The Truth? History, for Palestinians, is Little More Than Myths Grounded in Fantasy - by Jerold S. Auerbach

In the beginning of the 20th century and continuing throughout British Mandatory rule, there was little discernible evidence of Palestinian national consciousness.

Jerold S. Auerbach..
JNS.org..
17 June '19..

Rumors circulate of an impending Israeli-Palestinian peace plan to be proposed by the Trump administration. It might, therefore, be appropriate to scrutinize the Palestinian claim—grounded in myth and not history—to national sovereignty.

Jewish sovereignty in their biblical homeland began with the rule of kings David and Solomon in the 10th-century BCE. The kingdom of Israel existed as an independent state until 722 BCE, while the kingdom of Judah maintained its independence until 586 BCE. There was no sign of any people identified, or self-identified, as Palestinians. Despite repeated claims, there is not a shred of evidence—historical, archeological or textual—to connect them with the ancient Canaanites, Philistines or Jebusites, who preceded the return of Jews from Egypt to the homeland of their biblical patriarchs and matriarchs.

Modern conceptions of Palestine began to emerge in mid-19th-century England. Artist David Roberts, following the trail of the ancient Israelites from Egypt to their promised land, filled The Holy Land with romantic depictions of local people, places and ancient Jewish sites. Rev. Alexander Keith authored The Land of Israel, based on his belief in fulfillment of the ancient prophecy that Jews would return to their homeland. In a memorable phrase, often repeated, he wrote that Jews were “a people without a country; even as their own land … is in a great measure … a country without a people.” Palestinians were not mentioned.

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The Abbas Speech: Who Was the Real Audience? - by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

Mahmoud Abbas’s blatantly skewed account of the nature of Zionism and the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should bring Israel’s policymakers and opinion shapers to enunciate anew the story they tell their own people and the world at large.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 738..
12 February '18..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/mahmoud-abbas-speech/

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the January 14 meeting of the PLO’s Central Council lasted two hours. Apart from the phrase “May your house be destroyed,” which became the headline for the speech, Abbas’s “historical” survey of the chronicle of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has drawn most of the Israeli criticism. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the survey underscored the root of the conflict: “The Palestinians’ rejection of the existence of a Jewish state in any borders.”

For the Palestinians, too, particularly the younger among them, much of the speech must have sounded like a tiresome history lesson. Yet political speeches of this kind often have more than one audience in mind. In this case, Israeli society with its various factions and leaders, along with the international community, was the main audience. Appealing to fashionable legal and moral fads, particularly in Western Europe, Abbas again set forth the supposedly problematic aspects of Zionism. His “historical survey” undoubtedly fails the minimum test of facts, but it is uncritically accepted in many circles. This poses a real challenge to Israeli policymakers and opinion shapers.

By every historical account, the Zionist revolution – the incredible ingathering of the exiles and the establishment of the flourishing and highly successful state of Israel – is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon. Those who insist on viewing it as yet another immigration wave among the 20th century global population movements fail to grasp the real nature of this revolution. In this respect, Abbas touched the key issue that, in his eyes, made the Palestinians the main victim of Zionism: if the Jews yearn for a safe haven, and the international community wants to provide them with one, why does it have to be in Palestine, at the Palestinians’ expense?

Of all the leaders of the Zionist movement, it was Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, who dealt most extensively with the kinds of claims made by Abbas. Below are several passages from Abbas’s address followed by statements by Ben-Gurion on the same topic.

Abbas: “How did the problem in our region begin? They talk about the Balfour Declaration, promulgated a hundred years ago. They criticize us – why do we talk about something that happened a hundred years ago? And we say: ‘We will keep talking about the declaration until Britain apologizes and recognizes a Palestinian state’.”

Ben-Gurion: “Our right to the Land of Israel does not stem from the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration. It precedes those. The Bible is our mandate… I can state in the name of the Jewish People: The Bible is our mandate, the Bible that was written by us in our Hebrew language, and in this land itself, is our mandate. Our historical right has existed since our beginnings as the Jewish People, and the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate recognize and confirm that right” (testimony to the Peel Royal Commission, January 1937, Bama’archa, vol. 1, pp. 77-78).

“A homeland is not given as a gift and is not acquired by means of political rights and contracts. It is not purchased with gold and is not conquered by force, but is built with sweat. This homeland is a historical creation and a collective endeavor of a people, the fruit of its physical, spiritual, and moral labor down through the generations. … The Land of Israel will be ours not when the Turks, the English, or the next peace conference agrees to it, and it is undersigned in a diplomatic treaty – but when we, the Jews, build it. We will not attain the real, true, and lasting right to the land from others, but from our labor. For the Land of Israel to be ours, we must build it; the mission of our revival movement is the building of the land” (New York, September 1915, Mema’amad Le’am, p. 10).

