Surprise? Denying Jerusalem's Jewish History Despite Archaeological Evidence - by Lawrence A. Franklin

"Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel in order to deny Israel's right to exist is central to Palestinian Authority (PA) policy. Long before it started the PA terror campaign (the 'Intifada,' 2000-2005), the PA was fighting a history war – erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history."

Lawrence A. Franklin..
Gatestone Institute..
26 September '19..

The City of David Foundation recently delivered a major blow to the Arab effort to erase Judaism's 3,000-year ties to Jerusalem. On September 9, the foundation's leading archaeologist, Eli Shukron, announced the discovery of a 2,600-year-old royal seal, found near the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, which bears the name (in Hebrew) of Adenyahu, a son of King David mentioned in the biblical Book of Kings.

As has been true with previous archaeological discoveries in Israel, however, this one is unlikely to put a dent in the long-term international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state by rewriting and distorting its history, even by renaming the Jewish sites Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem to "Bilal ibn Rabah mosque" (it was never a mosque) and Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs the Ibrahimi Mosque.

This international campaign of delegitimization, moreover, far predates the establishment of the modern Jewish state.

The ancient Romans tried to strip the area of it Jewish identity to make it more Roman by renaming Judea "Syria Palaestina."

Later, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the fifth caliph of the Umayyad dynasty of Syria -- who ruled during the late 7th century -- employed the tactic of delegitimizing both Judaism and Christianity by constructing the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, atop the biblical spot where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac -- also the site of the twice-destroyed Jewish Temples. The famous Western Wall, a retaining structure of the Temple Mount, is all that remains of their existence.

In contemporary times, a version of this tactic of revisionist history was attempted by the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, who -- during the US-brokered Palestinian-Israeli peace talks at Camp David in 2000 -- tried to assert that the first and second Jewish temples were not erected in Jerusalem, but rather miles away in Nablus.

That episode followed a staggering report, three years earlier, by the Palestinian Ministry of Information, according to which no archaeological excavations in Jerusalem had supposedly ever unearthed Jewish artifacts.

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