Zion and Tenochtitlan

Every empire follows the same blueprint: erase the sacred, rewrite the past, and build its rule over the ruins. That is what happened in Jerusalem. And that is what happened in Tenochtitlan, today known as Mexico City.

Jerusalem was not sacred to Islam from the start. Mohamed never stepped foot there. It is never mentioned in the Quran. According to tradition, the first Muslims briefly prayed toward Jerusalem before switching permanently to Mecca. That shift is not proof of reverence — it is proof that Jerusalem was disposable.

Tenochtitlan only became important to the Spanish Empire as a show of force for Christianity, when conquering the Mexica people. Similarly, Jerusalem only became sacred to Muslims when power demanded it — not out of revelation, but rivalry.

In the seventh century, the Arab emperor Abd al-Malik launched a construction project atop the Temple Mount, where the ruins of the Jewish Temple remained. His goal was not spiritual, but strategic: to create a rival pilgrimage site and weaken a challenger who controlled Mecca. It was politics disguised as piety. And it worked.

To achieve that, the emperor cleared the remaining ruins of the actual Temple, creating an open plaza and two Islamic monuments: the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Centuries later, the Nuba inscription records that Arabic speakers still referred to Jerusalem by a Hebrew, not Arabic, term: בית המקדש Beit Ha-Mikdash, the Holy Temple. Eventually, this was arabized to give two names: Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), the plaza where the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque were built; and Al-Quds (the Holy), the name for the overall city of Jerusalem. The city’s sanctity was arabized, too.

Similarly, the Spanish Empire hispanicized the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan into Ciudad de México — and followed the Arab Empire’s example in more ways than one.

In the heart of Mexico City stands the Metropolitan Cathedral — massive, ornate, and triumphant. But like Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, it was not built on empty ground. It was built to bury what existed before it.

The Mexica — later known as the Aztecs — had built up Tenochtitlan as the spiritual, urban heart of their civilization. In a sense, Tenochtitlan was their Jerusalem. At its center was the Templo Mayor, a sacred precinct. It was razed by Spanish invaders.

But the Templo Mayor was not just destroyed. Like the Arab Empire did with Beit Ha-Mikdash in Jerusalem, the very stones of the Templo Mayor were recycled into the Metropolitan Cathedral — turning conquest into architectural triumph, a permanent display of dominance built from the ruins of the conquered.

Jerusalem is our Tenochtitlan.

The Arab Empire is our Spanish Empire.

The Templo Mayor and the Beit Ha-Mikdash, two monuments symbolizing the religious devotion of an indigenous people, were destroyed and replaced with monuments celebrating imperial dominance.

The Dome of the Rock was never a humble house of prayer. It was a statement of conquest, intended to crown a new regime with our ashes. It was built atop the very place where we once brought offerings of peace — replaced now by inscriptions that mock us, on a foundation laid over our shattered sanctuary.

“Those who received the Book differed only after knowledge came unto them, through transgression among themselves.” So reads the inscription carved into the Dome of the Rock, the “third holiest” site in Islam.

That is colonial holiness — power etched in stone, in the justice-speak of its time.

The inscription reflects the Islamic doctrine of تحريف tahrif, which asserts that Jewish people — referred to as بني إسرائيل Bani Israel, the Children of Israel — were given a divine revelation, but then became “prophet killers” who corrupted its truth, setting the stage for Mohamed to fix what we had supposedly broken (Quran 40:53, 2:61, 7:4).

Islam — or even the Quran itself — apparently cannot exist without talking about Jews. It builds on what is ours, then disowns us from it. It takes our prophets, our language, our sanctity — and declares we have no rightful claim to any of it.

The Roman Empire burned our Holy Temple. The Byzantine Empire limited our return. The Arab Empire built the Dome of the Rock over our ruins. The Crusaders slaughtered Jews on their way to “reclaim” the city. Again and again, conquering us made our occupiers holy.

By the time the Spanish Empire reached the Americas, they saw in Tenochtitlan a chance to declare a victory that would rival the conquest of Jerusalem. “The Spaniards had taken by storm the great city of [Tenochtitlan],” wrote Hernan Cortes himself, “in which there had died more Indians than Jews in Jerusalem.”

The Spanish Empire “sanctified” the conquest of the Mexica people by copying the formula used against Jewish people, from Roman emperor Vespasian to Arab emperor Abd Al-Malik: destroy the sacred center, and crown the ruins with an altar that replaces rather than coexists — and declare it holier than before. The Spanish Empire even brought with them their statues of a crucified Jewish messiah.

For the Mexica and for the Jews, our centers were not just destroyed. They were recycled — into someone else’s dominion.

The Arab Empire turned Jerusalem into a prize, just as the Spanish turned Tenochtitlan into Mexico City. Each stone of our sanctuaries laid the foundation for their narrative — one in Arabic script, the other in Spanish masonry.

Their message was the same: You are no longer here. We are.

But we are still here.

Zionism does not continue imperialism — it outlives it. Zionism does not conquer continents — it liberates a homeland. Zionism does not erase — it restores.

Coming under Jewish rule proves that the Dome of the Rock’s boastful inscription ultimately failed. That is why the Temple Mount remains one of the most geopolitically sensitive places on Earth.

The conquest that the Dome of the Rock was built to declare is unfinished. The erasure it was meant to seal never happened.

And that — more than anything — is what cannot be forgiven by a worldview built on our ruins.

By Levi Meir Clancy and Seyon G.