generalspeaking

De-Legitimizing History

As though to go the denial of the Holocaust one better, the propaganda coming out of the Arab world with respect to the very existence of ancient Israel in the Middle East continues its course. The Arab world, quite simply, is not prepared, and it begins to appear, will never quite reconcile itself to the acceptance of Jewish legitimacy on what is deemed to be soil dedicated to Islam.

In writing of the emergence of Arab nationalism resulting from Turkish Ottoman rule, Arthur Goldschmidt - a writer entirely sympathetic to Islam and the Arab cause - writes in "A concise History of the Middle East":

If Arab nationalism was to mean separation from the ottoman Empire, this might do more for the Egyptian khedive or the British than for the Arabs of Syria or Iraq. Even though Egypt was prospering, Arabs elsewhere did not crave British rule, let alone a French imperialism comparable to what already existed in Algeria. The Jewish settlers in Palestine, hardly large enough yet to threaten the Arab majority, might later aspire to separate statehood, and Arab nationalists opposed this even more than Turkish rule.

There was always an underlying current of hostility toward the very idea of any tribal or cultural or religious group outside Islam seeking autonomous possession of any part of the Middle East geography. Partly fed through Islamic precepts of making jihad against any entities threatening to take from Muslim Arabs that which they claimed as their divine right of accession, and partly fed from their long and unfortunate history of colonialism.

Nothing has changed through the centuries, and certainly not much has changed in the last century. If Israel's claims to right of nationhood in the Middle East as a fait accompli, resulting from the Balfour Declaration and the UN-approved partition of Palestine can no longer be defeated militarily, the idea is to bring the country to its knees through political propaganda portraying Jews as the world's outcasts, claiming land rightfully belonging elsewhere.

And little does it seem to matter how outrageously stupid are the claims, demands and denunciations against Israel as an 'apartheid', or a 'dictatorship', as an evil 'occupier', betraying their common humanity with the poor disadvantaged Palestinians, there is a ready and supportive audience to embrace those claims. Malicious slander is candy to those great swaths of humanity whose nations' administrators loathe Jews, and claim anti-Zionism does not equate with anti-Semitism.

The most risible example of a de-legitimizing campaign is the recent one where the Palestinian Authority has launched a campaign impugning Israel's right of ownership or custodianship over its own historical, heritage documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls document ancient Jewish life. These Hebrew-language parchments describe a Judaic society in biblical times in current-day Israel and the West Bank. They are far more ancient than the advent of Arab-speaking people in the area, let alone Islam.

And therein lies the wish to deny their legitimacy. Much as the Arab and Muslim community seeks to deny the ancient reality of Jerusalem as Jewish, as the site of the first most holy symbols of Judaism. Where Islam spoke its contempt of religions other than its own by building a mosque over the most holy of Israel's sites, the Temple Mount, where sat the first and the second Temples of Solomon, of which the Wailing Wall (Western Wall) is the sole remnant.

Islam insists that Jerusalem contains, in the Dome of the Rock, the third most sacred place in the religion, yet there are no indications that this is so in practise, since no Arab or Muslim countries mount pilgrimages to that site where Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven. Yet the Palestinian Authority with the full urging and support of the Muslim world - and the Western world as well, led by the UN and the U.S. - claims it has the moral, historical and legal right to insist on Jerusalem as the capital of its nascent nation.

Just as it has attempted to apply moral pressure against the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to surrender the Dead Sea Scrolls to them as the rightful owners of this ancient Jewish treasure. The PA claims the Israel Museum has illegally taken possession of the scrolls, that they were taken from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities upon Israel's rescue of East Jerusalem in 1967 from illegal occupation by Jordan.

No less a scabrous enemy of Israel than the former Yasser Arafat signed an accord on behalf of the PLO agreeing, as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people", that Israel's current custodianship of the Dead Sea Scrolls was in compliance with the 1994 Oslo Agreement, which set out the Protocols on Civil Affairs in the territories with respect to archaeological finds and artifacts.

The PA is interested in re-writing not only Jewish history, but their own as well, to conform with their benighted idee fixe that Israel's existence is illegitimate as a Jewish-majority state, established by Jews for the preservation of world Jewry. For to do so would be tantamount to finally agreeing with its existence, to finally relent and relinquish their dream of re-possession.

Labels: Israel, Middle East, Particularities/Peculiarities

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, July 02, 2009