David Longworth unravels a web of deceit and distortion. Part 1 of 2.
On 6 December 2017, following President Donald Trump’s official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Palestinian National Council member Hanan Ashrawi was interviewed by Matthew Amroliwala on BBC News.
Asked for her reaction to the proposed visit of US Vice-President Mike Pence, she angrily rejected his Christian viewpoint by asserting, “We are the original Christians, we are the owners of the land, we are the people who've been here for centuries. How dare they come here and give me biblical treatises and absolutist positions!” [my emphasis].1
I sat aghast, especially as this ludicrous nonsense went completely unchallenged by the BBC. She holds a doctoral degree from the University of Beirut and is acknowledged as a leading Palestinian legislator and scholar. Yet, in the very same interview, she had previously expressed absolutist claims of her own. She had accused the Israelis of “transforming Jerusalem into a historical forgery” and asserted that “Jerusalem is a Palestinian city”.
Such Palestinian rhetoric is far from unusual and has considerable depth, involving denials or perversions of many well-established facts. One of the problems we Westerners face is that much is said or written in Arabic, inscrutable to the vast majority. Thankfully, organisations like Al-Monitor, Middle East Media Research Institute and Palestinian Media Watch provide translations. Although the rhetoric forms quite a tangled web, we can still tease out some important elements.
Denying Jewish History
As recently as 15 November 2017, Saleh Rafat, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, stated on the national TV programme Palestine This Morning: “There are deep Palestinian roots in Palestine throughout all of history. It is a Zionist invention that this is the land of the Jewish Patriarchs.”2
In an article in The American Spectator on 6 May 2016, Ziva Dahl quoted the Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, “Zionism is the invention of robbers who stole Palestine from its inhabitants…whose lies are not supported by any archaeological remnants…Israel has no right to exist…The stories of Jewish prophets are a sick invention”. In that same official PA newspaper, columnist Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul remarked, “Religious, historical, and even biblical facts deny any connection between the Jews and Jerusalem” or to “historic Palestine.”3
Palestinian rhetoric about the Land has considerable depth, involving denials or perversions of many well-established facts.
Palestinian Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, is no better. On Palestinian Authority TV, on 21 March 2016, he said:
Our narrative says that we have been in this land since Abraham. I am not saying it; the Bible says it. The Bible says in these words that the Palestinians existed before Abraham, so why don’t you understand my right?...This land was never without a people, as we have been planted in its rocks and dust and hills since the beginning of civilisation and writing and the invention of the Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet more than 6000 years ago.4
The same speech, translated by The Times of Israel, went on as follows, “At this occasion, I don’t want to discuss history or religion, because there is no one better at falsifying history or religion than them. But if we read the Torah, it says that the Canaanites lived here before Abraham and haven’t left since that time. It hasn’t been interrupted. That’s in the Torah. If they want to fabricate, ‘to distort the words from their [proper] usages,’ as God said, I don’t want to get into religion.”5
To illustrate how pervasive is such rhetoric, let me quote an example from the Palestinian conservation movement. On 16 March last year, the Chairman of the Green Life Association, Faisal Zakarneh, launched the Gilboa Lily as the National Flower of Palestine. On the TV programme Palestine This Morning, he said:
This is a flower that grows in the Gilboa Mountains. At this opportunity, let me explain that Gilboa is an ancient Palestinian-Canaanite-Arabic word, and not Hebrew-Israeli. This needs to be clear. In our minds [the name Gilboa] is connected to the Gilboa Prison...but the occupier has always made us used to him using our language and stealing it and its Arabic-Canaanite-Palestinian names.6
Gideon’s Spring (Ein Harod), 2015. Author's collection.Actually, the name is Hebrew, meaning ‘swelling spring’. It is found eight times in the Tanach, between 1 Samuel 28:4 and 1 Chronicles 10:8, in six of which it refers to ‘Mount’ (Hebrew, har) Gilboa. The spring to which it refers is likely the most prominent along the mountain foot, Ein Harod (‘trembling spring’), which figures prominently in the account of Gideon’s preparation for battle (Jud 7:1ff) and can still be visited today.
Stealing the Jewish Basis of Christianity
Hanan Ashrawi’s outrageous claim that the ‘original Christians’ were Palestinian is far from unique.
