Stolen History:
How The Palestinians And Their Allies
Attack Israel's Right to Exist
by Erasing Its Past
By David Meir-Lev
“We say to him [Netanyahu], when he
claims that they [the Jews] have a historical
right dating back to 3000 years
BCE – we say that the nation of Palestine
upon the land of Canaan had a 7000
year history BCE. This is the truth,
which must be understood and we have
to note it, in order to say: ‘Netanyahu,
you are incidental in history. We are the
people of history. We are the owners of
history.’”
–Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas, May 14, 2011
Introduction
When Sheikh Abdul Palazzi, professor at the
Research Institute for Anthropological Studies in
Rome, was a guest lecturer at Yale University during
the spring of 2003, he told of his conversation
2
with a representative of the Waqf, the Palestinian
religious committee overseeing the maintenance of
the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount, during
his visit to Israel in 2000: “[They] took us to visit Al
Aksa [the silver-domed mosque at the south end of
the Temple Mount]. Right outside of the Dome of
the Rock is a small chapel on the eastern side. ‘What
is this place?’ I asked. ‘It is the place where Solomon
stood to dedicate the Temple,’ was the reply.
‘Then why do you deny this?’ I asked. With a smile,
I was told, ‘For political reasons!’”1
Understanding the “political reasons” for Arab
lies so cheerfully acknowledged requires an acquaintance
with the scope and strategy of the decadeslong
propaganda war against Israel. The goal in this
propaganda war is to delegitimize Israel, rebranding
it a rogue and racist state, as a way of convincing
other countries that supporting the Jewish State is
in fact supporting evil. The key elements of this
strategy are on full public display in the unremitting
attacks at the UN on Israel’s “occupation” and
“settlement” of Palestine, in the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) campaigns directed at trustees
of U.S. and European universities, and in the Nakba
demonstrations on American campuses mourning
3
the creation of Israel as an act of genocide against
the “indigenous Palestinian people.”
Less visible but perhaps even more important
in the propaganda war on Israel is an intensifying
effort to eradicate the ancient history of Israel and
the Jews, the “facts on the ground” that stretch back
to biblical times, and replace it with the fiction of a
“Palestinian antiquity” recently stolen by rapacious
Jews. This revisionist historical offensive against
Israel is waged by an army of Arab scholars, religious
leaders, political leaders, journalists, and their
enablers in the west. They work together with one
objective: to discredit the huge volume of evidence
from Jewish, Muslim and Christian Scriptures; Archaeology,
Assyriology, and Egyptology; ancient,
medieval and modern historical sources, including
Arab sources, all of which shows the historical Jewish
connection to the land on which the modern state
of Israel now stands.
The“Israel Denial” at the heart of the methodical
falsification of a region’s history is nothing less than
an effort to commit a conceptual genocide on the
Jewish people, an act serving as a legitimization of
the literal genocide some Arab leaders have called
4
for. The US State Department appears to understand
the implication of these efforts by radical Palestinians
and their fellow traveling Western supporters to
steal Israel’s history. The State Department’s former
spokesperson P.J. Crowley had this to say:
“We strongly condemn these [efforts]
and fully reject them as factually incorrect,
insensitive and highly provocative.
We have repeatedly raised with the Palestinian
Authority leadership the need
to consistently combat all forms of delegitimization
of Israel including denying
historic Jewish connections to the
land.”2
But the lies, pseudo history, and poisonous confabulations
continue—a war against Israel by other
means in which stealing their past is a prelude to
making sure Jews have no future in their ancient
homeland.
5
Academia’s denial of Israelite history: A Case
Study
Work by Western academics sympathetic to the
Palestinian cause has been crucial in the effort to
fictionalize Middle Eastern history. In his book The
Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian
History,3 for instance, Keith Whitelam, a professor
at Sheffield University in the UK, not only
attacks the historicity of Biblical texts and the very
existence of the kingdom of Israel and ancient Israelites,
but also asserts that modern Israeli archaeologists
have attempted to erase Palestinian history
in their analyses of the material uncovered in their
excavations.
This book is significant because it is the first
attempt to use Western historical methodology to
validate the propagandistic assertions of Palestinian
leaders; and the first attempt to ground claims of the
high antiquity of the Palestinian people in archaeological
and epigraphic evidence. It is worth focusing
on The Invention of Ancient Israel because it
summarizes the work and worldview of other scholars
and thus has status as a representative text.
6
The three core theses of Whitelam’s book, a now
oft-quoted “seminal text” for the anti-Israel academic
establishment, can be summarized as follows:
1.) Over the past century or so, Palestinian
history has been intentionally silenced,
stifled, choked, erased, and/or
minimized by Zionist archaeologists and
their supporters, and unintentionally by
other Biblical scholars and historians.
2.) Today’s Palestinians are the direct
descendents of the Philistines (whose
name was corrupted by the Romans into
“Palestinians”) and other non-Israelite
inhabitants of ancient Palestine, and so
in fact they have the true historic claim
to the Holy Land as a homeland.
3.) Until recently, modern Biblical
scholars and archaeologists have colluded
(perhaps unwittingly) to create
a fictitious, invented, history of Israel
to justify the Israeli claim to a Jewish
homeland, and to legitimize Israel’s
slaughter of Palestinians.
7
Although they are proposed in the reasoned language
of academic discourse, these ideas are actually
propaganda masquerading as scholarship.
In arguing that some of the last century’s greatest
Biblical scholars (many of whom are, or were,
neither Jewish nor Zionist) have knowingly falsified
“Palestinian history,” Whitelam is talking about the
intellectual giants of Ancient Near Eastern Studies:
individuals such as William Foxwell Albright, Martin
Noth, John Bright, G. E. Wright, Albrecht Alt,
and William Dever. All of these giants of Biblical
Studies were believing Christians, but none were
fundamentalists who took the Bible literally. All
searched the extra-Biblical corpus of ancient near
eastern texts and archaeology to throw light upon
the Bible and upon Israelite history, but none sought
to prove Biblical history correct. None ever discussed
the antiquity of the “Palestinians,” because
in their day the concept of a “Palestinian people”
had not yet been invented.
Whitelam has no such compunctions. He constantly
refers to “indigenous” Palestinians in an
effort to connect today’s Arabs living in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip with the ancient non-Israel8
ite peoples of that ancient geographic entity often
called Palestine, which is more or less the territory
of modern Israel . But he offers absolutely no evidence
for this “continuum,” and rigorously ignores
the voluminous evidence against such a claim.
The term “Palestine,” like its fore-runners
“Philistia” and “Palestina,” refer in all instances of
their appearance in Greek, Latin, and later texts to
a vaguely defined area inhabited by a variety of different
peoples and cultures. Sometimes it contained
several different independent nation-states (Philistines,
Israelites, Samaritans, Judeans, Edomites,
Moabites, Ammonites, Jebusites, among others);
and sometimes it was subsumed entirely within a
larger empire (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian,
Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid,
Fatimid, Ottoman). Never was there a political
entity with defined borders and national identity
known as “Palestine” until 1922 when the League
of Nations created “British Mandatory Palestine.”
