Palestinian rejectionism on display: PA’s top Islamic judge says Jews had no history in Jerusalem which has always been “Arab and Islamic”

Robin Shepherd

Think Tank Blog

27 August 09

In yet another story that tells you so much about the Middle East but just doesn’t seem to make it into the western press, the Palestinian Authority’s top Islamic judge, Sheikh Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, has now come out with the extraordinary statement that “Jerusalem is an Arab and Islamic city and it always has been so.”

The Jerusalem Post — an invaluable antidote to the half censored and half distorted news on the Israel-Palestine conflict that we in Europe are now used to — also reported that Tamimi had said that there was no evidence whatsoever that the Temple had ever existed or that Jews had even lived in Jerusalem prior to recent decades.

Tamimi is one of the Palestinian people’s most influential voices. His opinions both reflect and help perpetuate their political culture. This, in other words, is what Israel is up against. Apart from anything else, it illustrates the depths of the dishonesty, not to say lunacy, at the heart of the Palestinian narrative. Consider his statement that Jerusalem is and always has been Arab and Islamic.

Taken at face value, since Islam did not exist prior to the seventh century, Tamimi has tied himself into a narrative which suggests that Jerusalem is no more than 1,400 years old.

I suspect that the point does not need to be laboured. But it is precisely this sort of deranged nonsense that has been built into the fabric of Palestinian political culture over decades. And this is why peacemaking has always proved so elusive. As Dennis Ross put it in the New York Review of Books in an essay reviewing the reasons for the failure to achieve peace under Bill Clinton’s initiatives in 2000:

“Consider Arafat’s performance at Camp David. It is not just that he had, in the words of President Clinton, “been here fourteen days and said no to everything.” It is that all he did at Camp David was to repeat old mythologies and invent new ones, like, for example, that the Temple was not in Jerusalem but in Nablus. Denying the core of the other side’s faith is not the act of someone preparing himself to end a conflict.”

And this, I am afraid, is the essence of the problem.

To read the Jerusalem Post article referred to, click here:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145126442&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

To read the essay by Dennis Ross in the New York Review of Books, click here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14529
.