is also coming from the US and the EU. Current US engagement is evidenced by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to clarify the meaning of the “status quo” on the Temple Mount through a series of meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Jordan’s King Abdullah and PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
The European Union also has a hand in attempting to clarify the status of the Jewish and Muslim presence on the Temple Mount, as EU Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini is set to meet with Netanyahu in Berlin later this week about the issue.
Scholar, author and End Times expert Rabbi Pinchas Winston believes that there is a great spiritual significance of the tug-of-war over Jerusalem.
“If you look at a map of Europe, Asia, and Africa, it is amazing that tiny little Israel is like the hinge pin that holds them all together. It really looks like the center of the world, and Jerusalem is its center,” he told Breaking Israel News. “Kabbalistically [according to Judaism’s mystical tradition], Jerusalem is even the center of the Universe, because that is where the light of God descends to the world before being shared with the rest of mankind.
“This is why so many nations and religions cherish and demand the holy city, even if they are not conscious of this. As every parent knows, little is more ‘burdensome’ than when several children desperately want the same thing,” he explained.
“When it comes to Jerusalem, how much so is this true when the sides are even prepared to kill for it, ‘forcing’ the world to have to deal with the issue when they’d rather be focused elsewhere?”
