REWRITING HISTORY

(Cross posted from "Grandma's Army" )

Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel in order to deny Israel's right to exist is central to Palestinian Authority (PA) policy. Long before it started the PA terror campaign (such as the Intifada’s), the PA was fighting a history war - erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history.

This rewriting has two central goals:

1-   Erase the Jewish nation's 4,000 year history in the Land of Israel.
2-   Invent ancient Palestinian, Muslim and Arab histories in the land.

This international campaign of delegitimization began a long time before  the establishment of the modern Jewish state.

The ancient Romans tried to strip the area of its Jewish identity, to make it more Roman, by renaming Judea "Syria Palaestina."

Later, the fifth caliph of the dynasty of Syria - who ruled during the late 7th century - employed the tactic of delegitimising both Judaism and Christianity, by constructing the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This was the biblical spot where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Also the site of the twice-destroyed Jewish Temples. The famous Western Wall is all that remains of their existence.

The goal of this historical revision as a political strategy was first expressed publicly at a conference of Palestinian historians in 1998, when rewriting history was linked to the political goal of denying Israel's right to exist:

Dr. Yussuf Alzamili, chairman History Department at the Khan Yunis Educational College, called on all universities and colleges to write the history of Palestine and to guard it. “Not to enable the foreign implants and enemies to distort it or to legitimize the existence of Jews on this land...” History lecturer Abu Amar clarified that there is no connection between the ancient generation of Jews and the modern generation.

In contemporary times, a version of this tactic of revisionist history was attempted by the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. During the US-brokered Palestinian-Israeli peace talks at Camp David in 2000, he stated that the first and second Jewish temples were not erected in Jerusalem, but rather miles away in Nablus.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Information, no archaeological excavations in Jerusalem had ever unearthed Jewish artifacts.