The “Palestinians” are not the victims of colonialism. They are its perpetrators. - by Daniel Greenfield

...“Palestine” is a twisted colonial fiction. The name reflects Greek colonization of the region. And its use by the modern Islamic colonists shows their lack of any actual historical connection to Israel. After all the agonized wailing about the deeply meaningful “Palestinian” connection to “Palestine”, they still haven’t come up with their own name for the place.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
24 January '18..

Palestinian boss Mahmoud Abbas recently declared that Israel is "a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness". Moses, King David and thousands of years of Jewish history would disagree. Israel and the Jews are part of the story of human civilization. Over 50% of the human race has a holy book that tells of the Jewish journey to Israel. That includes Mohammed’s own copy of the Koran.

Israel isn’t a “colonial enterprise”. Palestine is.

Anyone who wants to find out where the name Israel comes from can open the Book of Genesis 32:29. The story even appears in Islamic hadiths. But where does “Palestine” really come from?

Palestine isn’t a Hebrew or Arabic word. The Greeks used it to describe the area. And when the Romans and their Arab mercenaries repressed the indigenous Jewish population, they renamed it all Palestine.

Palestine, after the Philistines: but why did the Greeks and Romans name the area after the Philistines?

The Philistines were one of the Greek origin sea peoples who had originally invaded and colonized the area. The Jewish resistance to Philistine colonialism is chronicled in the histories of Samson, King Saul and King David. It was natural for the Greek and Roman colonies that the Jews of the Second Temple era clashed with to use “Palestine”, the name associated with earlier colonies, to refer to their new colonies.

That latest phase of Greek colonialism led to an extended conflict between the Persian Empire and Greco-Roman civilization. The Romans made extended use of Arab mercenaries and rulers to secure their dominions. One such ruler was Herod, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples), who repressed the Jews.

The eventual decline and fall of the Roman and Persian empires made way for the Islamic conquests of the region. But the Islamic bandit hordes had no original ideas. Their religion was a hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, assorted pagan beliefs and Mohammed’s violent fantasies. The rest of their culture they took wholesale from the Greeks. This game of historical Idiocracy ended with a collection of Arab colonists who call themselves “Palestinians” and claim to be descended from… somebody.

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Questioning Mahmoud Abbas’ Historical Revisionism - by Pesach Benson

I’m sure that there are plenty more questions that I haven’t thought of. So — are any journalists out there looking for a story?

Pesach Benson..
Algemeiner.com..
21 January '18..

One of the more overlooked issues raised by Mahmoud Abbas’ recent speech was a claim that the Palestinians are Canaanites, whose presence in the Holy Land predates the arrival of Abraham:

We shall stay here regardless of the occupation and the settlements. We shall not leave this country. This is our country. This has been our land since the days of the Canaanites. By the way, our Canaanite forefathers. … The Torah says … and I do not want to go into history or geography… from the days of the Canaanites and to this day, [our forefathers] have not left this land. They were here before our patriarch Abraham. We were. Since before our patriarch Abraham.

Abbas reiterated this claim on Wednesday. The forum was Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, which is regarded as Sunni Islam’s foremost institution of higher learning.

Religion plays a major part in the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, but it’s rare to see the foreign press take a deeper look at these beliefs and their impact on the conflict.

So how do Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims and Christians feel about claims that:

• The Palestinians are descendants of Abraham.
• The Palestinians are descendants of Canaanites (and Natufians).
• The Palestinians predated the Canaanites.
• Jesus was a Palestinian.
• A Jewish temple never existed on the Temple Mount.

Are Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders willing to explain the theological and political impact of these assertions? And — on a different level — if one’s religious belief can’t be reconciled with a national narrative, what does that say about individual identity? I don’t have any answers.

But there are plenty of questions.

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The Media's Whitewashing of Abbas’ Revisionism and Rejectionism - by Pesach Benson

...there was a bigger picture that the mainstream media snoozed through. What most journalists would consider the boring, long-winded digressions were actually part of a bigger pattern of historical revisionism and rejection of any place for the Jews in the Mideast.

Pesach Benson..
Honest Reporting..
16 January '18..

Mahmoud Abbas’ two-hour address to the central committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization was the diplomatic equivalent of giving the finger to Israel, the US and peace prospects.

The speech was expected to articulate the Palestinian leadership’s response to Trump’s Jerusalem declaration and threatened cuts of aid for refugees.

But given how long the talk was, it must have been a challenge for reporters to focus on sorting out the “news” from the “rambling.” Indeed, the PA president rejected US mediation, blamed Israel for the “death” of the Oslo accords, and dropped tidbits such as someone offering the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis to become the capital of a Palestinian state. (Abbas didn’t say who made the offer.)

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Mr. Abbas taught me something about Oliver Cromwell, Proto-Zionist - by Elder of Ziyon

Thanks, Abbas! Tomorrow we'll look at your less-accurate claims.

Elder of Ziyon..
14 January '18..