The endless array of migrants and invaders of
differing ethnic, linguistic and cultural origins who
moved through the region from prehistoric times
onward provides no genetic or cultural ancestry for
9
today’s Arabs of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza
Strip. There is abundant evidence, in fact, that from
the mid-19th century onward, during the Ottoman
and British Mandate periods, hundreds of thousands
of Arabs migrated into the area from surrounding
lands in search of the better economic conditions
that the British and the Zionists created.4 The result
of this migration was a near quadrupling of the Arab
population of the Holy Land from an estimated
340,000 in 1855 to more than 1,300,000 in 1947.5
This means that the majority of today’s Arab population
of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip,
can trace its Holy Land ancestry back for 150 years
at best.
Also thwarting Whitelam’s arguments are the
unsolicited statements by Arab scholars and political
leaders in the years leading up to the UN partition
plan in 1947, to the effect that there is no such thing
as a Palestinian nation or a Palestinian people. In
fact, from the 1880’s onward Arab nationalists actually
protested against the use of the term “Palestine”
because “Palestine,” as they explained, was really
Southern Syria (as-Suriyeh al-janubiyeh). Even the
Grand Mufti Hajj Muhammad Amin el Husseini,
the most vitriolic and vociferous Arab national10
ist in Southern Syria, opposed the British Mandate
because it created “Palestine” separate from Syria.
Akhmed Shukairi, the PLO delegate to the UN, said
in 1956, eight years after the birth of the State of Israel
and the creation of “Palestinian refugees,” that
“it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing
but Southern Syria.” As late as 1974 Syria’s President
Hafez al-Assad asserted that “... Palestine is
not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic
part of Southern Syria.”6
Hence when the newly founded United Nations
presented a plan for the partition of British Mandatory
Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, with
UN General Assembly Resolution # 181, on November
29, 1947, its plan was seen by some Arab
leaders not as a rational way to end the escalating
violence between Arabs and Jews, but rather as a
historical and political injustice.7
And perhaps the most revealing of all in this
connection is the statement by Zahir Muhsein, a
member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s
Executive Committee, on March 31, 1977, in
an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw:8
11
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation
of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing
our struggle against the state of Israel for
our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference
between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and
Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do
we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian
people, since Arab national interests demand
that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian
people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan,
which is a sovereign state with defined borders,
cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a
Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa,
Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem.”
In short, Arab leaders committed to the destruction
of Israel invented the concept “Palestinian
people” in order to justify their interminable war
against Israel.
Even a cursory glance at Ancient Near East
scholarship demonstrates that Whitelam’s use of the
terms such as “dismissed,” “diminished,” “minimized,”
or “silenced,” to refer to the supposedly oppressive
treatment of “Palestinian history” by modern
Biblical scholars and archaeologists during the
12
last 150 years, is pure fiction. Aside from his spurious
and uncritiqued insinuation that “Palestinian
history” is in fact the history of the ancient non-Israelite
peoples referenced in Scripture as inhabiting
the Holy Land, his argument runs aground on the
plethora of scholarly and popular studies that prove
there is no “silencing” of these people’s histories.
A survey of these studies can be founding simply
by looking up in these peoples of ancient Canaan
– Philistines, Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites,
Amorites, Arameans, Amalekites, Midianites and
of course Canaanites – in traditional or on-line encyclopedias
such as Wikipedia.9 A more scholarly
and in-depth treatment of these non-Israelite nations
is available in a variety of scholarly resources, including
JSTOR,10 the Journal of Near Eastern Studies,
Biblical Archaeology, Biblical Archaeological
Review, Journal of the American Oriental Society,
Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research,
Annual of the American School of Oriental
Research, and the Harvard Theological Review.11
And some of these non-Israelite people are the subjects
of scholarly books and multi-volumed research
publications.12 Needless to say, there are no scholarly
works on the ancient “Palestinians” because the
“Palestinians” did not exist in antiquity and there is
13
no demonstrable connection between the Arabs of
modern Israel and the ancient non-Israelite people
of Canaan.
Moreover, there is a currently insurmountable
difficulty in writing the history of these ancient
non-Israelite inhabitants of Bronze and Iron Age
Palestine: no one other than the Israelites ever left
a record that has survived into the modern era. We
have only the most limited of references to these
peoples in Egyptian and Mesopotamian epigraphy,
and almost nothing in their own hand.
Ironically, it is only the Old Testament account,
an account which Whitelam and others so cavalierly
reject as infected with Judeocentrism, that provides
knowledge about these inhabitants of ancient
Bronze and Iron Age Palestine. Jewish Scriptures
make brief reference to various non-Israelite inhabitants
of the Holy Land as mentioned above, as they
come into contact with the Israelites. A few of these
tribes or nations appear briefly in a very limited
number of extra-Biblical sources such as a Moabite
king Chemosh-iat in the Moabite stone, defeated
Aramean city-state kings in neo-Assyrian and neo-
Babylonian inscriptions, and a few inscriptions of a
14
non-historical nature attesting to the use of the Aramaic
language in the area of north-western Syria.
But if we were discard, as Whitelam argues that we
should, the Biblical account of the Late Bronze and
Early Iron ages, we would know nothing, or almost
nothing, of these ancient non-Israelite inhabitants of
the Holy Land.
The third core argument of this book is that nefarious
Zionist archaeologists, and early 20th century
Christian Bible scholars who wrote long before
the concepts of governmental Zionism and “Palestinian
history” even existed, have invented the
history of Ancient Israel de novo. This conspiracy
theory ignores the overwhelming incontrovertible
evidence from extra-Biblical sources for the existence
of the Iron Age states of Israel and Judah.13
The earliest reference to ancient Israelites in extra-
Biblical history is the appearance of the name “Israel”
in the Mernephtah stele, a granite slab created
around 1200 BC, referring to the Egyptian King
Mernephtah’s military victory over an “Israelite
people” living in the north-central Israel highlands.
Over the next 200 years, there are many references
to Israel and Judah in Assyrian, Babylonian, Aramaic
and Persian texts from the 10th century BC
15
and thereafter:
• a 10th century inscription (approximately
the time of king David) written
in clear Biblical Hebrew and
quoting almost verbatim the texts
of Exodus 23:3, Isaiah 1:17, and
Psalms 72:3. It was discovered at a
site near Hebron.14
• the reference to the House of Omri
(dynasty of northern Israelite kings)
in the Black Obelisk of Shalmanesser
III (9th century).
• the Moabite stone with its own version
of the 9th – 8th centuries’ war
between Israel and Moab recounted
in the Book of II Kings.
• the 8th century account of the visions
of Balaam (“seer of the gods”)
in an Aramaic text from De’ir Alla
(Jordan Valley), apparently the same
Balaam who acquitted himself so ignominiously
with his talking donkey
16
in the book of Numbers.
