Free God's Gold by Sean Kingsley

Israelis have visited the site every month. Because Jews are forbidden from treading the hallowed ground of the Holy of Holies, even after the Temple’s destruction in AD 70, Israel’s right wing interprets this trend as evidence of a fast-moving Third Temple culture.
    In the modern political climate of this apocalyptic end-time, the resurfacing of the Temple treasure would create an unparalleled level of frenzy leading to appalling conflict, as Jew and Muslim fight over the sacred spaces of the Holy City. Monetary and historical value aside, this is the core reason why the quest for the Temple treasure of Jerusalem is so central and dangerous to contemporary Middle Eastern politics.

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VOLCANO OF HATE
    Spiritual and historic heart of the world, Jerusalem is also one crazy fairground ride. Ever thrilling, the Western Wall and Temple Mount are a stressful environment. The high-level security, political baggage, and fanatical emotions stoking this religious volcano leave one feeling edgy and disoriented. But in early April 2005, before heading into the center of modern Jerusalem to discuss Jewish treasure in the Vatican with the Temple Mount Faithful, I had no alternative but to face the most “peaceful battleground” on earth. Once again, the Temple Mount had been dragged into the Arab-Israeli peace process, only this time the argument felt personal: the archaeology of the Temple Mount itself was on trial.
    Between October 1999 and January 2000 the Islamic trust charged with overseeing the site, the Waqf, dug a massive hole 165 feet long, 82 feet wide and 40 feet deep into the southeastern corner near “Solomon’s Stables.” Although the architecture aboveground is the work of the Crusaders and Knights Templar, its subterranean hall of thirteen vaults and eighty-eight piers is ancient, an original design of King Herod to create an inclining entrance leading onto the Temple Mount from the southern triple Hulda Gate complex. The term Solomon’s Stables is wishful thinking based on the reference in 1 Kings 4:26 to the wise ruler’s 40,000 stalls of horses for his chariots and 12,000 horsemen. Over the centuries the legend stuck.
    The latest wounds inflicted on the Mount annexed both Solomon’sStables and the eastern Hulda Gate into a new mosque extending over one and a half acres, with a ten-thousand-person capacity, making the structure the largest mosque in Israel. In all, an estimated 65,000 square feet of the ancient Temple Mount’s surface has been ripped up and paved over.
    This development is highly provocative from any viewpoint. In 1967 Moshe Dayan infamously handed back the Temple Mount’s keys to Jordan at the end of the Six-Day War to prevent military escalation and greater bloodshed with the Arab world. So today the site is legally controlled by the Islamic Waqf. Traditionally, however, the Waqf has respected the Mount’s sacred status to both Judaism and Christianity, as well as to Islam. The large-scale building operations have now shattered this spirit of accommodation.
    Virtually nothing is known about the archaeology of the Temple Mount, so any building work carried out without recording ancient deposits is a major lost opportunity to contribute to global cultural knowledge. That ancient remains were destroyed is undeniable—but exactly what is lost remains contentious. Israeli police claim that an arched water channel dating to the time of King Herod was willfully destroyed (although other sources claiming a medieval date are more realistic) and according to an Arab Waqf worker, stones with decorations and inscriptions were deliberately recut to destroy religious marks, including ancient Hebrew texts.
    Israeli intelligence believes the Waqf has cleaned out ten giant subterranean cisterns on the Mount with the intention of filling them with water from Mecca’s holy Zamzam Spring. Zamzam is a major pilgrimage station in the Hajj, holy to Muslims as the