Mahmoud Abbas made a very strange, bizarre, ahistoric speech to the Palestinian Central Council meeting on Sunday.

The New York Times summarizes part of his speech:

Testing his audience’s attention, Mr. Abbas also gave a lengthy history lecture reaching back to the 17th century, saying that Oliver Cromwell had first proposed shipping European Jews to the Holy Land, before tracing the beginning of Zionism to what he called the 19th-century journalist and activist Theodor Herzl’s efforts to “wipe out Palestinians from Palestine.” “This is a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness,” Mr. Abbas said. “The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land — call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”

I plan to fisk some of his more outrageous claims, but the Cromwell thing seems not too far off!

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Wow! Palestinians really get upset when archaeology shows Jews controlled Jerusalem - by Elder of Ziyon

...The idea that Jews controlled Jerusalem, which Muslims freely admitted until recently, is now forbidden to be said. Because politics and hate of Israel is more important than facts or history. Whether Ma'an writes this way out of fear of repercussions if they reported the story accurately, or whether it simply regards itself as a propaganda arm for Palestinian anti-Israel narrative, is not important.

Elder of Ziyon..
01 January '18..

Haaretz reports:

A fantastically preserved seal impression made by the biblical Governor of Jerusalem during the First Temple era has been found by archaeologists where it fell 2,700 years ago.

Many dozens of seal impressions and seals themselves have been found in ancient Jerusalem, including in this area by the Temple Mount. Also, several seal impressions of the Jerusalem governor ("sar ha'ir"), who was the highest-ranking officer in the city, have been making the rounds in the black market, Dr. Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah told Haaretz.

But this lump of baked clay, all of 1.3 by 1.5 centimeters in size and just over two millimeters thick, is unique in being of unquestionable provenance.

"Ours is special because this was the first time the seal of the Governor of the City of Jerusalem itself was found in the right place," Weksler-Bdolah says.

The upper part of the governor's seal impression shows two standing figures facing each other, though their potential identities are obscure, as their heads are depicted as dots, with no special features. The two are garbed in a striped, knee-length garment, say Ornan and Sass.

The lower part has bears the inscription in ancient Hebrew script "sari'r" which the archaeologists are confident is ancient Hebrew for "sar ha'ir" or "governor of the city." Typical of the time, there is no space between the words.

The Governor of Jerusalem is mentioned twice in Hebrew Scripture, once in 2 Kings 23:7.

The Palestinian Arab Ma'an News Agency, which is touted as independent and objective, reports the story this way in Arabic:

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Reflections on Deir Yassin, the Nakba, and War Crimes - by Dr. Arnon Groiss

...Anyone expressing an aversion to war crimes should be expected to do so with regard to all parties to a conflict. Accusations of war crimes directed at one side only, without the slightest sign of self-criticism regarding one’s own atrocities, indicate a fundamental lack of integrity. Moreover, alongside denunciation of past cases, one should emphatically act against incitement to future war crimes, such as those spelled out or implied in the new Palestinian schoolbooks. Anyone who fails to do so is actually encouraging war crimes.

Dr. Arnon Groiss..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 653..
22 November '17..

Two important Hebrew-language books were published recently: Deir Yassin: The End of the Myth by Eliezer Tauber (Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir 2017), and Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956 by Adel Manna (Van Leer Institute Press, Hakibbutz Hameuhad Publishing House 2017). The value of these books emanates from their comprehensive presentation of data and facts hitherto not discussed.

Prof. Tauber, of Bar-Ilan University, gathered all the available testimonies related to the Deir Yassin battle from all involved parties, including both villagers and members of the attacking Etzel and Lehi underground groups. On the basis of these testimonies he provides a minute-by-minute analysis of the battle in the village’s various areas, indicating the death circumstances of each victim.

According to Tauber, Deir Yassin was the first case of house-to-house fighting in the 1948 war, as the defenders did not run away but fought from their houses until the end. The attackers broke into the houses by blowing up their doors, hurling hand grenades inside, and storming in while shooting. This resulted in many casualties, including non-combatants. Yet except for one case in which an attacker shot dead non-combatants who had surrendered and stepped out of their house, all the rest were killed during house-to-house fighting.

This conclusion is based on testimonies gathered from both surviving villagers and attackers.

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Jerusalem’s Walls, Breached Again - by Jonathan S. Tobin

...In a negotiation predicated by a genuine mutual commitment to coexistence, Jerusalem might be shared in some way and Jews might continue to live in peace and security in places like Shilo, just as Arabs live inside pre-1967. But instead, the Palestinians continue to act in a manner that is the moral equivalent of the Roman attack on the wall that the Romans destroyed 1,946 years ago. That’s a thought that should only stiffen the resolve of Israel and its friends to ensure that Jerusalem’s walls are never again breached.

