The evidence from the later Hellenistic and Roman and Byzantine periods is overwhelming. To call the accounts of Jewish existence and sovereignty in Israel during these periods "invented history" requires discrediting the surviving manuscripts of the inter-Testamental literature, the texts of the Christian Scriptures (especially the Synoptic Gospels), a variety of Greek and Latin texts, the books of Josephus, the text of Apion preserved in Josephus' "Contra Apionem," Tacitus' "De Reribus Mundi," the Dead Sea Scrolls with their textual replicas of large parts of entire books of the Bible, the Jerusalem Talmud, the thousands of references to Judea and Israel and Jews and Jerusalem in the Babylonian Talmud, and the Roman sources for the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD including the famed Arch of Titus. Compelling testimony is also provided by archaeological evidence of Hellenistic and Roman period seal impressions and coins in Hebrew, bearing Biblical names, coins of the Maccabean period, and the first and second revolts against Rome, and the Judaea Capta coins.
And then, of course (and perhaps ironically, given the political end toward which Whitelam and his colleagues labor), there are a number of well-known Qur'anic references to the high antiquity of the Israelites in their Holy Land:
• Allah freed the Israelites from Egypt and took them across the desert and into their promised land, according to Surah 5, he granted the Land of Israel to the Children of Israel and settled them there, also according to Surah 16
• Suras 17 and 34 describe Solomon's construction of the first Temple and the destruction of the first and sec- ond Temples.
• Finally, Surah 17:104 recounts Allah's promise to bring the Children of Israel back to their land, gathering them from their various lands in the Diaspora, before the Day of Judgment.
• In short, the Qur'an itself declares, with the concurrence of medieval Muslim commentators, that the Holy Land promised by Allah to the Jews is indeed the area of the modern State of Israel and its environs.16
The abundance of evidence for Israel's existence in the Late Bronze and Iron ages and in classical times utterly demolishes the thesis held by Whitelaw and politicized scholars like him about the "his torical invention" of ancient Israel. Yet these revisionist allegations have nonetheless steadily worked their way from the academy into the popular press, including the BBC, the Economist, Time Magazine,17 and of course much Arab media. Writing in the Khaleej Times, for instance, Karin Friedemann blandly and uncritically accepts every anti-Jewish assertion of Israel deniers, including the amazing assertion that Jews never existed as Jews in the millennia before the 10th century CE:
" ... Intellectuals of Jewish origin in 19th century Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, invented their folk narratives 'retrospectively,' out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people, argues Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand, author of How and When the Jewish People Was Invented ... There is no single founder population for modern Jewry any more than there is a single founder population for modern Christians or modern Muslims. Late ancient and early medieval texts describe an ethnically diverse collection of communities associated with proselytizing pre-Rabbinic Judaism ... (after all) ... the Palestinians' ancestors created the Hasmonean Kingdom, composed the Hebrew Bible, followed Jesus, wrote the New Testament, compiled the Mishnah, and redacted the Jerusalem Talmud. The Palestinian people constitute the living link to the earliest beginnings of the heritage from the Torah and Gospel."
Jewish Religious Sites and Documents — Denial and Destruction
Whitelam's book may stand as a sort of manifesto for the new anti-Israel faux-history of the Holy Land, but it is only one of a spate of such works churned out by the pro-Palestinian academy. Prof. Nadia abu el-Haj, for instance, attacks modern Israeli archeologists and the fruit of their academic labor in her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001).18
Professor el-Haj spins a yarn based on two major arguments. First, that modern Israeli archaeologists undertake their scholarship with the conscious, subversive intent of eradicating evidence of the historical presence of the "Palestinian people" in the Holy Land. And secondly, that these same archaeologists have worked for almost a century to exploit and distort archaeology for Jewish nationalistic purposes, selectively excavating sites that are likely to support what she argues is the Zionist inspired pseudo narrative of Ancient Israel's millennia-long sovereignty in the Holy Land; and to validate a fictitious history according to which Jews lived and ruled in the Holy Land 1,600 years before the arrival of Arabs.