• the Assyrian accounts of Tiglat Pilesser
III’s destruction of the northern
kingdom of Israel and exile of
its Israelite inhabitants (late 8th century),
and Sennacherib’s destruction
of Lachish during his abortive invasion
of Judea.
• the Babylonian account of Nebuchadnezar’s
two deportations of
Judeans and ultimately the destruction
of Jerusalem (late 7th and early
6th centuries).
• the Persian account of Cyrus the
Great (late 6th century) and his proclamation
that permitted the return of
Judean exiles to Judea and Jerusalem.
• The recently discovered 9th century
Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan
which parallels the text of II Kings
8, and mentions what looks like
“the House of David” and perhaps
17
the name “Israel,” as well as a fragmented
personal name with the Israelite
theophoric ending YHW (as in
YHWH).
• Ostraca (shards of pottery bearing
inscriptions) have also been recovered
from Israelite Tel Arad, written
in Biblical Hebrew. Those from the
small temple in stratum IX include
names identical to the names of
priestly families listed in the book
of Chronicles. One long and wellpreserved
letter from El-Yashiv, the
commander of the fortress at Arad,
to someone in Jerusalem refers to
“Beit YHWH” (Lit: “House of Yahweh,”
perhaps a reference to the
Temple in Jerusalem).15
• The Siloam inscription, a passage of Hebrew
text engraved in bedrock found in
1838 in the Hezekiah tunnel, also in good
Biblical Hebrew, attests to an 8th century
Israelite engineering achievements in subterranean
aquifer engineering in Jerusalem.
18
• And witness to the tragic and violent end
of Judea comes most dramatically from
the ostraca at Lachish which document the
Babylonian invasion (early 6th century)
and conquest of the fortresses surrounding
Jerusalem.
In addition, there are numerous seals found
throughout Judea and Samaria written in Biblical
Hebrew. Perhaps the best known of these is the
bronze seal of “Shema, servant of Jereboam” found
at Megiddo. The identification of this Jereboam
with the Israelite king Jereboam II is broadly accepted.
During the Persian period, coins found in
excavations of many sites throughout Judea attest
to the continuity of Jews there following the Babylonian
exile.
The evidence from the later Hellenistic and Roman
and Byzantine periods is overwhelming. To
call the accounts of Jewish existence and sovereignty
in Israel during these periods “invented history”
requires discrediting the surviving manuscripts
of the inter-Testamental literature, the texts of the
Christian Scriptures (especially the Synoptic Gospels),
a variety of Greek and Latin texts, the books
19
of Josephus, the text of Apion preserved in Josephus’
“Contra Apionem,” Tacitus’ “De Reribus Mundi,”
the Dead Sea Scrolls with their textual replicas of
large parts of entire books of the Bible, the Jerusalem
Talmud, the thousands of references to Judea
and Israel and Jews and Jerusalem in the Babylonian
Talmud, and the Roman sources for the destruction
of Jerusalem in 70 AD including the famed Arch
of Titus. Compelling testimony is also provided by
archaeological evidence of Hellenistic and Roman
period seal impressions and coins in Hebrew, bearing
Biblical names, coins of the Maccabean period,
and the first and second revolts against Rome, and
the Judaea Capta coins.
And then, of course (and perhaps ironically, given
the political end toward which Whitelam and his
colleagues labor), there are a number of well-known
Qur’anic references to the high antiquity of the Israelites
in their Holy Land:
• Allah freed the Israelites from Egypt
and took them across the desert and
into their promised land, according
to Surah 5, he granted the Land of
Israel to the Children of Israel and
20
settled them there, also according to
Surah 16
• Suras 17 and 34 describe Solomon’s
construction of the first Temple and
the destruction of the first and second
Temples.
• Finally, Surah 17:104 recounts Allah’s
promise to bring the Children
of Israel back to their land, gathering
them from their various lands in the
Diaspora, before the Day of Judgment.
• In short, the Qur’an itself declares,
with the concurrence of medieval
Muslim commentators, that the Holy
Land promised by Allah to the Jews
is indeed the area of the modern
State of Israel and its environs.16
The abundance of evidence for Israel’s existence
in the Late Bronze and Iron ages and in classical
times utterly demolishes the thesis held by Whitelaw
and politicized scholars like him about the “his
21
torical invention” of ancient Israel. Yet these revisionist
allegations have nonetheless steadily worked
their way from the academy into the popular press,
including the BBC, the Economist, Time Magazine,17
and of course much Arab media. Writing in the Khaleej
Times, for instance, Karin Friedemann blandly
and uncritically accepts every anti-Jewish assertion
of Israel deniers, including the amazing assertion
that Jews never existed as Jews in the millennia before
the 10th century CE:
“….Intellectuals of Jewish origin in 19th
century Germany, influenced by the folk
character of German nationalism, invented
their folk narratives ‘retrospectively,’
out of a thirst to create a modern
Jewish people, argues Tel Aviv University
Professor Shlomo Sand, author of
How and When the Jewish People Was
Invented….There is no single founder
population for modern Jewry any more
than there is a single founder population
for modern Christians or modern Muslims.
Late ancient and early medieval
texts describe an ethnically diverse collection
of communities associated with
22
proselytizing pre-Rabbinic Judaism…..
(after all)…..the Palestinians’ ancestors
created the Hasmonean Kingdom, composed
the Hebrew Bible, followed Jesus,
wrote the New Testament, compiled
the Mishnah, and redacted the Jerusalem
Talmud. The Palestinian people constitute
the living link to the earliest beginnings
of the heritage from the Torah and
Gospel.”
Jewish Religious Sites and Documents – Denial
and Destruction
Whitelam’s book may stand as a sort of manifesto
for the new anti-Israel faux-history of the Holy
Land, but it is only one of a spate of such works
churned out by the pro-Palestinian academy. Prof.
Nadia abu el-Haj, for instance, attacks modern Israeli
archeologists and the fruit of their academic labor
in her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological
Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli
Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001).18
Professor el-Haj spins a yarn based on two major
23
arguments. First, that modern Israeli archaeologists
undertake their scholarship with the conscious, subversive
intent of eradicating evidence of the historical
presence of the “Palestinian people” in the Holy
Land. And secondly, that these same archaeologists
have worked for almost a century to exploit and distort
archaeology for Jewish nationalistic purposes,
selectively excavating sites that are likely to support
what she argues is the Zionist inspired pseudo narrative
of Ancient Israel’s millennia-long sovereignty
in the Holy Land; and to validate a fictitious history
according to which Jews lived and ruled in the Holy
Land 1,600 years before the arrival of Arabs.
The Temple Mount
Argument by archeology has become one of the
pro-Palestinian academy’s chief weapons. The central
front in the use of such evidence to re-write
Mideast history is the Temple Mount, the holiest site
in Judaism, known in Muslim tradition as al-Haram
ash-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). It is the precinct
on which sit the El-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of
the Rock and is claimed by the Muslims to be the
location upon which Muhammad descended during
his heavenly flight (Qur’an, Sura 17:1). Current
24
Arab “Israel Denial” asserts that the Temple Mount
never existed in Jerusalem and probably never existed
at all, and that that site was Muslim from its
origins.
