As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a "dialogue of the demented" in her book The World Turned Upside Down,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently continued a long tradition
of attempting to de-Judaize Jerusalem by expressing his mendacious
notion that "Jerusalem's identity is Arab, and the city's and Christian
holy sites must be protected from Israeli threats." The same scholar of
history who wrote a doctoral dissertation that questioned the extent
and truthfulness of the Holocaust was now making his own historical
claim that there has never been a Jewish presence and history in the
world's holiest city.
Israeli archeology and biblical links to Jerusalem, and
specifically the Temple Mount, "will not undermine the fact that the
city will forever be Arabic, Islamic and Christian," Abbas crowed,
adding that "there will be no peace or stability before our beloved city
and eternal capital is liberated from occupation and settlement,"
suggesting that even Jerusalem itself is in fact occupied and that it
was, and still is, the capital of a putative Palestinian state. This
airbrushing out of a Jewish presence from Jerusalem -- in fact, all of
Palestine -- is not a new message for Abbas, of course. In 2000 he
expressed similar contempt for the idea that a Jewish temple had ever
existed on the Temple Mount and that, even if it had existed, the
offenses committed by Israel against the Palestinians negated any claim
Jews might have enjoyed, absent their perfidy. "Anyone who wants to
forget the past [i.e., the Israelis] cannot come and claim that the
[Jewish] temple is situated beneath the Haram," he asserted in a 2000
article in Kul Al-Arab, an Israeli Arabic-language weekly newspaper.
"They demand that we forget what happened 50 years ago to the refugees
... 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 a
practical peace."
In characterizing East Jerusalem -- or any part of Jerusalem, for
that matter -- as territory that Israel "occupies" but over which it
enjoys no sovereignty, Abbas (and the Obama administration's State
Department, too) is misreading, once again, the content and purpose of
1967's U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 that suggested an Israeli
withdrawal "from territories" it acquired in the Six-Day War. Critics
of Israeli policy who either willfully misread or deliberately obscure
the resolution's purpose say that the Jewish State is in violation of
242 by continuing to occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem, including what
is mistakenly now referred to as "Arab" East Jerusalem. But the
drafters of Resolution 242 were very precise in creating the statute's
language, and they never considered Jerusalem to have been "occupied" by
Israel after the Six-Day War. Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.,
Arthur Goldberg, one of the resolution's authors, made this very clear
when he wrote some years later that "Resolution 242 in no way refers to
Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate[.] ... At no time in [my]
many speeches [before the U.N.] did I refer to East Jerusalem as
occupied territory."
Along with their unwavering and various demands, including a "right
of return" of all refugees and sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the
Palestinians now insist that Jerusalem must be divided to give them a
capital in its eastern portion as the location of their new state. That
view is troubling because it reveals a pattern in which Arabs endow
Jerusalem with intense significance to serve purposes of political
expediency. In fact, observed scholar of Islam and Middle East Forum
director Daniel Pipes, "[a]n historical survey shows that the stature of
the city, and the emotions surrounding it, inevitably rises for Muslims
when Jerusalem has political significance. Conversely, when the utility
of Jerusalem expires, so does its status and the passions about it."
When Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank and purged Jerusalem of its
Jews from 1949 to 1967, for example, Jerusalem's stature declined. But
Israel's recapture of the territory in 1967 changed the political
landscape, including an Arab desire for Jerusalem, suggesting to Dr.
Pipes that "the Muslim interest lies not so much in controlling
Jerusalem as it does in denying control over the city to anyone else."
Dore Gold, Israel's U.N. ambassador from 1997 to 1999, observed in his book, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,
how many in the Muslim world, and even some individuals in the West,
have begun a sinister process aimed at establishing a spiritual as well
as political presence in Jerusalem for Islam, while simultaneously
diminishing Jewish historical links to the city. Gold believes that
this trend began at the 2000 Camp David meetings, when Yasser Arafat
first stated loudly and publicly his breathtaking belief that there had
never been a Jewish temple at the Temple Mount. Arafat, according to
Gold, thereby tossed "a stone of historical lies into a lake and its
ripples spread all over the Middle East. 'Temple Denial' became a common
theme at seminars in the UAE or in Jordan in the years that followed.
European professors joined this anti-biblical trend."
Ever since Camp David, the Palestinians have been relentless in
creating a false impression of how important Jerusalem is to them,
while, at the same time, they have de-Judaized Jerusalem and tried to
obscure the Jewish relationship with and continuing presence in the holy
city -- something Middle East scholar Martin Kramer has called their
desire to effect "a reversal of history."
Writing in al-Hayat al-Jadida, in March of 2009, for instance, Dr.