AP Photo/Oded Balilty

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
20 October '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/2151376-jerusalem-walls-breached-again/

In a saner era, the latest archeological discovery in Jerusalem would be the sort of thing only academics or ancient history buffs would care about. But in a month when UNESCO has voted repeatedly to treat Jerusalem’s holiest spots as if they were solely Muslim, the dig that located the site where the Romans breached the capital’s walls during the great Jewish revolt in 70 C.E. is of more than academic interest. It is not only yet another reminder of the insidious nature of the war still being waged to extinguish the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland.

The details of the discovery are exciting to those who care about this chapter of history during which the second Jewish commonwealth ended. Archeologists have uncovered the remains of the “Third Wall” that protected the northern extremity of the capital during the Roman siege that ended in the city’s destruction as well as the burning of the Second Temple. The dig, which was supervised by the Israel Antiquities Authority, also found the remains of one of the guard towers that dotted the defensive structure as well as stones that were the ammunition for catapults the Romans used to pummel and ultimately break through the wall, as the historian Josephus attested. The defeat of the defenders at this spot gave the Romans the chance to get inside the city. It would take them another two and a half months to get through the other two inner walls and begin the orgy of murder and destruction that ended Jewish independence for two millennia.

It is hardly surprising that such fascinating artifacts could be found in the heart of Jerusalem. And that is the problem for the Palestinians and their supporters in institutions like UNESCO. All you have to do to prove the existence of historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem is to start digging virtually anywhere in the city or, for that matter, anywhere in the country. That’s why Palestinians and their supporters are so quick to resist archeological work in and around the Old City such as the separate dig at the City of David—a site that points to an even more ancient Jewish kingdom a thousand years before the Romans laid waste to the city.

Pretending, as the Palestinians and now the majority at the UN agency that claims to be its educational, scientific and cultural organization do, that the Temple Mount and the Western Wall—the heart of the Jewish city that the Third Wall was built to protect—is Muslim a statement of astonishing ignorance. The stones of the Temple Mount and the remains of part of its outer enclosure that make up the Wall are living evidence of 3,000 years of Jewish history as well as the events and places that are integral to the beginnings of Christianity. But it’s far more than that. This revisionism is at the heart of a century-old effort to deny Jewish history and the rights of the Jewish people to their homeland and its capital.

Contending with the Palestinian 'war of history'

...According to the Palestinians, the ones who were burned in the crematoria were not the Jews in Europe but rather Palestinian children in Israel. These are widely held beliefs, attributed to the highest-ranking clergymen in the Palestinian Authority. They can be found in school textbooks. They are broadcast on Palestinian Authority television, not just Hamas networks. The rewriting of both Jewish and Palestinian history has one very clear goal: It serves to negate Israel's right to exist and as a basis for refusing to recognize it.

Dr. Nesia Shemer..
Israel Hayom..
02 November '15..

A quiet war has been raging for years and few but researchers in the field have paid it any attention. This war is a "war of history" that the Palestinian Authority has been waging against the State of Israel.

The scandal surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remark recently that Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea of exterminating the Jews in Hitler's head can be considered a mild revision of history when compared with what is currently happening in Palestinian society, in a blatant, intentional manner.

One of the main staples of the Palestinian Authority's policy is the rewriting of the history of the Land of Israel. Thus, Jewish history is wiped and replaced with a fabricated, ancient Muslim-Palestinian history that supposedly pre-dates the Jews. Before the establishment of the state, the Zionist narrative rested on the Bible as a source of legitimization for establishing a Jewish state here. When David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by the Peel Commission why he -- a native Pole -- was demanding rights to this land, he replied: "The Bible is our mandate. Our historic right has existed since the dawn of the Jewish people."

To counter this narrative, the Palestinians have, for years, cultivated the "Canaanite myth." On Palestinian television programs, the Biblical Canaanites are morphed into Arabs who have lived in this land since 7000 BCE and to this day. After all, even the Bible says that the Canaanites lived in this land before the Israelites and Abraham came along. Incidentally, in these Palestinian documentaries, Abraham is turned into a Muslim who built Al-Aqsa mosque. Moses becomes a Muslim who shepherded the Muslims out of Egypt, and Jesus is not a Jew but a Palestinian.

Surprise? The Times Declares History is Bunk

...By treating lies denying the historical ties of Jews to Jerusalem as being deserving of a fair hearing, the Times is calling into question more than claims about who gets to pray on the Temple Mount. The reason why Palestinians say such things isn’t because they have a solid historical case, but because their goal is to treat Jews and Judaism as alien to the place where the Jewish history began. The stakes here are not about archeology but about the right of Israel to exist. The Times has a long history of journalism malpractice with regard to Israel and Jewish issues dating back to the Holocaust. But Gladstone’s atrocious effort to treat history as bunk is an act of intellectual dishonesty that will rank it beside the worst articles ever published by the newspaper.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
09 October '15..