Until recently there was a consensus even among
Islamic historians about the legitimacy of the Jewish
claim. In A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif,
published by the Supreme Moslem Council in 1925,
Muslim scholars expounded upon the antiquity and
sanctity of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, stating
that it dates to earliest times, certainly to the time
of the Israelite kingdom, and is identified beyond
dispute with the site of Solomon’s Temple.19
In a description of the area of Solomon’s Stables,
which Islamic Waqf officials converted into a
mosque in 1996, the guide states: “...little is known
for certain about the early history of the chamber
itself. It dates probably as far back as the construction
of Solomon’s Temple... According to Josephus,
it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge
by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem
by Titus in the year 70 A.D.”
Yet, during the 2000 Camp David Summit,
25
Yasser Arafat categorically denied that any Jewish
Temple ever existed on the Temple Mount. Later he
suggested that the Temple may have been in Nablus,
and later still he mused that perhaps it was someplace
else, like Yemen.20 Diplomats Dennis Ross
and Dore Gold discuss this statement in their accounts
of the 2000 Camp David talks, concluding
that this assertion was part of an effort by Arafat to
delegitimize the Israeli claims to Jerusalem.21
This campaign of “Temple denial” and the erasure
of Jewish history of which it is a central part
is now widely accepted in much of the Arab world.
For example: Mahmoud Labadi, a charismatic, old
guard PA apparatchik, asserts that the entire Jewish
historical claim to Jerusalem is bogus because
no Jewish temple ever existed anywhere in the area.
“This temple - I will tell you frankly, this is not a
Jewish temple,” he went on. “This is a myth. This
was a palace - a palace where David and Solomon
lived. [The Jews] are looking everywhere in [Jerusalem’s
Old City] to find some traces. Until now, 43
years of occupation, they couldn’t find any real trace
of any kind of temple. It’s mythology they build in
their heads.”22
26
Even western media have lent credence to these
risible assertions. In 2009 James R. Davila, Professor
of Early Jewish Studies and Principal of St
Mary’s College, St Andrews, criticized the increasing
practice among journalists of writing as though
the existence of the ancient Jewish temples on the
Temple Mount was a moot question with two legitimate
“competing narratives.” According to
Professor Davila, “Reporters need to get it straight
that there is no debate among specialists in specialist
literature about the existence of the Iron Age II
Judean Temple and the Second and Herodian Temples
in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount platform.
Again, narratives to the contrary are propaganda,
not scholarship.”23
Shortly after Arafat returned from Camp David
in 2000, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, then
the number two man in the PLO, publicly denied the
existence of a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount
with the following incoherent statement: “I challenge
the assertion that this is so [that there has ever
been a Jewish Temple]. But even if it is so, we do
not accept it, because it is not logical for someone
who wants a practical peace.”24
27
Nabil Sha’ath, member of the Palestinian Legislative
Council and senior advisor to President
Mahmoud Abbas, labels the Jewish temple as
“fictitious.”25 Walid Awad, foreign press spokesman
for the Fatah Central Media Commission stated in
an interview with IMRA on Dec. 25, 1996: “There
is no tangible evidence of Jewish existence from the
so-called ‘Temple Mount Era’. . . . (the Temple)….
might be in Jericho or somewhere else.”
Ikrima Sabri, former Palestinian Authorityappointed
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and currently
the head of the Higher Islamic Committee, the
highest ranking cleric in the Palestinian Authority,
has repeatedly insisted that Jews have no connection
to any part of the Temple Mount, including the
Western Wall. Shortly after Arafat’s denial, Sabri
stated during an interview with Die Welt: “There is
not [even] the smallest indication of the existence
of a Jewish Temple on this place in the past. In the
whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating
Jewish history... The Jews cannot legitimately
claim [the Western] wall, neither religiously nor
historically....”26
The Palestinian Authority’s chief Islamic judge,
28
Tayseer Tamimi, also publicly denied any Jewish
heritage in Jerusalem in a 2009 television interview:
“I know of Muslim and Christian
holy sites in [Jerusalem]. I don’t know
of any Jewish holy sites in it... Israel has
been excavating since 1967 in search of
remains of their Temple or their fictitious
Jewish history.”
Turning truth on its head, he charged Jews with
falsely converting the “Al Buraq wall” (known to
the rest of the world as the Western Wall) into a Jewish
site:
“When the Prophet [Muhammad] entered
Jerusalem, after landing with his
‘riding animal’ in the Night Journey
from Mecca to Jerusalem, he tied it to
the western wall, which is known today
[by Muslims] as the al-Buraq Wall, and
which the Jews usurped by falsification
and deception [saying it is the Western
Wall of the Temple].”27
Even more outrageous is Tamimi’s accusation,
29
that Israel is working to destroy traces of the Al Aqsa
Mosque to improve its claim to the Temple Mount
(an accusation echoed by the World Archaeological
Congress, for reasons unknown):28
“The [Israeli] excavations’ purpose is to
destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In fact, its
foundations have been removed. Chemical
acids were injected into the rocks to
dissolve them. The soil and the pillars
[were moved] so the mosque is hanging
in midair. There is an Israeli plan to destroy
the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to build
the Temple.”29
The exact opposite is true. Not Israel, but the
Islamic Waqf, which exercises religious sovereignty
over the Temple Mount, has been carrying out destructive
excavations beneath and alongside of the
Temple Mount since the late 1990s, even though
these excavations have damaged archaeological
artifacts in Solomon’s Stables and in the Huldah
Gates areas, including First Temple remains. The
Waqf has also transferred excavated material into
the municipal garbage dump where, mixed with
local garbage, it can no longer be examined for its
30
historical and archaeological value.30
The Waqf is deliberately removing evidence of
Jewish remains. As Mark Ami-El of the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs described the situation in
2002:
“After September 2000, the Muslim
Waqf closed off the Temple Mount entirely
to any archeological oversight by
the Israel Antiquities Authority. Then,
in order to complete new underground
mosques at the site, it removed to city
garbage dumps some 13,000 tons of
rubble from the Temple Mount that included
(Israelite) archeological remnants
from the First and Second Temple
periods. The intention is to turn the entire
36-acre Temple Mount compound
into an exclusively Muslim site by erasing
every sign, remnant, and memory of
its Jewish past, including the destruction
of archeological findings that are proof
of this past.”31
Dr. Eilat Mazar, an Israeli archaeologist at the
31
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has compared
these Palestinian actions to the routine denials of
the existence of the Jerusalem Temples by senior
officials of the Palestinian Authority.32 And the Palestinian
Authority validates her accusations on their
Ministry of Information website 33 with an article
that denied any Jewish connection to the Western
Wall, a claim that was repeated in official Palestinian
Authority media.34 Ironically, their own officials
indicate that it is Palestinians who are doing the illegal
excavating as Arab looters and grave robbers
have a field day in the West Bank’s archaeological
sites while the Palestinian Authority does nothing to
stop them.35
If, as they claim, there is no evidence to support
the existence of an Israelite or Judean Jerusalem
temple, why must they work so hard to destroy that
evidence?
