When people object to characterizations of segments of Islam as living in the Dark Ages, what can they say to this: The Jews have no connection whatsoever with Jerusalem and have no sacraments there . . . The Temple of Solomon does not exist in Jerusalem . . . Therefore the Jews have no connection or right to have any presence in Jerusalem.
The speaker was not some far out, non-influential, Islamic crackpot. It was no less an Islamic personage than Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal, speaking in 1973. Since then? Things have only gotten worse.
It was not always this way. Earlier documents by Islamic leaders, such as one by the Supreme Moslem Council in Jerusalem, said of the Temple Mount: Its identity with the site of Solomons Temple is beyond dispute. This was in 1925.
What happened between 1925 and 2009 is the deliberate, broad-brush whitewashing of history by opponents of Zionism, beginning with the notorious anti-Semite, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who began his career in the 1920s (and among whose malignant bequests was his nephew Yasir Arafat).
The mufti disseminated the libel that the Jews were trying o destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque. He was so successful with his incendiary rhetoric and agitation that, by 1929, Jews were not even allowed to sound a shofar at the Western Wall.
The effort to deny Jews equal rights in the Holy Land embraced several methods: opposition to Jewish political power, opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine, terrorist violence and historical revisionism. Revisionism has reached something of a peak in recent months, at once ridiculous and dangerous. Various Islamic authorities have increased the number and visibility of their claims that the ancient holy Temple the center of the Chanukah story, for example never existed in Jerusalem; that not a single stone of the Western Wall has any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews.
Even worse, the Waqf the Islamic custodian of the Temple Mount which, after 1967, Israel left in place in a spirit of inter-religious tolerance has destroyed Jewish antiquities by excavating beneath the Temple Mount. Why Israeli governments permitted this is beyond us. Meanwhile, the irony burns like sulphur: The Jews have no history in Jerusalem, but we are doing our best to destroy it.
Writing in the Forward (from which we derived some of the information above), Daniel Levin recalled that last September at the UN Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu answered Irans charges of Holocaust denial and of usurpation of Palestine by waving a Nazi document on the extermination of the Jewish people, and by citing Isaiahs words engraved on the UNs own headquarters: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.
The latter is proof, said Netanyahu, that we are not strangers to this land. It was sickening that he even had to make the point.
Those who still say that Jews are strangers in Israel are living in the Dark Ages or, perhaps, in a rather modern, Orwellian universe. Whitewash history. Erase facts. Deny sources, Jewish or Islamic. Do anything to delegitimize Israel. Exactly how is peace supposed to be concluded with people who have this mentality such as key leaders in the Palestinian Authority?