If the cult of pretended objectivity is the orthodox faith of modern mainstream journalism, there is no greater exponent of this false faith than the New York Times. Those who edit and write for the news pages of the flagship of liberal opinion set great store by their pose of impartiality, even if their left-wing tilt on every issue is obvious to everyone, except perhaps their faithful liberal readership. Though they rarely give both sides a fair hearing in their pieces, their formula is to air the claims of the competing sides in disputes. That’s especially true of the Middle East conflict where the veneer of even-handed reporting is most evident. In the view of the Times, terrorists and their victims are often juxtaposed as just two sides of the same coin, as they did earlier this week when they noted similar casualty figures for Israelis and Palestinians but had to include the slain terrorists along with their victims in order to achieve that balance. But does treating the long war against Israel’s existence extend to proven historical facts? Judging by their piece published today about the dispute about the Temple Mount, apparently so. But in going down this road, the newspaper is doing more than playing the he said-she said game about the Middle East. By treating propaganda about there being no tie between the holy site and Jewish history, they are validating revisionist Palestinian myths whose purpose is to deny legitimacy to the Jewish state and the right of Jews to live anywhere in the country.

The title of the article says it all: “Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place.” The conceit of the piece by Rick Gladstone, one of the Times’ foreign editors, is that it is impossible to determine whether the enclosed plateau above the Western Wall is really where either of the biblical Holy Temples stood before their destruction, the first by the Babylonians and the second by the Romans. Gladstone is able to quote a tiny minority of archeologists who express such doubts and backs them up by citing the fact that there have been no archeological digs on the Temple Mount itself to verify what is underneath the mosques that were built there by subsequent Muslim conquerors.

That’s true as far as it goes. But the notion that belief that the temples were located on the Temple Mount has more what Gladstone calls “circumstantial evidence” behind it. After all, the Temple Mount is surrounded on one side by the last remnant of the Second Temple, the outer enclosure that is now known as the Western Wall. But as anyone who has visited it in recent decades knows, the Wall is more than just the old pile of stones before which Jews have prayed for 2,000 years. It consists of tunnels and other remnants of Second Temple Jerusalem that make it clear that it was only a piece of the large structure that stood at the center of Jewish life before the Roman destruction. In other words, you don’t have to be an archeological expert or a historian to know that the Temple had to exist on the Mount; you just have to have a working pair of eyes.

In order to believe the Western Wall was not part of the Temple complex, you’d have to also believe that every archeological find from the Second Temple era that has been discovered in Jerusalem over the last 200 years is a fake. Indeed, you’d have to think the whole notion of biblical Jerusalem and every bit of evidence we have about the ancient homeland of the Jewish people is just a story told by Zionists in order steal Arab land and Muslim holy sites.

In Destroying Antiquities, Palestinian Groups Ahead of ISIS

...In seeking to destroy Jewish history in Jerusalem and elsewhere, some Palestinian Arabs are—similar to the more widely covered actions by ISIS, also known as the Islamic State or Islamic State in the Levant—attempting to rewrite history for their political ends. Major media would do well to note that ISIS is far from original in its revisionism by demolition.

Sean Durns..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
25 September '15..

Destruction of antiquities and ancient artifacts by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has received considerable news media attention. Not so for other acts meant to erase the history of pre-Islamic peoples.

A Lexis-Nexis search shows that from July to September 2015, 13 editorials and articles appeared in The Washington Post alone on the threat to and eventual destruction by ISIS of one notable ancient site: the ancient Roman city of Palmyra in Syria. Yet, ISIS is far from alone when it comes to defacing and destroying evidence of ancient, non-Islamic civilizations.

Just as the al-Qaeda breakaway and now larger terrorist movement seeks to destroy antiquities that reflect a time before Islam (in Islamic terminology the Jahiliyyah or “age of ignorance”) and the Taliban dynamited the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan in 2001, Palestinian Arabs have sought to erase evidence of the existence of the Jews on the land of Israel (eretz Yisrael) that predates any Arab or Muslim presence.

In August 2015, ISIS destroyed a fifth-century Christian monastery in the Syrian town of Qaryatain, claiming that the monastery was “worshipped without God.” The destruction received considerable media coverage, for example “Islamic State Destroys Assyrian Christian Monastery in Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 21, 2015)

In 2013, more than 200 terror attacks occurred at Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem, where the Jewish matriarch Rachel is said to be buried—119 of those attacks included the use of explosives at the sacred site. Contrasted with its coverage of ISIS destructions, 2013 saw only one Washington Post three-sentence mention of attacks on Rachel's Tomb (“Palestinian inmate buried as leaders try to halt unrest,” Feb. 26, 2013). And even that was confined to the bottom of an article detailing the death of a Palestinian terrorist.
In September 2015, four Palestinian terrorists were arrested for plotting an attack on another Jewish sacred site, Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, the ancient Shechem in Samaria, the northern West Bank. They planned to set off explosives at the site but were caught and arrested by Israeli security forces—despite the fact that the men lived in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is bound by the 1993 Oslo accords to apprehend terrorists and prevent attacks.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Careless Candor by Sarah Honig

