Stolen History: How the Palestinians and Their Allies Attack Israel's Right to Exist by Erasing Its Past (2 page)

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 neoBabylonian inscriptions, and a few inscriptions of a 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.
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The earliest reference to ancient Israelites in extraBiblical 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 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.
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• 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 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 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).
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• 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.

• 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 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 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 sec- ond 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.
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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 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
,
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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 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."

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).
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Professor el-Haj spins a yarn based on two major 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.

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 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.
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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, 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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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."
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Nabil Sha'ath, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas, labels the Jewish temple as "fictitious."
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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."