Peace In Our Time? Hardly

Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian Authority official leading all peace talks with the Jewish state just stated:

The Jewish Temples never existed and Israel has been working to "invent" a Jewish historical connection to Jerusalem.

According to the Jewish version of history, the First Jewish Temple was built on the so-called temple mount by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C., and was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The Second Temple was supposedly built in 515 B.C. and was destroyed by the Roman Empire in A.D. 70.

So both Jewish temples - if they existed - have been lost to history, though they are claimed today to have been the center of religious Jewish worship. These temples are said to have housed what was called the "Holy of Holies", or the Ark of the Covenant, also lost.

According to the Muslim version of history, the world was created from the foundation stone of the Temple Mount. The site is believed by the Muslims to be the biblical Mount Moriah, the location where Abraham was supposedly ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Jewish tradition holds Mashiach, or the Jewish Messiah, will return and rebuild the third and final Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem.

The Kotel, or Western Wall, is supposed to be the only remaining part the Second Temple, but there is really no evidence for that. What is today called the Western Wall is actually a part of the foundation of the platform structure itself.

Since the recent discovery of incredibly massive stones in the foundation of the structure that are almost identical in size and weight to the trilithon stones in Balbek, stones so huge as to be far beyond the ability of either the Jews of Arabs of the day to carve, move or place, it appears now that both sides are now arguing over a structure that neither side created nor owned, but just occupied from time to time, perhaps building a few comparably trivial structures on the platform more realistically scaled to their abilities of the day, structures that - unlike the platform - have not survived the rigors of time.

Regardless, it does seem there will be no resolution over this massive platform built long before either the Jews or the Arabs appeared on the scene, just more animosity and eventually more war.