...If anyone can lay claim to utmost mastery of the thriving arts of history-forging it’s the Jordanians. Their entire state, nationhood and very identity are a sham. Had the international community not been sympathetically predisposed to lap up the lie, Jordan obviously couldn’t pull it off. Its wholesale deceit hinges on a world contentedly complicit in hoodwinking itself – to no small measure because it’s loath to overcome its congenital Jew-aversion. So the deceit blithely thrives in a world so eager to be deceived. The recent-vintage Jordanian and Palestinian pseudo-ethnicities are presented as bona fide nationalities. Moreover, it’s brazenly asserted that they are dissimilar and deserve self-determination in separate homelands.

Mahmoud Abbas (right) to King Abdullah-
We are one nation in two states

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
18 June '15..

Abraham Lincoln once famously said that “no man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.”

Honest Abe of course never encountered Palestinian Authority figurehead Mahmoud Abbas, who’s certainly a hugely successful liar. Nonetheless, Abbas, like most liars, does find it exceedingly hard to keep track of all the whoppers that incessantly escape his lips.

The more he fibs, the harder it becomes to bear in mind at each and every moment what version of which pretense he had used on each occasion and with whom. Eventually, even a consummate liar like Abbas is sure to slip up.

That’s what happened to him during his recent stopover in Amman, on the way back from Doha where he married off his grandson in sumptuous style. But Abbas, alas, found himself in a bit of hot water as soon as his visit began.

The Hashemite Kingdom’s loyalists didn’t take kindly to reports that Jibril Rajoub – Abbas’s fellow Fatah honcho and chairman of the Palestinian Football Association – had failed to vote for Prince Ali Ibn al-Hussein to head FIFA. Ali is King Abdullah’s own brother who, owing to the monarchy’s non-too-regulated nepotistic inclinations, is also president of the Jordan Football Association. Rajoub’s attempts to kick Israel out of soccer’s international federation didn’t mitigate the royal umbrage.

Seeking to sooth the offended Hashemites, Abbas assured them that “the relationship between Jordan and Palestine is the relationship of one nation living in two states.”

Quite inadvertently, the above blandishment may well be the truest statement to have been uttered by Abbas in a very long time. It doubtless resulted from a memory lapse of the sort Lincoln judged that all liars are inevitably liable to experience.

Overwrought, Abbas briefly forgot to toe his own line and explicitly contradicted his own two-state refrain – the mendacious mantra about two states for two nations that’s reiterated everywhere as if it were infallible God-given gospel.

Abbas unintentionally admitted is that the so-called Palestinians and the so-called Jordanians are one and the same, that there’s no difference between them, that a two-state solution is already in force and that Arabs already control nearly 80 percent of Palestine. Hence, Abbas’s claim that he represents yet another nation that clamors for yet another Palestinian Arab state is nothing but an expedient scam.

The divergent Arab ethnicities, accepted at face value by the gullible non-Arab world, are all counterfeit. The Jordanians/Palestinians offer a cogent case in point.

A matter of more than some importance to not give them the narrative

...Two myths — the existence of a wronged “Palestinian people” and the peaceful intentions of the PLO. They are the received wisdom in most of the world. Why shouldn’t they be? We and most of our leaders don’t dispute it!

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
24 November '14..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2014/11/dont-give-them-the-narrative/

Narrative is everything in information warfare.

If you give your enemy the narrative, then the game is tilted in his favor from the start.

Palestinian Arabs constantly repeat the myth that they are an indigenous people and we stole their land. This is an article of faith in Europe, the UK, American campuses, Tel Aviv coffee houses and the White House.

Our officials act as though they believe this. They offer to ‘return’ land to the ‘Palestinians’ in return for security from their terrorism. They feel guilty about ‘Palestinian refugees’ whose ancestors mostly left to escape a war that they and their allies started and who were kept in refugee camps because the Arab states and (later) the PLO wanted them there to be an army against Israel.

The myth is made-up history. They aren’t indigenous. They are mostly Arabs from Syria, Egypt and other places whose ancestors arrived here in the 19th and 20th centuries. And they would have lost nothing if they and their allies hadn’t waged war against us. We don’t owe them anything.

The PLO pretended to want a peaceful state alongside Israel. Our leaders, again, acted as though the believed this. We brought it back from the dead, gave it a base next door to us, armed and funded it. But it is the same terrorist gang that it was in 1972, when it murdered our athletes in Munich. Thousands of Jews (and not a few Arabs) died because of this monumental stupidity.

Two myths — the existence of a wronged “Palestinian people” and the peaceful intentions of the PLO. They are the received wisdom in most of the world. Why shouldn’t they be? We and most of our leaders don’t dispute it!

Inventing history for a never mentioned people, not even in the Quran.