The attempt to erase the Jewish connection to
Israel and Jerusalem is not limited to the Palestinians.
From the Saudi king to various Arab journalists
and academicians across the Arab world, the
claim is repeated endlessly that there never was a
Jewish temple, or if it existed at all it was elsewhere
32
in the world. Abdullah Marouf, a former Media and
Public Relations Officer of the al-Aqsa mosque now
runs a web site devoted to the Al-Aqsa mosque providing
English readers with the rewritten “history”
of the structure.36
The Temple Mount Coming to Mohammed
Given the fury of this Arab intellectual and religious
assault on Jewish history, it is ironic and
instructive that Jerusalem had no major religious
significance in Islam until it came under the political
control of the Jews. It is well known from the
Qur’an and the Sunnah that the first Qibla (place
toward which Muslims must bow in prayer) for Mohammed
was Jerusalem. But when Mohammed’s
teaching were rejected by the Jews of Arabia (much
to their peril, as Mohammed later either killed or enslaved
or exiled all of them), Mohammed changed
the Qibla to Mecca, thus effectively nullifying any
religious significance that Jerusalem might have had
for Islam.
However, in the late 680’s, just 50 years after
Mohammed’s death, a civil war erupted among the
33
Muslims. The caliph, who at that time ruled from
Damascus, wanted to put down a revolt by his Muslim
enemies who controlled Mecca, the place of
pilgrimage. In order to weaken them, he created a
counter-pilgrimage site to compete with Mecca and
to which to redirect pilgrims who might have decided,
once in Mecca, to take up the rebels’ cause.
He therefore built a dome over the Rock upon which
the Temple Mount had been build in Jerusalem, and
declared Jerusalem “el-Quds” (the sacred place). So
Jerusalem’s sanctity to Muslims originates with a
political and propagandistic ploy.
For centuries thereafter, Jerusalem played little
or no role in the religious affairs and development
of Islam. In the 13th century, Ibn Taymiyya, a major
Muslim cleric and ideological godfather to later
Saudi Wahhabism, wrote extensively about Jerusalem,
demonstrating from Muslim sources that there
were only two holy cities in Islam – Mecca and Medina.
Ibn Taymiyya went to great lengths to explain
that the veneration of Jerusalem was nothing more
than the “Judaization” of Islam.37
But all of the admissions and acknowledgements
by Muslim scholars and imams about the rel34
ative insignificance of Jerusalem for Islam stopped
immediately when the Temple Mount came under
Jewish sovereignty after Israel’s victory in the June,
1967 Six-Day war.
Archaeological Cleansing
Even Jewish sites outside of Israel are subjected
to this Arab commitment to eradicate Jewish history.
Ezekiel’s tomb in al-Kifl, just south of Baghdad in
Iraq, has, from time immemorial, been identified by
Muslims, Christians and Jews as the traditional tomb
of the Biblical prophet Ezekiel. The Jewish nature
of the tomb, with Hebrew inscriptions and a Torah
Ark, has never been questioned. In 2003, a report
surfaced in the press that the newly installed Iraqi
government planned to renovate the site, remove
all Jewish inscriptions and artifacts, and to build a
mosque in its place. Shelomo Alfassa, US director
of Justice for Jews from Arab countries, lodged
complaints. But within a few weeks it became clear
that the Iraqi government intended to move forward
with its purge of the site’s Jewish character and its
replacement with a mosque.38
As the Palestinian propaganda offensive gains
35
momentum in Europe and the U.S., some mainstream
media such as the BBC increasingly echo
Muslim claims about Israel’s historical (as well as
political) illegitimacy. And the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) has declared that Rachel’s Tomb in
Bethlehem and the Patriarchs’ Tomb in Hebron are
sites sacred to Muslims, not to Jews, and that these
sites should not be considered by the Israeli government
as numbered among Israel’s national heritage
sites.39
The tomb of the Biblical Joseph in Nablus did
not last long enough for the UN to deny its authenticity
and spuriously anoint it with high Muslim
antiquity and Islamic religious significance. It was
reduced to a smoldering ruin by a furious Palestinian
mob on Oct. 7, 2000 at the beginning of the 2nd
Intifada..40
The Palestinian Dead Sea Scrolls
Incredible though it may sound, the Palestinian
Authority has even officially declared that the Dead
Sea Scrolls, the writings of an eschatological Jewish
sect in Jerusalem and environs during the last centuries
before the destruction of the Second Temple (70
CE), are actually a Palestinian historic treasure.
In April, 2010, Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister
of the Palestinian Authority, wrote to the Canadian
Prime Minister to claim ownership of the Dead Sea
Scrolls soon to be on display in Toronto’s Royal Ontario
Museum in Canada. He tried to get the Canadians
to refuse the show altogether. To emphasize the
seriousness of this Palestinian claim, pro-Palestinian
groups demonstrated outside the museum to protest
the exhibit. Jordan – ostensibly the most moderate
of Israel’s neighbors – also demanded that Canadian
authorities seize the scrolls and return them to
Jordan. The justification for this claim, according
to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, is that Israel
stole some of the scrolls in 1947-8, during the
first Israel-Arab war, and acquired possession of all
known scrolls in 1967 after the 6-day war. By the
1954 Hague convention rules, Jordanian and Pal-
36
37
estinian authorities claim, antiquities belong to the
nation having legal sovereignty over the territory in
which the antiquities are found. And since Israel has
no claim to the land on which it stands, the scrolls
belong de facto to the Palestinians.41
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) rejects
this claim entirely, of course, pointing out that neither
Jordan nor the Palestinian Authority (which did
not exist before 1993) ever had legal sovereignty
over the Dead Sea region in which the scrolls were
found. But this did not stop the embarrassment of
Canadian officials or the cascade of disinformation
at the Toronto exhibit.42
Playing the Gene Card
In the article she wrote for the Khaleej Times falsifying
Israeli history, Karen Friedemann also ventured
into falsified genetics as well, asserting that:
“Current genetic anthropological findings based on
DNA analysis indicate that the male ancestors of
Yiddish Jewry were of Eastern European and non-
Levantine Southwest Asian origin while the female
ancestors were Eastern Europeans.”43
38
In reality, recent genetic research clearly indicates
that most of the Jews in the world today (with
the exception of those in Ethiopia and India) are
more closely related genetically to the Jews of the
ancient Near East than they are to the people of their
host countries in the Diaspora. In June 2010, genetic
research at the New York University (NYU) School
of Medicine concluded that modern Jewish genes
can be shown to trace back to a common people of
Middle East origin.44
There is some debate as to the comprehensiveness
and reliability of this study, especially with regard
to the issue of the genetic impact of proselytizing in
the Roman Empire when the effort to bring converts
to Judaism, in the period before the destruction of
the Temple in 70 AD, may have weakened the Jewish
gene pool.45
However, another independent study tends to
corroborate the original findings of the NYU study,
and support the traditional view that Jews worldwide
share not only religious and cultural practices (de
spite minor regional and sectarian differences) but
also a common genetic heritage, with the genes of
widely separated Jewish populations having much
39
more in common than have the genes of localized
Jewish populations with their non-Jewish neighbors
(despite intermarriage and conversion). These studies
also support the Zionist assertion that most Jews,
though scattered world-wide, share a common genetic
ancestry in the ancient Near East, more specifically
in the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Israel).46
The strength of this research lies in the fact that
groups examined in the study included not only major
communities such as Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern
Europe and Sephardim from Bulgaria and Turkey,
but also several that are much smaller and, like the
Bukharan Jews of Central Asia and Jews from India,
Ethiopia and Yemen, are often referred to as
the “lost tribes” of Israel. Because the Nature paper
compared the Jewish groups to an unprecedentedly
broad array of non-Jewish groups, the results make
the comparison – and the genetic ties identified –
especially robust.