Husam Zomlot was the PLO Representative to the UK from 2003 to 2008; he is now Ambassador-at-large for the Palestinian Authority and Co-Chair of the School of Government at Bir Zeit University, Ramallah. Here’s an extract from what he said in an interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS news (USA) on 6 December 2017:
We are a dignified nation. In fact, we are the nation that has produced all religions. We are celebrating Christmas now. Bethlehem is the birthplace of Jesus and Christianity. We are such an ancient nation. And surrender is nothing we know. But we know the message of Jesus. We know the message of peace. We celebrate it. We [the Palestinians] are a model in the region of — a model as a society…of diversity and tolerance.7 [my emphasis]
On 3 December 2010 Samih Ghanadreh from Nazareth, when interviewed on PA TV about his new book Christianity and its Connection to Islam, had this to say: “The Shahid [martyr] President, Yasser Arafat, used to say, ‘Jesus was the first Palestinian Shahid’. I heard him say that sentence many times.” The TV host responded, “He [Jesus] was Palestinian, no-one denies that”, to which Ghanadreh replied, “He was the first Palestinian Shahid. Arafat attributed this martyrdom to Palestine as well.”8
Hanan Ashrawi’s outrageous claim that the ‘original Christians’ were Palestinian is far from unique.
In the Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on 6 May 2013, Adel Abd Al-Rahman, a Fatah official and arts event organiser, commented: "Easter...is not a holiday for Christian Palestinians only, but a holiday for Palestinian nationalism, because Jesus, may he rest in peace, is a Canaanite Palestinian. His resurrection, three days after being crucified and killed by the Jews - as reported in the New Testament - reflects the Palestinian narrative, which struggles against the descendants of modern Zionist Judaism, in its new colonialist form, that conspires with the Western capitalists who claim to belong to Christianity.”9
Note how the only mention of Jews is to blame them for the death of a ‘Palestinian’. The same trope was used by Omar Hilmi A-Ghoul, adviser to the former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyed, in the same paper on 6 September 2016: “…indeed as I have said in a number of relevant articles – Jesus, Issa, son of Maryam, peace be upon him, was the first Palestinian Martyr, who was crucified by the Jews, or they think they crucified him. He was born to a Palestinian mother and grew up in Palestine.”10
Denying the Jewish Temple
As long ago as 25 August 2000, Mahmoud Abbas used the Nazareth-based newspaper Kul al-Arab to declare,
Anyone who wants to forget the past cannot come and claim that the Temple is situated beneath the Haram. They demand that we forget what happened 50 years ago to the refugees – and I speak as a living, breathing refugee – while at the same time they claim that 2000 years ago they had a Temple. I challenge the assertion that this is so. But even if it is so, we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants practical peace.”11
One wonders, what kind of logic is his?
This was followed on 17 January 2001 by a pronouncement by Sheikh Ikrima Sabri (Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, October 1994-July 2006) during an interview for the German daily newspaper Die Welt: “There is not 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 do not even know exactly where their temple stood.” Responding to a challenge by the interviewer, he said, “It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world, but they can’t do it to us. There is not a single stone in the al-Buraq wall relating to Jewish history”11 (‘al-Buraq’ is the Muslim name for the unquestionably Herodian Western Wall).
Western Wall, incomplete verse from Isaiah 66:14, attributed to the 5th Century AD. See Photo Credits.Temple denial is not restricted to political and religious figures. Here’s the opinion of a lecturer in urban planning at Bir Zeit University, a member of the Scientific Committee for the 2008 Urban Planning Conference at An-Najah University in Nablus, as expressed on PA TV on 23 June 2009 in regard to the Muslim Dome of the Rock:
There is a view that where it stands was the Holy of Holies of the fictitious Temple – and by the way, that is merely an illusion. There is no remnant of it. It's a myth. A story of no value, like the Arabian Nights, and other legends…60 years of digging, and they've found nothing at all. Not a water jug, not a coin, not any earthen vessel, no bronze weapons, no piece of metal, absolutely nothing of this myth, because it's a myth and a lie. This digging has not left a single metre [unturned], but it has achieved absolutely nothing.12
These archaeological allegations will be addressed in the next section, but it important to note that, contrary to several Palestinian allegations, Israel’s Antiquities Authority allows no excavation under the Temple Mount itself. However, illegal Muslim alterations within the Mount have removed large quantities of sub-surface material, destroying portions of the archaeological layers. Ironically, this has further undermined their rhetoric, as will be seen in Part 2 (next week).
Temple denial is not restricted to political and religious figures – even academics join in.
Tisha Ba’Av is an annual day of Jewish mourning, fasting and prayer, principally for the fall of the First and Second Temples. Reporting events in 2011, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida stated on 9 August:
Since Monday morning, groups of extremist Jews have been roaming the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque [the Temple Mount] one after the other, under heavy police protection, on the occasion of the so-called "destruction of the Temple"...This Sunday, the occupation's police handed the shop owners in the Market of the Cotton Merchants...which leads to the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, an order forcing them to close their shops on Monday afternoon, in order to facilitate the arrival of the settlers to the Market, for the sake of holding special Talmudic rituals on the occasion of the destruction of the alleged Temple.13
Such rhetoric has had a serious impact. James Davila, Professor of Jewish Studies and Principal of St Mary's College, University of St Andrews, has drawn attention to the increasing practice among Western journalists of writing as though the existence of the ancient Jewish temples on the Temple Mount were a disputable 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."14
Tragically, the propaganda has had another result. In April 2016, a resolution on Jerusalem drafted on behalf of the Palestinians by seven Muslim countries was adopted by the Executive Council of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The resolution essentially erased the Temple Mount's Jewish history, referring to it only as "al-Aksa Mosque/al-Haram al Sharif and its surroundings" and to the Western Wall as the "al-Buraq Plaza". This was not only an undeserved victory for the Palestinians but also for Islam.
