Stolen History: How the Palestinians and Their Allies Attack Israel's Right to Exist by Erasing Its Past

When Sheikh Abdul Palazzi, professor at the Research Institute for Anthropological Studies in Rome, was a guest lecturer at Yale University during the spring of 2003, he told of his conversation with a representative of the Waqf, the Palestinian religious committee overseeing the maintenance of the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount, during his visit to Israel in 2000: "[They] took us to visit Al Aksa [the silver-domed mosque at the south end of the Temple Mount]. Right outside of the Dome of the Rock is a small chapel on the eastern side. 'What is this place?' I asked. 'It is the place where Solomon stood to dedicate the Temple,' was the reply. 'Then why do you deny this?' I asked. With a smile, I was told, 'For political reasons!'"
¹

Understanding the "political reasons" for Arab lies so cheerfully acknowledged requires an acquaintance with the scope and strategy of the decadeslong propaganda war against Israel. The goal in this propaganda war is to delegitimize Israel, rebranding it a rogue and racist state, as a way of convincing other countries that supporting the Jewish State is in fact supporting evil. The key elements of this strategy are on full public display in the unremitting attacks at the UN on Israel's "occupation" and "settlement" of Palestine, in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns directed at trustees of U.S. and European universities, and in the Nakba demonstrations on American campuses mourning the creation of Israel as an act of genocide against the "indigenous Palestinian people."

Less visible but perhaps even more important in the propaganda war on Israel is an intensifying effort to eradicate the ancient history of Israel and the Jews, the "facts on the ground" that stretch back to biblical times, and replace it with the fiction of a "Palestinian antiquity" recently stolen by rapacious Jews. This revisionist historical offensive against Israel is waged by an army of Arab scholars, religious leaders, political leaders, journalists, and their enablers in the west. They work together with one objective: to discredit the huge volume of evidence from Jewish, Muslim and Christian Scriptures; Archaeology, Assyriology, and Egyptology; ancient, medieval and modern historical sources, including Arab sources, all of which shows the historical Jewish connection to the land on which the modern state of Israel now stands.

The"Israel Denial" at the heart of the methodical falsification of a region's history is nothing less than an effort to commit a conceptual genocide on the Jewish people, an act serving as a legitimization of the literal genocide some Arab leaders have called for. The US State Department appears to understand the implication of these efforts by radical Palestinians and their fellow traveling Western supporters to steal Israel's history. The State Department's former spokesperson P.J. Crowley had this to say:

"We strongly condemn these [efforts] and fully reject them as factually incorrect, insensitive and highly provocative. We have repeatedly raised with the Palestinian Authority leadership the need to consistently combat all forms of delegitimization of Israel including denying historic Jewish connections to the land."
²

But the lies, pseudo history, and poisonous confabulations continue — a war against Israel by other means in which stealing their past is a prelude to making sure Jews have no future in their ancient homeland.

Work by Western academics sympathetic to the Palestinian cause has been crucial in the effort to fictionalize Middle Eastern history. In his book
The Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian History,
³
for instance, Keith Whitelam, a professor at Sheffield University in the UK, not only attacks the historicity of Biblical texts and the very existence of the kingdom of Israel and ancient Israelites, but also asserts that modern Israeli archaeologists have attempted to erase Palestinian history in their analyses of the material uncovered in their excavations.

This book is significant because it is the first attempt to use Western historical methodology to validate the propagandistic assertions of Palestinian leaders; and the first attempt to ground claims of the high antiquity of the Palestinian people in archaeological and epigraphic evidence. It is worth focusing on
The Invention of Ancient Israel
because it summarizes the work and worldview of other scholars and thus has status as a representative text.

The three core theses of Whitelam's book, a now oft-quoted "seminal text" for the anti-Israel academic establishment, can be summarized as follows:

1.) Over the past century or so, Palestinian history has been intentionally silenced, stifled, choked, erased, and/or minimized by Zionist archaeologists and their supporters, and unintentionally by other Biblical scholars and historians.

2.) Today's Palestinians are the direct descendents of the Philistines (whose name was corrupted by the Romans into "Palestinians") and other non-Israelite inhabitants of ancient Palestine, and so in fact they have the true historic claim to the Holy Land as a homeland.

3.) Until recently, modern Biblical scholars and archaeologists have colluded (perhaps unwittingly) to create a fictitious, invented, history of Israel to justify the Israeli claim to a Jewish homeland, and to legitimize Israel's slaughter of Palestinians.

Although they are proposed in the reasoned language of academic discourse, these ideas are actually propaganda masquerading as scholarship.