The Temple Mount
Argument by archeology has become one of the pro-Palestinian academy's chief weapons. The central front in the use of such evidence to re-write Mideast history is the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, known in Muslim tradition as al-Haram ash-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). It is the precinct on which sit the El-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock and is claimed by the Muslims to be the location upon which Muhammad descended during his heavenly flight (Qur'an, Sura 17:1). Current Arab "Israel Denial" asserts that the Temple Mount never existed in Jerusalem and probably never existed at all, and that that site was Muslim from its origins.
Until recently there was a consensus even among Islamic historians about the legitimacy of the Jewish claim. In A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif, published by the Supreme Moslem Council in 1925, Muslim scholars expounded upon the antiquity and sanctity of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, stating that it dates to earliest times, certainly to the time of the Israelite kingdom, and is identified beyond dispute with the site of Solomon's Temple.19
In a description of the area of Solomon's Stables, which Islamic Waqf officials converted into a mosque in 1996, the guide states: "... little is known for certain about the early history of the chamber itself. It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon's Temple... According to Josephus, it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 A.D."
Yet, during the 2000 Camp David Summit, Yasser Arafat categorically denied that any Jewish Temple ever existed on the Temple Mount. Later he suggested that the Temple may have been in Nablus, and later still he mused that perhaps it was someplace else, like Yemen.20 Diplomats Dennis Ross and Dore Gold discuss this statement in their accounts of the 2000 Camp David talks, concluding that this assertion was part of an effort by Arafat to delegitimize the Israeli claims to Jerusalem.21
This campaign of "Temple denial" and the erasure of Jewish history of which it is a central part is now widely accepted in much of the Arab world. For example: Mahmoud Labadi, a charismatic, old guard PA apparatchik, asserts that the entire Jewish historical claim to Jerusalem is bogus because no Jewish temple ever existed anywhere in the area. "This temple - I will tell you frankly, this is not a Jewish temple," he went on. "This is a myth. This was a palace — a palace where David and Solomon lived. [The Jews] are looking everywhere in [Jerusalem's Old City] to find some traces. Until now, 43 years of occupation, they couldn't find any real trace of any kind of temple. It's mythology they build in their heads."22
Even western media have lent credence to these risible assertions. In 2009 James R. Davila, Professor of Early Jewish Studies and Principal of St Mary's College, St Andrews, criticized the increasing practice among journalists of writing as though the existence of the ancient Jewish temples on the Temple Mount was a moot 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."23
Shortly after Arafat returned from Camp David in 2000, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, then the number two man in the PLO, publicly denied the existence of a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount with the
following incoherent statement: "I challenge the assertion that this is so [that there has ever been a Jewish Temple]. But even if it is so, we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace."24
Nabil Sha'ath, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas, labels the Jewish temple as "fictitious."25 Walid Awad, foreign press spokesman for the Fatah Central Media Commission stated in an interview with IMRA on Dec. 25, 1996: "There is no tangible evidence of Jewish existence from the so-called 'Temple Mount Era' ... (the Temple) ... might be in Jericho or somewhere else."
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 ..."26
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]."27
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):28
"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."29
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.30
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."31
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.32 And the Palestinian Authority validates her accusations on their Ministry of Information website 33 with an article that denied any Jewish connection to the Western Wall, a claim that was repeated in official Palestinian Authority media.34Ironically, 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.35
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.36
The Temple Mount Coming to Mohammed
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.37
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.
Archaeological Cleansing
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.38
As the Palestinian propaganda offensive gains momentum in Eur
ope 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.39
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..40
The Palestinian Dead Sea Scrolls
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.41
Stolen History: How the Palestinians and Their Allies Attack Israel's Right to Exist by Erasing Its Past Page 2