Perhaps the greatest oddity is that Temple denial runs counter to Islamic history. In 1924, the Supreme Moslem Council published an English-language tourist guide to the Temple Mount entitled ‘A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif’, which stated (p4): “The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings”15 [my emphasis]. It even adds the reference to 2 Samuel 24:5.
The guide was reprinted several times, but withdrawn from sale in 1954. A professional-quality replica is presently advertised on CCNow.com for £6.05 + P&P!
Denials of Biblical Archaeology
Here are two examples of Palestinian attempts to deny the archaeological record, published in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority’s national newspaper, in Ramallah. On 5 October 2015, according to the writer, Yahya Rabah, a member of the Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza:
Netanyahu turned to the old fraud, the fraud of the Jewish myths and the historical lies, that are refuted by the book of the first Jews, the Bible, and that have been refuted by hundreds of archaeological missions over hundreds of years, that did not find remains of the myths according to which Palestine is the land of the Jews and their homeland…”16
The propaganda is misleading Western journalists and influencing global politics.
Then on 16 September, in the London-based edition of the same paper, Jihad Al-Khazen wrote, “In college I was a student of history. I focused on the modern history of the Middle East, but the material also included the study of ancient history, on the assumption that it serves as a ‘background’ for the present. I ask the students of religion to accept what I say: there are no Jewish archaeological remnants in our lands. There are no archaeological remains of kingdoms or prophets…”.17
This latter writer is no mere lightweight. According to the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research (2017), he is a Lebanese columnist based in London, a board member of the Arab Thought Foundation and also a Member of the Board of Advisors of the World Bank, Middle East and North Africa. He has a BA degree in Political Science and a Masters in Arabic Literature from the American University of Beirut: he should know better!
Much more recently (5 October 2017), speaking of excavations in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, Governor of the Jerusalem District, Adnan Al-Hussein, said, "Most of the antiquities that have been found in these excavations are antiquities from the Islamic culture in its different periods - along with Roman, Byzantine, and Umayyad antiquities - and Israel's claims regarding the finding of Jewish antiquities are a clear falsification of the city’s history."18
Such claims are so easy to refute that one wonders why and how they should even be contemplated, let alone expressed publicly. Next week we will turn to the archaeological record and ask why the Palestinian narrative departs so totally from reality.
References
1 Usher, B. Trumplomacy: Key takeaways from Jerusalem policy shift. BBC News, 7 December 2017.
2 Marcus, I and Zilberdik, NJ. PA: Jews have no history in "Palestine". PMW Bulletin, 14 December 2017.
3 Dahl, Z. In Their Own Words: An Invented Palestinian Nation. The American Spectator, 6 May 2016.
4 PA and Fatah personalities: Mahmoud Abbas. Palestinian Media Watch.
5 Ahren, R and Lieber, D. Israel’s leaders atypically quiet after Abbas asserts their state is invalid. Times of Israel, 15 December 2017. The phrase “to distort the words from their [proper] usages” is an expression directly quoted from the Qur’an, widely interpreted to refer to the Jews.
6 Rewriting history: Palestinian history fabricated. Palestinian Media Watch.
7 How Israelis and Palestinians see Trump’s Jerusalem move. PBS News, 6 December 2017.
8 Arafat said Jesus was a Palestinian. Palestinian author and TV host agree. Youtube/Palestinian Media Watch, 23 December 2010.
9 Rewriting history: Jesus misrepresented as “Muslim Palestinian”. Palestinian Media Watch.
10 Ibid.
11 MEMRI translation. Hollander, R. Updated: The Battle Over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. CAMERA, 24 July 2017.
12 Rewriting history: Jewish history rewritten. Palestinian Media Watch.
13 Marcus, I and Zilberdik, NJ. The PA denies Jewish history in Jerusalem: The Jewish Temple is "the alleged Temple". PMW Bulletin, 11 August 2011.
14 Davila, JR. Temple Mount Watch: The BBC is taking Jewish-Temple denial in Palestinian circles rather more seriously than it deserves. Paleojudaica.com, 2 June 2009.
15 Supreme Muslim Council, 1924. A Brief Guide to Al Haram Al Sharif Jerusalem. Jerusalem.
16 PA depicts a world without Israel. Palestinian Media Watch.
17 Ibid.
18 Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, 5 October 2017. See note 2.
[All Scripture quotes NKJV]