In arguing that some of the last century's greatest Biblical scholars (many of whom are, or were, neither Jewish nor Zionist) have knowingly falsified "Palestinian history," Whitelam is talking about the intellectual giants of Ancient Near Eastern Studies: individuals such as William Foxwell Albright, Martin Noth, John Bright, G. E. Wright, Albrecht Alt, and William Dever. All of these giants of Biblical Studies were believing Christians, but none were fundamentalists who took the Bible literally. All searched the extra-Biblical corpus of ancient near eastern texts and archaeology to throw light upon the Bible and upon Israelite history, but none sought to prove Biblical history correct. None ever discussed the antiquity of the "Palestinians," because in their day the concept of a "Palestinian people" had not yet been invented.

Whitelam has no such compunctions. He constantly refers to "indigenous" Palestinians in an effort to connect today's Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with the ancient non-Israelite peoples of that ancient geographic entity often called Palestine, which is more or less the territory of modern Israel . But he offers absolutely no evidence for this "continuum," and rigorously ignores the voluminous evidence against such a claim.

The term "Palestine," like its fore-runners "Philistia" and "Palestina," refer in all instances of their appearance in Greek, Latin, and later texts to a vaguely defined area inhabited by a variety of different peoples and cultures. Sometimes it contained several different independent nation-states (Philistines, Israelites, Samaritans, Judeans, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, Jebusites, among others); and sometimes it was subsumed entirely within a larger empire (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ottoman). Never was there a political entity with defined borders and national identity known as "Palestine" until 1922 when the League of Nations created "British Mandatory Palestine."

The endless array of migrants and invaders of differing ethnic, linguistic and cultural origins who moved through the region from prehistoric times onward provides no genetic or cultural ancestry for today's Arabs of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. There is abundant evidence, in fact, that from the mid-19th century onward, during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods, hundreds of thousands of Arabs migrated into the area from surrounding lands in search of the better economic conditions that the British and the Zionists created.
⁴
The result of this migration was a near quadrupling of the Arab population of the Holy Land from an estimated 340,000 in 1855 to more than 1,300,000 in 1947.
⁵
This means that the majority of today's Arab population of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, can trace its Holy Land ancestry back for 150 years at best.

Also thwarting Whitelam's arguments are the unsolicited statements by Arab scholars and political leaders in the years leading up to the UN partition plan in 1947, to the effect that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation or a Palestinian people. In fact, from the 1880's onward Arab nationalists actually protested against the use of the term "Palestine" because "Palestine," as they explained, was really Southern Syria (as-Suriyeh al-janubiyeh). Even the Grand Mufti Hajj Muhammad Amin el Husseini, the most vitriolic and vociferous Arab nationalist in Southern Syria, opposed the British Mandate because it created "Palestine" separate from Syria. Akhmed Shukairi, the PLO delegate to the UN, said in 1956, eight years after the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of "Palestinian refugees," that "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria." As late as 1974 Syria's President Hafez al-Assad asserted that "... Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of Southern Syria."
⁶

Hence when the newly founded United Nations presented a plan for the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, with UN General Assembly Resolution # 181, on November 29, 1947, its plan was seen by some Arab leaders not as a rational way to end the escalating violence between Arabs and Jews, but rather as a historical and political injustice.
⁷

And perhaps the most revealing of all in this connection is the statement by Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, on March 31, 1977, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper
Trouw
:
⁸
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem."

In short, Arab leaders committed to the destruction of Israel invented the concept "Palestinian people" in order to justify their interminable war against Israel.

Even a cursory glance at Ancient Near East scholarship demonstrates that Whitelam's use of the terms such as "dismissed," "diminished," "minimized," or "silenced," to refer to the supposedly oppressive treatment of "Palestinian history" by modern Biblical scholars and archaeologists during the last 150 years, is pure fiction. Aside from his spurious and uncritiqued insinuation that "Palestinian history" is in fact the history of the ancient non-Israelite peoples referenced in Scripture as inhabiting the Holy Land, his argument runs aground on the plethora of scholarly and popular studies that prove there is no "silencing" of these people's histories. A survey of these studies can be founding simply by looking up in these peoples of ancient Canaan — Philistines, Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, Amorites, Arameans, Amalekites, Midianites and of course Canaanites — in traditional or on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
⁹
A more scholarly and in-depth treatment of these non-Israelite nations is available in a variety of scholarly resources, including JSTOR,
¹⁰
the
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
,
Biblical Archaeology
,
Biblical Archaeological Review, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research, Annual of the American School of Oriental Research
, and the
Harvard Theological Review
.
¹¹
And some of these non-Israelite people are the subjects of scholarly books and multi-volumed research publications.
¹²
Needless to say, there are no scholarly works on the ancient "Palestinians" because the "Palestinians" did not exist in antiquity and there is no demonstrable connection between the Arabs of modern Israel and the ancient non-Israelite people of Canaan.