Stolen History: How the Palestinians and Their Allies Attack Israel's Right to Exist by Erasing Its Past (3 page)

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 ..."
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The Palestinian Authority's chief Islamic judge, 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]."
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Even more outrageous is Tamimi's accusation, 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):
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"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."
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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 historical and archaeological value.
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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."
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Dr. Eilat Mazar, an Israeli archaeologist at the 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.
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And the Palestinian Authority validates her accusations on their Ministry of Information website
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with an article that denied any Jewish connection to the Western Wall, a claim that was repeated in official Palestinian Authority media.
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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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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But all of the admissions and acknowledgements by Muslim scholars and imams about the relative 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.

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.
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As the Palestinian propaganda offensive gains 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.
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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.
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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 Palestinian 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
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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.
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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 nonLevantine Southwest Asian origin while the female ancestors were Eastern Europeans."
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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.
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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.
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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 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).
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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 conclusion:

"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."
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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.

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 wonder why they lie so flagrantly?

The answer is that they lie because the truth does not support their goals.