Tayseer Al-Tamimi, PA chief justice of religious court and chairman of
supreme council of Islamic law, absurdly claimed that "Jerusalem is the
religious, political and spiritual capital of Palestine," meaning a
Palestinian Palestine, and that "the Jews have no rights to it." But
the true danger of the Palestinian thinking about Jerusalem -- and,
indeed, about all of the Palestine that they covet, including Israel
itself -- was crystallized in Yasser Arafat's own view that he expressed
in a July 2000 edition of al-Hayat al-Jadida. "I will not
agree to any sovereign presence in Jerusalem," he wrote, referring to
the thorny issue of who, Israel or the Palestinians, would have
sovereignty of the Holy Basin -- "neither in the Armenian quarter, nor
in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, neither in Via De La Rosa, nor in the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre. They can occupy us by force, because we are weaker
now, but in two years, ten years, or one hundred years, there will be
someone who will liberate Jerusalem [from them]."
"Liberating" Jerusalem, of course, does not mean transforming it
into a pluralistic, open city where members of three major faiths can
live freely and practice their religions openly. Liberating Jerusalem
for the Palestinians would be more in keeping with the type of
liberation that Transjordan's Arab League effected when they burned and
looted the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem in 1948; expelled and killed its
hapless Jewish population; destroyed some 58 synagogues, many hundreds
of years old; unearthed gravestones from the history-laden Jewish
cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for latrine pavers; and
barred any Jew from praying at the Western Wall or entering the Temple
Mount. That same predilection to destroy religious property was on
display again shortly after Camp David, when a crazed Palestinian mob
took sledgehammers to Joseph's Tomb, a Jewish holy site, and completely
obliterated it as Palestinian policemen stood idly by and watched.
More to the point, Abbas's accusations that Israel threatens or
cannot coexist with Muslim and Christian traditions is a most outrageous
charge -- not only because Israeli archeologists are fastidious in
methodology and practice, but also, given what is happening currently
atop the Temple Mount itself -- one of the world's richest archeological
and historical sites. Indeed, this tragedy is something that the
Muslim world, not the Israelis, should have to answer for.
Scholars and archeologists remember, for instance, the howls of
outrage that arose from the Arab world in February 2007, when Israeli
authorities initiated a project to rebuild a ramp to the Mugrabi Gate,
an entrance to the Temple Mount plaza and the Al Aqsa Mosque platform
that had been damaged in an earlier storm. Riots and protests began
immediately, with accusations against Israel coming from throughout the
Arab world for its "scheme" and treachery in digging under and
threatening to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque itself. The committee of
Muslim scholars in Jordan's Islamic Action Front, for one, "urge[d] ...
jihad to liberate Al Aqsa and save it from destruction and sabotage from
Jewish usurpers" -- a spurious claim, since construction was taking
place well outside the Mount platform, some 100 meters from the mosque,
and clearly posed no possible threat. It is also an oft-repeated
charge, suggests Israeli columnist Nadav Shragrai, frequently used by
Arabs against Israel as a way of inciting hatred toward Jews for their
perfidiousness and guile. This he calls the "Protect the Al Aqsa
Mosque" blood libel -- a propaganda tool that has been used since the
1920s to cause mistrust of Jews when the then-Grand Mufti Haj Amin
al-Husseini, Hitler's Middle East ally, exhorted Muslims everywhere to
defend Islamic holy places in Jerusalem from the pernicious Jews,
causing riots, bloodshed, and 133 Jewish deaths.
And while riots ensued in recent years when Israelis initiated a
carefully supervised reconstruction project near the Temple Mount, the
Islamic Waqf, the Muslim guardians of the Judaism's holiest site, have
felt no compunction in brutally gouging the historic surfaces when it
suited their own purposes, either in 2007 when they created a deep
trench or as they did in 1999 when they opened a gaping hole -- in what
is known as Solomon's Stables -- 18,000 square feet in area and 36 feet
deep, for new mosques. Most seriously, 13,000 tons of rubble from that
criminal dig, containing rich archeological remnants from the First and
Second Temple periods, was scattered clandestinely in the Kidron Valley
dump without any professional archeological oversight and before experts
could evaluate any unearthed items of significance.
The Arab world's own complicity in playing fast and loose with
history, and obscuring the actual "facts on the ground" in their attempt
to create a historical narrative conforming to their political agenda,
makes Abbas's accusations against Jews bent on the undermining of Muslim
and Christian holy sites all the more disingenuous. In yet another
example of "turnspeak," the Arab world has accused Israel of the
misdeeds, lies about history, and destruction of a nationhood that they
themselves are committing. It is part of a relentless and continuing
effort to delegitimize Israel and finally eliminate it through a false
historical narrative that is repeated in Palestinian schoolbooks, in
sermons, in the Arab press, in Middle Eastern study centers at
universities, and in the politicized scholarship and dialogue generated
by Israel-haters, anti-Semites, and Palestinian apologists around the
world -- something Shragai has aptly called a "tissue of lies."