Researchers from eight countries participated.
They examined 600,000 genomic markers, distributed
over the entire genome, comparing the descendents
of 14 Diaspora Jewish communities with 69
non-Jewish populations around the world. The con40
clusion:
“Historical evidence suggests a common
origin in the Middle East, followed by
multiple migrations that led to the creation
of Jewish communities in Europe,
Africa, and Asia - what we call the Jewish
Diaspora…..Genome-wide analysis
has proven extensive sharing of DNA
sequences among geographically and
temporally widely separated Diaspora
Jewish communities - most of whom
bear a Levantine Near East signature.”47
In short, the Palestinian assertions denying the
historicity of Jewish origins in Israel are thoroughly
and comprehensively and decisively contradicted
by the genetic research summarized above.
Conclusion
The effort of Palestinians and their political allies
in the West to alter, deny and misrepresent Israeli
and Jewish history, while increasingly success
ful, are so transparently Orwellian that it is valid to
41
wonder why they lie so flagrantly?
The answer is that they lie because the truth does
not support their goals.
The concepts of “historic Palestine,”“Palestinian
homeland,” and the “Palestinian people” were all
invented to suit the political needs of Arab forces
committed to the destruction of Israel.48 These concepts
were born in a propaganda war – products of
the Soviet Union’s exploitation of post-1948 Arab
anti-Israel rejectionism – to create a faux-history
that changed the appearance of the conflict from a
genocidal Arab war against the Jewish State, motivated
almost exclusively by traditional Muslim
Jew-hatred,49 into a struggle by the “oppressed
indigenous Palestinian people” for their national
self-realization, political self-determination and
freedom from occupation. By rebranding terrorism
as a “struggle for freedom,” the Soviets, and a
compliant UN, could make a genocidal war against
Israel could appear as a legitimate and even heroic
struggle for nationhood by “freedom fighters.”50
But in order for this revisionist history to work,
there needed to be a “Palestinian homeland” where
42
the “Palestinian people” had lived from “time immemorial.”
Because these elements did not exist in
reality, the Arab leadership needed to invent them.
And the need to invent “Palestine” brought with
it an equally deformed Siamese twin: the need to
deconstruct Israel, to disconnect Jews and Judaism,
Israel and Israelites, from their own traditional
homeland and from their history.
And perhaps the greatest irony of all is that
Palestinian leaders are open and frank about their
desire to erase Jewish history and fabricate their
own. Among the “Palestinian papers” released to
the world via wikileaks, there is one called “Talking
Points on Recogntion [sic] of Jewish State.”51
In this paper a Palestinian Authority spokesperson
details the reasons for not accepting Israel as a Jewish
state. Among them:
“Recognizing the Jewish state implies
recognition of a Jewish people and recognition
of its right to self-determination….
Those who assert this right also
assert that the territory historically associated
with this right of self-determination
(i.e., the self-determination unit) is
43
all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition
of the Jewish people and their
right of self-determination may lend
credence to the Jewish people’s claim to
all of Historic Palestine.”52
They seek to steal Jewish history from the Jews
because if the Jews are allowed to possess their history
then their claim to “historic Palestine” is indisputable.
So precisely because the Jews do have
that history, and hence that claim, the PA leadership
must find some way to take it from them.
And since this leadership wants the entire Land
of Israel, what they call “historic Palestine,” to be the
site of a future Palestinian state, a Judenrein state,
they must not only steal Israel’s history from the
Jews, they must also appropriate it to themselves by
foisting upon an all too credulous world the transparent
lies of an ancient “Palestinian” presence—a
paradise lost to the machinations of by nefarious
Jews.
The entire endeavor to steal Israel’s history and
replace it with the fiction of a Palestinian nation of
high antiquity in “historic Palestine” is war by other
44
means. And as in all wars, the first casualty is the
truth.
Endnotes:
1 http://www.yale.edu/ycsd/press/palazzi.html, Yale University,
Sheikh Professor Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the Secretary General of the
Italian Muslim Association, spoke on the topic of “Islam and Democracy
-- Political Theory in the Qur’an and Islamic Tradition,” March
4, 2003.
2 Besser, James, “Obama administration hits Palestinian Authority
for Temple Mount ‘Study’, The Jewish Week, Nov. 30, 2010, http://
www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/political_insider/obama_administration_
hits_palestinian_authority_temple_mount_study; and cf. also
Ami-El, Mark, “The Destruction of the Temple Mount Antiquities,”
Jerusalem Viewpoints, 1 August, 2003, Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs, http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp483.htm.
3 Routledge, London, 1996, Keith W. Whitelam, chair, Biblical Studies
Department, Sheffield University (UK).
4 For demographic studies substantiating this assertion, cf. Justin
McCarthy, Population of Palestine; and Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial.
5 McCarthy, op. cit supra, note #5.
6 Syrkin, Marie, “Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and
Goal,” in Curtis, Michael, Neyer, Joseph, Waxman, Chaim, and Pollack,
Allen, The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 200 ff.
45
7 Ibid, supra note 7, p. 201.
8 Dorsey, James, Wij zijn alleen Palestijn om politieke reden, Trouw,
31 March 1977; not available on line but referenced frequently on
line at, inter alia:
http://www.think-israel.org/hertz.ersatzpeople.html; http://www.
youtube.com/user/blessings18;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Zuheir_Mohsen; http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.
php?1297324-PLO-executive-committee-member-Zahir-Muhseinquot-
The-Palestinian-people-does-not-exist-quot and http://www.
danielpipes.org/comments/18157 .
9 such as, but not limited to, the Encyclopaedia Britannica , the Jewish
Encyclopedia, the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Oxford Encyclopedia
of Archaeology in the Near East, and other major encyclopedias
from the early 20th century on. There are other non-Israelite peoples
mentioned very briefly in the Jewish Scriptures, but these nine are the
ones best documented and most thoroughly researched by scholars
since the mid-19th century.