Dr. Reuven Berko..
Israel Hayom..
20 January '13..

Back in the days of the British Mandate, Jewish community elders used to say in jest that the Palestinians were "a bastard child, born from a Zionist womb and British father." According to broadcasts now coming from the Voice of Palestine radio station, however, the land of Israel never had a Jewish mother.

According to the archaeologists on the Voice of Palestine, the land belongs to the Palestinians because they are the descendants of nations who inhabited it before its invasion by "bandits and murderers" who came here arbitrarily with Moses and went by the name of "Habiru" or "Apiru." These people were documented as ephemeral nomads and thieves, and records of them even appear in the Amarna Letters written during the New Kingdom-era in Egypt.

In Israel, the Palestinians are not denounced. There are those who point to the Jewish origins of rural Palestinians who converted to Islam. Some people posit that there is a genetic link between Jews and Palestinians. Others highlight the influx of laborers from across the Arab world who came here seeking to capitalize on the Zionists' prospering economy. Historians of the Middle East point to the Arab conquest in the seventh century, while European visitors described the land as barren and disease-ridden.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, fundamentally reject us. The Voice of Palestine radio station works at inventing history for a Palestinian people that are never mentioned in any historical document, not even in the Quran.

The problem is that adopting the false Palestinian narrative is dependent on simultaneously rejecting the Jews' historical rights to the land of Israel, which is presented as a fleeting episode, even though these rights are anchored in Islamic prophecies, Christian historiography, and of course in the book of books, the Bible.

In Hebron Denial Runs Deep

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
10 August '12..

One of the most troubling aspects of Palestinian discourse is the refusal to acknowledge the Jewish historical presence in Biblical Israel. In an article recently published in Middle East Quarterly, Alexander Joffe reminds readers how Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat once “famously told then-U.S. president Bill Clinton that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem, causing the usually unflappable Clinton to nearly explode.” Joffe continues, “Denials regarding the Jewish historical connection to the Land of Israel generally and categorical denials that Jews constitute a nation are all frequently heard from Palestinian leaders, intellectuals, and others.”

The tendency to deny Jewish history is also evident in Old Hebron: The Charm of a Historical City and Architecture. This book, published by a Palestinian group, The Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC), in 2009 fails to accurately describe the Jewish presence in Hebron, which dates back thousands of years. One way the book does acknowledge the Jewish presence in Hebron is through repeated references to the terrible massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein in 1994 that resulted in the deaths of 29 Palestinians in the Ibrahim Mosque.

By way of comparison, the book, which is nearly 200 pages in length, makes no reference to the Arab-perpetrated massacre of 62 Jews in Hebron that took place in 1929. By repeatedly mentioning the 1994 massacre of Palestinians and omitting any reference to the 1929 massacre of Jews (which helped end centuries of Jewish presence in the city), the text obscures the truth and demonizes Israel.

If the book did acknowledge the 1929 massacre, it would provide an implicit acknowledgment that Jews were present in the city before their return after the Six Day War in 1967 and embarked on what Emad Hamdan and Yousef al-Tarturi, author of chapter on Hebron's economic and political situation term a strategy of “Judaization.”

Hebron, where according to Genesis, Abraham and Sarah were buried, is one of the most important cities in Jewish history and, does not need to be “Judaized.” Writing in the September/October 2005 issue of Biblical Archeological Review, archeologist Jeffrey R. Chadwick reports, “Biblically speaking, before Jerusalem, there was Hebron. And except for Jerusalem, no other ancient city is more important in Biblical tradition than Hebron.”

Jews Erased from Hebron

Acknowledging the historical presence of Jews in Hebron is clearly something the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee did not want to do. This organization is not just about renovating the city of Hebron – with funds provided by Western donors – but about using an opportunity to memorialize its work as a chance to erase Jews from the Biblical city of Hebron, also funded by Western donors.

The production of this book was subsidized by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development, which funded the production of the Arabic and Spanish versions of the text. (The agency's logo is printed on the cover). The British government paid for its translation into English. In the English version of the text, the HRC expressed its gratitude “to the British Representative Office in the OPTs [“Occupied Territories”] who funded the English version of the book.”

Fabricating Palestinian History: The Battle over Silwan

Shaul Bartal..
Middle East Quarterly..
Summer 2012..

On August 26, 2010, a violent clash broke out between Jewish and Arab residents of Silwan, a predominantly Muslim village outside the southern end of the walled Old City of Jerusalem. The name derives from the biblical "Shiloah" and its subsequently Graecized "Siloam."

On the face of it, the sparring that erupted over a gate built illegally by Arab residents may seem like a miniature version of the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over who controls the Holy Land. But reducing the struggle to a mere real estate dispute misses a critical point in understanding the persistence of the larger conflict. For the battle of Silwan is a microcosm of a larger fight, one in which one side, the Palestinian, seeks to erase the existence of the other—not merely through traditional armed conflict but also by rewriting history.

