The only obstacle to peace
The only obstacle to peace, argues Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, is the 'Palestinian' effort to revise history to vitiate the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. THIS HISTORIC denial has political ramifications. In 2000, talks between former prime minister Ehud Barak and PA Chairman Yasser Arafat at Camp David in the presence of former US president Bill Clinton broke down over similar historical revisionism. After Barak had made an overly generous offer about splitting sovereignty of the Temple Mount, Arafat claimed that he could not concede an inch of this “Islamic territory” because the Jewish Temple never existed. This “Temple denial” wasn’t just distorting Jewish history and tradition but also Christian. Arafat was attacking the belief of more than a billion Christians worldwide.Read the whole thing.
As we approach Christmas, another form of historical revisionism emerges.
The myth that Jesus was a Palestinian is told to anyone who arrives on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem or other Christian holy sites under the Palestinian Authority.
However, the facts once again don’t add up. The Jewish province of Judea was destroyed by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135 C.E. when the Romans quashed the Bar Khochba-led Jewish revolt. To sever the Jewish connection with the Land of Israel, the Roman emperor changed its name to Syria Palaestina, eventually becoming known in English as Palestine.
According to Christian scholars, Jesus was crucified somewhere between 26 and 36, a full hundred years before the term Palestine had even been coined.
The world at that time did not have a single mosque and Islam and the Arab conquest of this land was still six centuries away.
It is perhaps understandable that those who came late to a region would need to supplant a history by appropriating and denying that of its earlier inhabitants. While the Palestinians claim to be the original residents of our land, history and fact stand in their way.
While the majority of the Jewish people had to endure a two millennia exile from our land, the stones of our Temple, the burial sites of our forefathers, our ritual baths, ancient cisterns and synagogues remained. Palestinians will attempt to destroy historical memory just as surely as they destroyed actual Jewish holy and historical sites like Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus.
However, 2,000 years of foreign occupation and attempted negation of Jewish history could not prevent the return of the aboriginal people to our land.
When I first saw this article, I thought yeah, he's on to something. But on re-reading it, I have to tell you that it bothers me that he gives the 'Palestinian' narrative equal validity with the Jewish one. While there has been an Arab and Muslim presence here off and on since the 8th century, no one recognized the existence of a 'Palestinian people' until the 1960's, and even now, that 'people' is not ethnically distinct from the Arabs. If you want to pretend that there's a 'Palestinian people' because you want to make peace (as if that were possible) that's one thing, but to stretch that into making the 'Palestinian' claim to the land as equally as valid as the Jewish claim is just a lie. That's why you will always find the term 'Palestinian' in scare quotes on this blog.
Labels: Israel is a Jewish state, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, Palestinian people
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:42 PM
5 Comments:
The only obstacle to peace is the so called "palestinians" - period!
Exactly! They don't want peace and its time to take them at their word!
Now if we can just convince the (normally reasonable) people who only will read the NYT and LAT... Amazing that the NYT is aiding and abetting the distribution of these leaks, since the content completely undermines everything they have blasted for the last decade...
BTW, thank our lucky stars for the internet. I just posted this Kenyan newspaper item that Gateway caught... I posted it where my legions of lefty friends will see it. I'll be interested to see whether they 1) ignore it, 2) say the U.S. has laws like that on the books, 3) say it's not true (is it?)... These social issues are supposedly at the top of the list of reasons they supported the (D)s and Obama. Since this doesn't match their imagined world, I'm just sure they will ignore it.
http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2010/11/obamas-cousin-kenyan-prime-minister-raila-odinga-orders-arrest-of-gays/
Nope, I guessed wrong. For a while the Kenya/Odinga post was ignored, but finally someone put up one option that I didn't think of. So it was 4) "completely false." Well that settles it. No curiosity there. Actually, I wonder if there is a way to see whether the *Kenyan* news site made it up).
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