10 http://www.jstor.org/ (and cf. also http://about.jstor.org/). JSTOR
is a not–for–profit on-line service that helps scholars, researchers,
and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of scholarly
content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic
journals and other scholarly sources. It enables access to and
preservation of scholarly books and articles in collaboration with the
academic community. Each non-Israelite nation mentioned above
has been the beneficiary of hundreds, and in some cases thousands,
or scholarly articles, monographs, and in some cases entire books.
These scholarly works can be accessed via the urls below, but may
require registration with JSTOR for a fee.
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=canaanites&gw=j
tx&prq=philistines&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=philistines&acc=
off&wc=on;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=moabites&gw=jt
x&prq=moabites&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on;
46
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=edomites&g
w=jtx&prq=edomites&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=ammonites+in+a
ncient+near+east&gw=jtx&prq=ancient+ammonites+in+canaan&Se
arch=Search&hp=25&wc=on;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=amorites&gw=jt
x&prq=arameans&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=arameans&gw=j
tx&prq=ammonites+in+ancient+near+east&Search=Search&hp=25
&wc=on;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicResults?hp=25&la=&wc=on&ac
c=off&gw=jtx&jcpsi=1&artsi=1&Query=amalekites&sbq=amalekit
es&prq=amorites&si=26&jtxsi=26;
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=jebusites&gw=jt
x&prq=amalekites&Search=Search&hp=25&wc=on.
11 These too can be sources of hundreds of articles on the history, language
and culture of these non-Israelite peoples. Go to http://www.hds.harvard.edu/
faculty-research/research-publications/harvard-theological-review and http://
www.asor.org/pubs/basor/basor.html for more details.
12 Among the more highly regarded of full-sized texts on these peoples,
see:
For Canaanites: Redford, Donald B. (1993), Egypt, Canaan, and Israel
in Ancient Times, (Princeton University Press); and Tubb, Jonathan
N., Canaanites, (Oklahoma) 1998.
For Philistines: Dothan, Trude Krakauer (1982), The Philistines and
Their Material Culture. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press; Idem & Dothan, Moshe (1992), People of the Sea: The Search
for the Philistines, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company; Idem
& Gitin, Seymour, Mazar, Amihai, Stern, Ephraim (1998), Mediterranean
Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries
BC. Jerusalem, Israel: Israel Exploration Society; Ehrlich, Carl S.
(1996), The Philistines in Transition: A History from ca. 1000-730
BC. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill; Finkelstein, Israel (December
2002), “The Philistines in the Bible: A Late-Monarchic Perspective”.
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 27 (2): 131–167;
47
Killebrew, Ann E. (2005), Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological
Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early
Israel, 1300-1100 B.C.E.. Atlanta, Georgia: Society of Biblical Literature;
and Oren, Eliezer D. (2000), The Sea Peoples and Their World:
A Reassessment (University Museum Monograph 108). Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania
and Yasur-Landau, Assaf (2010), The Philistines and Aegean Migration
at the End of the Late Bronze Age. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press.
For Moabites: Routledge, Bruce. ‘Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony,
Polity, Archaeology,’ 2004; Bienkowski, Piotr (ed.) Early Edom and
Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan (1992); and
Dearman, Andrew (ed.) Studies in the Mesha inscription and Moab
(1989).
For Edomites: Piotr Bienkowski, “New Evidence on Edom in the
Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods”, in John Andrew Dearman,
Matt Patrick Graham, (eds.), The land that I will show you: essays on
the history and archaeology of the Ancient Near East in honour of J.
Maxwell Miller, (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), pp. 198ff.
For Amorites: Giorgio Bucellati, “Ebla and the Amorites”, Eblaitica 3
(1992):83-104; and Alfred Haldar, Who Were the Amorites (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1971).
For Ammonites: Cohen, D., (ed.) (1988). “Les Langues Chamitosemitiques”.
Les langues dans le monde ancien et modern, part 3.
Paris: CNRS. Aufrecht, WE (1989), A Corpus of Ammonite Inscriptions;
Lehmann, Ulrich and Lettau, Janine, The Ammonites: Their
life and their world (1981); and MacDonald, Burton & Younker, Randall
W., (1999), Ancient Ammon. BRILL, Netherlands.
For Midianites: Clines, David and Sawyer, John, eds. “Midian, Moab
and Edom: The History and Archaeology of Late Bronze and Iron
Age Jordan and North-West Arabia”. Journal for the Study of the Old
Testament, Supplement Series, No. 24. Sheffield Academic Press,
1983.
For Arameans: Beyer, Klaus (1986). “The Aramaic language: its
distribution and subdivisions,” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht);
Lipiński, Edward (2000). The Aramaeans: their ancient history,
culture, religion, Peeters Publishers, Netherlands; Moscati, S., ‘The
Aramaean Ahlamû’, FSS, IV (1959); and the Tel Halaf excavation
series: M. Freiherr Von Oppenheim, Der Tell Halaf, Leipzig, 1931
pp. 71–198; M. Freiherr Von Oppenheim, Tell Halaf, III, Die Bauwerke,
Berlin, 1950; A. Moortgat, Tell Halaf IV, Die Bildwerke, Berlin,
1955; B. Hrouda, Tell Halaf IV, Die Kleinfunde aus historischer
Zeit, Berlin, 1962.
For Amalekites: Tanner, Hans Andreas, “Amalek: Der Fiend Israels
und der Fiend Jahwes,” in Dietrich, Walter, Biblische Enzyklopaedie,
“The Early Monarchy in Israel: The Tenth Century,” Zurich, 2007.
13 Unless otherwise noted, the references below can be found in Pritchard,
James B., & Fleming, Daniel E., The Ancient Near East: an
Anthology of Texts and Pictures, 2010.
14 Yellin, Avi, Arutz Sheva News, “King David Era Pottery Shard
Supports Biblical Narrative,” 1/8/2010, website@israelnationalnews.
com
15 Aharoni, Yohanan, The Arad Inscriptions, 1981, University of Virginia:
Israel Exploration Society.
16 cf. Rocker, Simon, “What the Koran says about the Land of Israel,”
The Jewish Chronicle on Line, March 19, 2009, http://www.
thejc.com/judaism/judaism-features/what-koran-says-about-landisrael
for a full discussion of this issue with reference to medieval
Muslim commentators.
17cf.http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=4&x_
article=1843.
18 Author’s addendum: For a fully detailed and annotated critique
of Abu el-Haj’s attempt to discredit Israeli archaeology, see this
writer’s lengthy article, “Facts on the Ground – Nadia Abu el-Haj’s
New Salvo in the Arab Propaganda War against Israel,” http://www.
campus-watch.org/article/id/3890, Middle East studies in the News;
and see also ibid in Solomonia Blog, August 15, 2007, http://www.
solomonia.com/blog/archive/2007/08/david-meirlevy-facts-on-theground-
nadia/http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/3890. Abu
el-Haj’s seemingly endless errors of fact and apparently intentional
48
fictionalization of Israeli archaeology’s acquisition and interpretation
of evidence are far too numerous to recount here.
