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Palestinian Revisionism Is the Only Obstacle to Peace

(Jerusalem Post) Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon - The recent Palestinian Authority report stating that the Western Wall has no religious or historical significance to the Jewish people is sadly yet another attempt at political historical revisionism. As the recent UNESCO report on Jewish sites in Judea and Samaria exposed, the Palestinian rejectionist narrative is foisted on the international agenda and is supported by an automatic majority in multilateral forums. The PA Ministry of Information claims on its website that "according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1917, the Western Wall became part of the Jewish religious tradition around the year 1520 AD, as a result of Jewish immigration from Spain, after the Ottoman conquest the year 1517." In fact, the entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1917 provides historic references to the Western Wall from antiquity and certainly before the Arab invasion, conquest and occupation of the Middle East. The recent UNESCO report that Rachel's Tomb near Jerusalem is the Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque is an even greater scandal. It also disposes of hundreds of years of Muslim tradition. According to an Ottoman document found by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in 1830 the Turks issued a firman (royal decree) that gave legal force to Rachel's Tomb being recognized as a Jewish holy site. In 2000, talks between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PA Chairman Yasser Arafat at Camp David in the presence of U.S. President Bill Clinton broke down over similar historical revisionism. After Barak had made an overly generous offer about splitting sovereignty of the Temple Mount, Arafat claimed that he could not concede an inch of this "Islamic territory" because the Jewish Temple never existed. While the Palestinians claim to be the original residents of our land, history and fact stand in their way. While the majority of the Jewish people had to endure a two millennia exile from our land, the stones of our Temple, the burial sites of our forefathers, our ritual baths, ancient cisterns and synagogues remained. And 2,000 years of foreign occupation and attempted negation of Jewish history could not prevent the return of the aboriginal people to our land. The real obstacle to peace is Palestinian rejection of Israel and the self-determination of the Jewish people. The PA brainwashes its people to disallow Israel's legitimacy and falsifies Jewish, Christian and Muslim history in the process. This rejectionism has been at the heart of every failed peace effort for more than 70 years. Palestinian hate and intolerance, more than all the other issues combined, will doom the region to many more years of conflict.
2010-12-02 10:19:15
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