Mohammed Mar'i Saudi Gazette RAMALLAH – The Israel government funds right-wing Jewish organizations that advocate the building of the so-called third temple on ruins of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, a report said on Sunday. The Israeli Army Radio revealed that the Education Ministry and the Culture and Sport Ministry have transferred over the course of the last decade between 300,000 and 700,000 Israeli shekel (between $84,000 and $196,000) to a non-government organization known as The Temple Institute. The report said that the organization received last year 282,000 shekel ($79,000) from the Education Ministry and another 134,000 shekel ($37,000) from the Culture Ministry. The Army Radio said that aside from subsidies, the government also permits young women who opt to forgo compulsory military service to perform national service as unpaid tour guides and instructors with the institute. The women are also sent to schools and kindergartens around Israel to speak about their experiences as well as the educational programs the institute has to offer. The organization said in its website that “our short-term goal is to rekindle the flame of the Holy Temple in the hearts of mankind through education. Our long-term goal is to do all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time.” It also published images of models of the Third Temple, with the Muslim holy places like the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque conspicuously absent from these illustrations. On last July, the rightist Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel said that the government has to build the second temple on the ruins of the Al-Aqsa Mosque Complex in occupied Jerusalem. Ariel, form the rightist Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party, reportedly said that the “we have built many buildings, including many ‘small temples',” employing a term used in the Jewish world to refer to synagogues. “We need something that is not like the Temple. We need the Temple. On the Temple Mount (Al-Aqsa Mosque Complex),” Ariel told participants at the Shilo Conference on Biblical Research and Archaeology. Shilo settlement located to the north of Ramallah in the West Bank. The Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage says that Israeli authorities are carrying out excavations near the Al-Aqsa Mosque Complex to build projects for Jewish worshipers and tourists. The foundation said that goal of excavations “is to Judaize Jerusalem and the collapse of Al-Aqsa Mosque to build the so-called second temple on ruins of it.” The Jewish Rabbi Yaakov Medan of Har (Mount) Etzion seminary said early last July that the Israeli internal intelligence service Shin Bet supports the visits. “The Shin Bet Jewish Division Director told me Jewish presence on the Temple Mount (Al-Aqsa Mosque complex) is essential for maintaining our sovereignty. “He told me that in order to accommodate this trend he would increase the number of agents and security personnel on the Temple Mount.” Medan told participants in the Begin Center Conference on the complex. Israel captured East Jerusalem in the June 1967 War, annexed it in 1980, and has since built settlements there that are home to some 300,000 Jewish settlers. Control over the city has been seen as the most sensitive and thorniest issue of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians hope to make East Jerusalem the capital of their future state but the Israel says the city is its eternal capital.
