A denial of our history

Editorial

An exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum drew protests and a call for boycotts by anti-Israel groups this month, bringing to Canada one of the more shameful aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The scrolls, ancient Hebrew scriptures, were discovered in the 1940s and '50s in caves near the Dead Sea. The full collection of nearly 900 artifacts is held in the Shrine of the Book, at the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem. Before 1967, the scrolls were housed in the Rockefeller Museum, in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem.

The criticism of the exhibit rests on the assumption that the ancient artifacts are Palestinian property; that they were, in effect, looted by Israel in the Six Day War.

On the face of it, the claim that Israel stole the artifacts is based on the fact that they were discovered in the then-Jordanian-controlled West Bank and moved to Israel-controlled territory after the 1967 war. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written in Hebrew, are ancient Jewish religious texts. So while the Palestinian claim of ownership is legally and morally silly, the protesters in Toronto who insist the documents are stolen property are not merely ignorant of history and theology. They are part of a larger, insidious and dangerous international effort to deny the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.

Contesting the legitimacy of everything Israel does – including its mere existence – is a vital strategy of the anti-Zionist movement. Attempting to obliterate the historical facts is an essential part of this approach.

"No stone of the Western Wall has any connection to Jewish history," said the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ikrama Sabri, in 2001. The Palestinian Authority has so thoroughly adopted this revisionism that public opinion polls have indicated that many Palestinians are actually unaware of the Jewish people's historical existence in this land.

As ludicrous as all of this seems, it is far easier to deny the historic Jewish connection than it is to deny the contemporary existence of a Jewish state, and yet this is exactly what every Arab state, save Jordan and Egypt, has done for 61 years. Arab Middle Eastern maps do not include Israel; it has already been, to use the words of Iran's president, wiped from the map. How difficult could it be, how much of a stretch is it, to deny the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land, having already achieved the extraordinary feat of denying the existence of contemporary Israel?

The unqualified denial of Jewish historical or contemporary rights, indeed of our very existence, is a significant elephant in the room of Arab intransigence. Even after the beginning of the peace process in 1993, Yasser Arafat continued with the most provocative accusations. In fact, nine years of intifada began in 2000 when Palestinian radio broadcast the incendiary claim that Ariel Sharon, in his notorious walk on the Temple Mount that is blamed for sparking this violence, was leading thousands of Israeli soldiers to destroy the third-holiest site in Islam.

"They are determined to destroy the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount and replace them by building Solomon's Temple," Arafat had previously thundered in a foreshadowing of this nonsensical but lethal allegation.

"We shall continue to save holy Jerusalem from the Judaizing monster and the despised settlements," Arafat said in 1998.

In other news recently, a senior politician from Arafat's Fatah party stated as clearly as possible that his group will never recognize the existence of Israel. This is Fatah, make a note of it, the "moderate" Palestinian faction that governs the West Bank, not the "extremist" Hamas, that occupies the Gaza Strip.

The fact that this statement is news is its only newsworthy aspect. Almost everything that the Palestinian Authority has done since 1993 and especially since 2000 has sent precisely this message. Any news value in this latest explicit statement can only be that there is still anyone in the world who actually thinks it is news that the Palestinian leadership will never recognize Israel.

Having been offered in negotiations everything they publicly stated they wanted, the Palestinians, under Fatah's Arafat at the time, upended the negotiating table and reverted to violence. Perhaps knowing that his time was limited, the launch of the intifada in 2000 may have been what Arafat meant when he promised in 1995, during a Jordanian TV interview "defending" the peace process: "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."

From the literal attempt to wipe Israel from the map to the attempts to extinguish any Jewish historical connection to the land, the anti-Israel movement is comprehensive in its determination to deny the Jewish people both a history and a future.

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