(Read full "Fabricating Palestinian History: The Battle over Silwan")

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The History Men: Truth versus Falsehood

Daphne Anson
30 May '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/05/history-men-truth-versus-falsehood.html

Historical revisionism is becoming a lethal weapon of the Palestinian Authority. You may recall that the map on the PA's London Embassy website shows the whole of Israel as "Palestine". http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/05/paint-it-black-and-green-and-red-that.html

Pro-Palestinian groups in the West enthusiastically aid and abet historical revisionism, and what was conceived as the national liberation movement of the Jewish People is routinely presented as an ugly and unacceptable manifestation of European colonialism.

As with this poster, Israel's ill-wishers even stoop to appropriating travel posters designed for the Yishuv by refugee from Hitlerism Franz Krausz, as if those posters were the work of Arabs and in order to advance the notion that "Palestine" (incorporating all of Eretz Israel) was, and should again be, an autonomous Arab land.

Earlier this year, Bibi Netanyahu gave a trademark impressive speech in Jerusalem to a visiting contingent of European Friends of Israel.

As proves so often the case, he manifested his obviously deep and genuine feel for history.

In the course of his address, he noted:

"Now people say, well, you don't really have an attachment to this land. We are new interlopers. We are neo-crusaders.... [F]rom the place next to the Temple wall, the Western Wall from around the time of the Jewish kings, they found a signet ring, a seal of a Jewish official from 2700 years ago, and it has a name on it in Hebrew. You know what that name is? Netanyahu. Now, that's my last name.


My first name, Benjamin, goes back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin the son of Jacob who with his brothers roamed these very hills. So we have some connection with this land but we recognize that others live in it too. We want to make peace with them but we have this basic millenial connection to this land.


Part of the campaign against Israel is the attempt to distort not only modern history, but also ancient history. There was no Jewish Temple - did you hear that one?


Well, I'd like to know where were those tables that Jesus overturned? Were they in Tibet? There's an attempt to rewrite history - ancient and modern and to deprive the Jewish people of their connection to their ancestral homeland ..."

Mahmoud Abbas is not averse to distorting history - as witness that despicable doctoral dissertation of his, completed in the Soviet Union in 1982 and published in book form a couple of years later as The Other Side of the Secret Relationship Between Zionism and Nazism. Not only does it allege that Zionists, eager for as many victims of genocide as possible in order to advance their aims, were in cahoots with the Nazis, it suggests that the actual number of Jews who perished in the Shoah was perhaps less than one million.

An Arab land

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
05 March '10

Were Israelis to unconditionally submit to ever-mutating Arab historiography, all attachments to the Western Wall and Mount of Olives would have to be abjectly relinquished.

Who says we’re not winning the war for the world’s hearts and minds? Even Arabs seem swayed by the argument that the oldest ties to this land are the ones that bind.

Apparently they were converted to the view that everything boils down to who was here first, who left all the place names of all this country’s towns and villages (including those which conquistador Arabs took over), who embedded this unlikely location in world consciousness and rendered it a cultural/religious byword in the farthest climes, whose national cradle this was, the hub of whose beliefs and aspirations this arid little territorial tract had been from time immemorial.

The Arabs, obviously, haven’t become overnight lovers of Zion. But despite their unabated enmity to the Zionist project – Israel – they commandeer Zionism’s logic and Zionism’s case and put these to their own use with a set of preposterous counterclaims that go spectacularly unchallenged in our postmodern existence. With moral-relativists throwing history to the wind, any absurdity can be propagated with colossal impudence and impunity.

The latest example was just furnished in the Knesset by Israeli-Arab MK Taleb a-Sanaa (Ta’al-Ra’am). In a plenum debate he embraced the premise that the land belongs to its earliest claimants: “You say that Abraham purchased Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, but the man who sold it to him was a Palestinian Arab. Consequently, we were here first and Hebron is eternally ours.”

Thereby a-Sanaa made a huge leap from traditional Arab portrayals of Abraham as an Arab. A-Sanaa now categorizes him as the Israelites’ father and stakes Arab claims on real-estate vendor Ephron the Hittite (although the mosque which Arabs constructed over the second-holiest Jewish shrine is called the Ibrahimi Mosque – Ibrahim being the Arabic pronunciation for the Hebrew Avraham).

THIS ISN’T an irrelevant frivolous footnote. A-Sanaa isn’t the first Arab to reinvent the past to suit current interests. Indeed, this is a long-established vogue. Way before the homicidal agitation of British-appointed Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, it was a widespread Arab sport to hurl human excrement from atop the Temple Mount at Jews praying below. But Husseini decided to usurp the wall’s sanctity for Islam, decreeing it to be the hitching-post where Muhammad tethered his super-steed al-Buraq. That presumably overrode and erased all Jewish associations to the site.

(Read full article)
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