God's Gold by Sean Kingsley Page B

occupies an old British Mandate–period town house, not unlike a Roman villa with a main corridor and two side wings flanking an open courtyard. Overgrown vegetation droops down the sides of a run-down building, which has seen better days. There is no nameplate, no hint of end-time plans being hatched behinda closed door. I knocked on a ground-floor door to be greeted by a bemused student who had never heard of the Temple Mount Faithful and was quite sure they didn’t operate from his building.
    This meeting has taken enormous patience to set up. An endless stream of messages on answerphones, flying faxes, and e-mails seemed to be for nothing. Crestfallen, I left the building’s grounds and was about to give up the chase when a dark blue Cadillac parked in the shadows flashed its lights at me. I was being watched. Inside sat the director of the Temple Mount Faithful, Gershon Salomon, cautiously vetting me from a vantage point of quick escape should the need arise. Clearly I passed the test and wasn’t considered an immediate threat. Within five minutes I found myself seated in the sanctuary of a rather scruffy office.
    Back home in England I had steeled myself to dislike Mr. Salomon. I had no sympathy with a political mind-set obsessed with ridding the Haram al-Sharif (Judaism’s Temple Mount) of Islam and seeing God establish a Third Temple on the Mount. I couldn’t see how it could work peacefully and firmly believed that this was a political problem, not to be resolved through direct religious channels. The way the Faithful went about their business also disturbed me. Publicly dragging cornerstones for a new Temple to the edge of the Old City, and searching out unblemished red heifers to revive Temple ritual based on sacrifice, isn’t a very subtle way of negotiating your business. However, having been firmly shown the door by the Vatican and Israel’s politicians, I was relying on Gershon Salomon to give up the golden key to unlock the “undeniable facts” proving the Temple treasure of Jerusalem to be imprisoned in Rome’s Vatican City. To uncover these facts I was prepared to sup with the devil.
    To my great surprise I ended up rather liking Mr. Salomon. Contrary to the image of the man I had envisaged—someone who was loud, self-opinionated, and arrogant—he neither dressed nor spoke like a fanatic. Perhaps it was the way he hobbled with a cane after surviving a life-threatening military skirmish as a youngster, or the glimpse of a broken man, weary from a lifetime battling for a cause he believed inheart and soul. Gershon spoke eloquent words with passion and without ego. His eyes shone like an evangelical prophet as he outlined dreams of the Promised Land he hoped to create.
    Gershon Salomon established the Temple Mount Faithful movement immediately after the Six-Day War of 1967 with the objective of returning Israel to a biblical nation, a kingdom of priests. He was born of old Zionistic stock, whose family emigrated to Jerusalem from Vilnius in Lithuania in the late eighteenth century. The newcomers dreamed of forging a messianic revolution, and his forefathers believed that the messiah would arrive in 1840. So the dream of a biblical nation has been in Gershon’s heart since childhood; he drank this idealism with his mother’s milk.
    Just before the Six-Day War, he experienced a revelation that would transform his life. At the age of nineteen he was serving as a commander in northern Israel, defending kibbutzes and villages from Syrian attack. A mere three days before he was due to finish his tour of duty, his unit was caught in a terrible ambush and attacked by thousands of Syrians during an eight-hour battle.
    â€œGod saved my life,” Gershon maintains. “A tank drove over my body and I lay in the corner of the field of battle, more dead than alive. At night the Syrians surrounded me, but as they prepared to shoot, they suddenly turned and ran