19Cf.http://www.klinebooks.com/cgi-bin/kline/24816 for extant copies,
and http://www.bibleplaces.com/guide.pdf for the on-line original
text.
20 Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, August 12, 2000, Translation: MEMRI; and
http://israndjer.blogspot.com/2007/11/issues-in-peace-process.html
for a reference to his 2002 flippant suggestion that perhaps the Temple
was in Yemen.
21 Ross, Dennis, The Missing Peace: the Inside Story of the Fight
for Middle East Peace, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, August, 2004; and
Gold, Dore, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and
the Future of the Holy City. Regnery Publishing, 2002
22 Kay, Jonathan, National Post (Canada), July 19, 2011, “Once
again, the Jewish Question,”http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Onc
e+again+Jewish+question/5122436/story.html .
23 Davila, James R., “Temple Mount Watch: The BBC is taking Jewish-
Temple denial in Palestinian circles rather more seriously than it
deserves,” Paleojudaica.com, June 2, 2009.
24 Kul Al-Arab (Israel), August 25, 2000; Translation: MEMRI: quoted
in CAMERA, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_
issue=4&x_article=1843.
25 Sauwt Falastin (Voice of Palestine) Radio Station, July 26, 2000,
Al-Ayyam, July 27, 2000.
26 Die Welt, January 17, 2001, quoted in CAMERA, Hollander,
Ricki, “Celebrating Jerusalem amid Denial of Jewish Rights,”
May 12, 2010, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_
issue=4&x_article=1843; and for his earlier pronouncements of the
same opinions, cf. also Al Ayyam, Nov. 22, 1997; and Kul Al-Arab,
August 18, 2000.
27 Ibid, note #29, Die Welt.
28http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Dahari_letter.shtml,“The
WAC Accusation of Israeli Destruction of Archaeological Sites,” Jan
7 2004; and cf. also http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090819/full/
news.2009.835.html, “Uproar over Palestinian Archaeology Con-
49
gress” for more on the debate over these issues.
29 cf. CAMERA ibid, supra note #29, and cf. also CAMERA
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=4&x_
article=1404 for a very comprehensive list of Palestinian leaders’
public denials of Israel’s connection to the land of Israel and to the
Temple Mount over the past decade.
30 Cf. Shanks, Hershel, 18 July 2008). “Opinion:Biblical Destruction”.
Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB118472091594669763.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep ;
Chabin, Michele, (11 July 2006). “Archaeologists Campaign to Stop
Desecration of Temple Mount,” Jewish United Fund, http://www.juf.
org/news/israel.aspx?id=10300; and Ami-El, Mark (1 August 2002),
“The Destruction of the Temple Mount Antiquities,” Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs, http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp483.htm.
31 http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp483.htm; and cf. also Romey, Kristin M.
(March–April 2000), “Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Flap”. Archaeology:
A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America 53 (2),
http://www.archaeology.org/0003/newsbriefs/flap.html; and Paul
Reynolds (9 February 2007), “In Jerusalem archaeology is politics,”
BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6347077.stm.
32 Lappin, Yaakov, (7 February 2007). “Archaeologists: Waqf damaging
Temple Mount remains,” Ynet. http://www.ynetnews.com/
articles/0,7340,L-3362223,00.html, and cf. also http://christianactionforisrael.
org/isreport/novdec99/temple.html and The Israel Report,
“Temple Mount: Layers of dirt, history, and conflict,” by Arnold,
Michael S., Jerusalem Post, Nov./Dec. 1999.
33http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2010/11/pa-ministry-of-information-
kotel-not.html.
34 http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=489.
35 Yahya, Adel H., Director, Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange
(PACE), “Palestinians are the illegal excavators,” http://presentpasts.
info/index.php/pp/article/viewArticle/pp.26/48.
36 Cf. Shragai, Nadav, “In the beginning was Al-Aqsa,” Haaretz, November
27, 2005 for a summary of these allegations, and http://www.
ouraqsa.com/english/ for Marouf’s website.
50
37 Mazuz, Hagai and Rhode, Harold, “Is Jerusalem Sacred for Muslims?”
Hudson New York, October 20, 2010, http://www.hudson-ny.
org/1609/jerusalem-sacred-for-muslims.
38 “Erasing Ezekiel’s Jewish identity,” http://www.plaintruth.com/
the_plain_truth/2010/01/erasing-ezekiels-jewish-identity.html, January
15, 2010.
39 UNESCO, 184 EX/37, Paris, March 19, 2010, http://unispal.un.org/
UNISPAL.NSF/0/8F8CBDCA74D7D20385257721007157CF
40http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1991to_now_alaqsa_josephstomb.
php.
41http://archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/are-dead-seascrolls-
palestinian.html, “Come again?: Ancient Hebrew fragments
of Jewish Bible are part of Muslim country’s ‘cultural heritage,’” January
4, 2010, http://archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/
are-dead-sea-scrolls-palestinian.html.
42 “Are the Dead Sea Scrolls Palestinian treasures?” http://archaeologynewsreport.
blogspot.com/2008/09/are-dead-sea-scrolls-palestinian.
html, September 6, 2008.
43 Ibid, supra note #49.
44 Gil Atzmon, Li Hao, Itsik Pe’er, Christopher Velez, Alexander
Pearlman, Pier Francesco Palamara, Bernice Morrow, Eitan Friedman,
Carole Oddoux, Edward Burns, and Harry Ostrer, “Abraham’s
Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations
Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern
Ancestry,” American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 86 (2010),
pp. 850-859; and cf. also Begley, Sharon (June 3, 2010). “The
DNA Of Abraham’s Children”. Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.
com/2010/06/03/the-dna-of-abraham-s-children.html.
45 Balter, Michael (June 3, 2010), “Tracing the Roots of Jewishness,”
Science, http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/06/tracingthe-
roots-of-jewishness.html.
46 Nature: the International Journal of Science, Volume: 466,
Pages: 238–242, 08 July 2010, http://blogs.nature.com/news/
thegreatbeyond/2010/06/genes_link_jewish_communities.html and
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/nature09103.
51
html; and cf. also Technion Focus, October 2010, “Jewish Genes,”
www.focus.technion.ac.il and http://www.focus.technion.ac.il/Oct10
researchStory1.htm.
47 Ibid, Nature, July 2010.
48 Supra, notes #6-9.
49 Cf. the author’s History upside Down: the Roots of Palestinian
Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, Encounter Books, 2007;
and Kuntzel, Matthias, Jihad and Jew-Hatred, 2007, for a global analysis
of this phenomenon.
50 Cf. supra, note #56, History upside Down.
51 http://www.ajtransparency.com/en/document/2021.
52http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/12/cynical-plo-deniesthe-
undeniable-jews-exist-1/, Tzioni, Eldad, “Cynical PLO Denies
the Undeniable – Jews Exist!” Feb 12, 2011; and cf. also
http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/abbas1.
jpg; and for one example out of many cf. http://elderofziyon.blogspot.
com/search/label/Palestine%20Papers.
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