User:John Z/drafts/rock

"The paratroopers wandered around the plaza as if in a dream," Narkiss was quoted as saying. "Rabbi Shlomo Goren was among them. I was alone for a moment, lost in thought, when Rabbi Goren approached me. 'Uzi,' Rabbi Goren said to me. 'Now is the time to put 100 kilograms of explosives into the Mosque of Omar so that we may rid ourselves of it once and for all.'

"I said to him, 'Rabbi, enough.'

"He said, 'Uzi, you will go down in history if you do this.'

"I answered, 'My name will already be written in the history books ofJerusalem.'

"But Goren persisted. 'You don't grasp what tremendous significance this would have. This is an opportunity that can be taken advantage of now, at this moment. Tomorrow it will be too late.'

"I said 'Rabbi, if you don't stop, I'll take you to jail.'

"Thus the discussion, which only lasted a few minutes, came to an end.Rabbi Goren turned and walked away in silence."

Goren's former aide, Rabbi Menahem Hacohen, told Israel's Army radio on Wednesday that he was present for the discussion but it did not take place as recounted.

"The rabbi told Uzi that if, during the course of the war a bomb had fallen on the mosque and it would have - you know - disappeared - that would have been a good thing. Uzi said, 'I am glad that did not happen,'" Hacohen said.

Hacohen said Goren "did not suggest using explosives, and Uzi never told him not to do it. That was the whole conversation."

The radio also played a tape of a speech Goren made in 1967 to a military convention, in which Goren called it a "tragedy" that Israel had left the Temple Mount in control of the Muslims.

On the tape, Goren says:

"I told this to the defense minister (Moshe Dayan) and he said, 'Iunderstand what you are saying, but do you really think we should have blown up the mosque?' and I said, 'Certainly we should have blown it up.'

"It is a tragedy for generations that we did not do so. ... I myself would have gone up there and wiped it off the ground completely so that there was no trace that there was ever a Mosque of Omar there."

http://www.middleeast.org/archives/1999_01_05.htm MER - Washington - 1 January 1998 AP: JERUSALEM (AP) by Hilary Appelman (31 December 1997) - Hours after Israeli soldiers captured Jerusalem's Old City in 1967, the army's chief rabbi urged that the gold-topped Dome of the Rock mosque be blown up, according to a newspaper report Wednesday.

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A first school favors building the Third Temple today. The only chief rabbi who backed this position was Rabbi Shlomo Goren, and this before the 1967 war and for a short period immediately following it (a period when Goren had not yet been appointed chief rabbi). At the 1962 Oral Law Conference, Goren said that if the Old City of Jerusalem would ever be captured from Jordan there would be a need to rebuild the Temple.2 After the Temple Mount fell to the Israeli Army on the second day of the 1967 war, Goren, then Army Chief Rabbi, asked Central Region Commander General Uzi Narkiss to place 100 kg. of dynamite in the Dome of the Rock.3 Goren repeated the need to blow up the Dome of the Rock at an all-day seminar on the Temple Mount for reservists in the military rabbinate. In the heat of war, where there was much bombing, such an action could have been carried out, Goren claimed, without even a formal military order to counter sniper firing from the Jordanians on the Mount.4

3. Goren took aside Central Command Head General Uzi Narkiss at the site and, ensuring that nobody overheard him, told him: "Uzi, this is the moment to put 100 kg of dynamite into the Dome of the Rock, and that will be it. Once and for all we will be rid of it." Narkiss replied: "Rabbi, Stop." Goren persisted: "You will enter the pages of history for such an act. You don't grasp the very important implications for such an action. This is an opportunity which it's possible to exploit now at this moment. Tomorrow, it won't be possible to do anything." Narkiss replied: "Rabbi, if you don't stop I will take you from here to prison." Goren walked away without a word. (Haaretz, 31 December 1997). [All translations in the text are by the author - Y.C.] 4. Goren added that he spoke to Air Force Chief Motti Hod who, according to the former, said that he would pilot the plane himself to destroy the Dome. (Hod has denied saying this.) Later Goren sought to disassociate himself from his original call. (When journalist Uzi Benziman of Haaretz wanted to print Goren's original remarks, Goren threatened to sue the paper for libel, Haaretz, 31 October 1994; Haaretz, 31 December 1997.) In 1967 the IDF Military Censor altered a report of Goren's remarks at the seminar of the military rabbinate held on the Mount. The original article submitted for the censor's approval which said that Goren called for the Dome of the Rock to be blown up was altered to "a personality called for strengthening Jewish possession of the Mount" (Haaretz, 4 August 1995).

http://www.jcpa.org/jpsr/s99-yc.htm

also http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/43709.stm