In 1915 Cemal Pasha made on offer to Albert Antebi to sell the area in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in order to dismantle the nearly 30 houses owned by Moroccans and create a space ‘reserved for the prayers of the Jewish people.’ Since the mid-nineteenth century wealthy European Jews tried to purchase the same area from the Ottomans but to no avail. The reasons for a denial were different but things did not change under the British despite the support given to the Jews with the Balfour Declaration. After the incidents occurred in 1929 any possibility to acquire the Western Wall was postponed. This paper will briefly address the correspondence available at the Zionist Archives showing the individuals involved took an oath not to ever discuss this business, and highlighting the divisions among Zionists in relation to holy places and symbols. Narratives produced in the following years and decades neglected this event as Zionism became the dominant ideology dictating the writing of the history of the emerging state of Israel after 1948. A perusal of traditional Zionist narratives shows that this event fell victim of the erasure of Ottoman Palestine. Works discussing the history of Zionism and the history Palestine during the war has revealed a static narrative where the four years of military dictatorship of Cemal Pasha have come to epitomize four centuries of – anti-Jewish, later anti-Zionist and anti-Arab - Ottoman rule. Zionist narratives have been built with the purpose to provide meaning for Jewish self-determination and settlement in Palestine. In other words they understood Zionism as a movement that set out just to do that – Jewish self-determination – and in that viewing Zionism in a secular and nationalist light, they simply have not attributed importance to a seemingly isolated episode, such as the purchase of the Western Wall, that may have complicated things, suggesting Zionism has also a quasi-messianic component not in line with Zionist orthodoxy. In the end the Western Wall affair and its failure did not look good: first its purchase may have not fit the paradigm of redemption (the conquest of 1967 did so much better) and secondly its failure was not worth to be reported while the basis for the creation of the state of Israel were being laid down and the Wall was adopted, this time, as a national symbol.