Pierre Rehov’s beautiful new film, “Unveiling Jerusalem,” shines a spotlight on the city’s architectural wonders and amazing recent archaeological finds. Even more importantly, it exposes why the religious-political conflict over Jerusalem appears to be getting worse instead of better, despite years of a “peace process.” The film provides much-needed moral clarity on what causes violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Rehov’s starting point is the October 13, 2016, UNESCO resolution denying any connection between the Temple Mount and Judaism. The resolution never once refers to the Temple Mount, but refers to that place 19 times by its Muslim name, Al-Haram al-Sharif. Likewise, it refers to the Al-Aqsa Mosque 19 times.

“Unveiling Jerusalem” earns its name by offering viewers a glimpse of new archaeological findings and animated reconstructions of the Temple Mount, as well as rare shots inside the stunning Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Rehov interviews historians, archaeologists, an Orthodox priest, a Protestant minister,and a Palestinian Muslim human rights campaigner; and he adds excerpts from extant writings of Josephus and Tacitus. All confirm the historical as well as religious importance of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to Christian, as well as Jewish, history.

By denying the connection between the Temple Mount and the First and Second Temples, the latter being where Jesus reportedly spent some of his final hours, Rehov shows, the Arabs who sponsored the UNESCO resolution also denied Christian ties to Jerusalem. The movie notes that most European (i.e., Christian) nations abstained from the 2016 vote.

This denial is a new phenomenon.

Rehov documents that pre-1967, Arabs freely acknowledged that the Haram al-Sharif was in fact the Temple Mount. He shows a stone inscription dated to the ninth or tenth century C.E., from an Arab village of Nuba (about 16 miles south of Jerusalem),that  refers to the Dome of the Rock as “the rock of the Bayt al-Maqdis,” i.e., the Holy Temple.

He also films a 1930 document, “A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif,” published by the Supreme Muslim Council — led by the antisemitic Nazi collaborator, Hajj Amin al-Husseini — which states, “Its [the Haram’s] identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.” He also shows a 1962 guidebook to the West Bank, published when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem. It identifies the Temple Mount as Mount Moriah, the site of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, which was subsequently identified with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Importantly, the guidebook identifies only a part of the Temple Mounts as being within Al-Aqsa Mosque.

“Unveiling” shows that, since 1967, Palestinians have increasingly tried to build up their claims and belittle Israel’s by physically obliterating archaeological evidence of Jewish history. As the movie describes, the waqf controlling the Muslim compound brought in bulldozers in 1999 to dig a pit on the Temple Mount, and simply threw out the debris without making any effort determine whether it contained anything of historical value. Such evaluations are standard in construction projects in many places where there is much less reason to believe anything of historical value exists.

....