Jews in the middle east? It never happened!

Bibi Netanyahu asked the  Palestinians before,during and after the failed negotiations. Recognise Israel as a Jewish state. Declare that Israel is a country that is Jewish. In April of this year he said to U.S.envoy George Mitchell

“Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples,” a senior official in Netanyahu’s office quoted the new prime minister as telling Mitchell, U.S. President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East.

Another Israeli official said Netanyahu saw Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state as “a crucial element in moving forward with the political dialogue”.

Bibi was castigated by not only his critics but by others who asked why do we need them to legitimise Israels Jewishness. Is it not enough that we know it to be true? Palestinian commentators saw this recognition of  Israel as a “Jewish state”as insulting and frivolous. It was  rejected out of hand by the Palestinian leadership and ignored by the United States government. The reason was they viewed this as an attempt to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel in any future two state solution.

Asking the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, after Netanyahu had done the equivalent for their prospective state, would appear to be the soul of fairness and reciprocity. In consistently, bluntly rejecting the request—Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, for instance, said that

“We’ll never sign a deal demanding recognition of Israel as a Jewish state”—Palestinian leaders end up putting themselves in a light that seemingly, to any fair-minded spectator, is not favorable.

The Israeli-Arab co-executive director of  The Abraham Fund Initiatives, an organization that promotes coexistence and equality among Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.

“I think the Jews deserve a homeland of their own,” Mr. Darawshe said, “but not one that negates the rights and status of other citizens.”

Isabel Kershner of the New York  Times wrote “The more stridently Isarel insists on Palestinian recognition of it as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the more adamantly the Palestinian leadership seems to refuse. As a result, some senior Israeli officials are beginning to question the wisdom of the policy of their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish nation-state a prerequisite for any final agreement with the Palestinians.

So the question is was Bibi right in demanding this confirmation from the Palestinians and ultimately from the Muslim world in general.  Well recent events would suggest that he was “right on the money”

It seems that there is now an orchestrated campaign to not only refuse such recognition but in fact to deny that the Jewish presence in the middle east ever existed. This concept  is not new, but when you have UN organizations supporting this kind of whitewash,one has to ask why now?

Painting of Rachel's Tomb as it looked in the late 1800s.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted recently to officially declare Rachel’s Tomb to be a mosque. UNESCO director Irena Bokova had previously stated “concern” at Israel’s decision to treat the tomb as a heritage site.

The vote called for Rachel’s Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs – the burial site of the other Biblical Patriarchs and Matriarchs – to be removed from Israel’s National Heritage list.

The Palestinian Authority has claimed that Rachel’s Tomb is holy to Muslims as the site of a mosque called the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque. The PA demands control over both the tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hevron, as well as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Just this week :

According to a  PA study, the Western Wall, which the Palestinians call Al-Buraq wall and say is an integral part of the Al-Aksa Mosque, is not made of even one stone from the era of King Solomon.

The paper was prepared by Al-Mutawakel Taha, a senior official with the PA Ministry of Information, according to The Jerusalem Post. Taha wrote that the Jews never used the site for worship until the Balfour Declaration of 1917. “This wall was never part of the so-called Temple Mount, but Muslim tolerance allowed the Jews to stand in front of it and weep over its destruction,” he wrote in the paper.

Alex Joffe wrote recently on jewishideasdaily.com in his article “Why Rachel’s Tomb matters”

Palestinian denial of the Jewish past and hence of the Jewish connection to Israel is nothing new. Yasir Arafat famously assured Bill Clinton that there had never been a Jewish temple in Jerusalem—a position shared by Ikrima Sabri, the mufti of Jerusalem, as well as by Hassan Ali Khater, editor-in-chief of the Al Quds Al-Sharif Encyclopedia, the current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, and others. The Israeli scholar Yitzhak Reiter has documented at length the modern Islamic tradition according to which Jerusalem was never associated with the Jews.

Refusing to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, denying any Jewish involvement in the middle east, is the subtext for continuing the struggle against Israel even after a final settlement.

Without an enemy the Muslim world and the Palestinians would have to concentrate on actually building a viable nation and addressing there own deficiencies. Blaming everything on the Jews is much easier. Convincing the rest of the world is an important step in allowing the struggle to continue.