Official PA Daily Denies That the First and Second Jewish Temples Ever Existed

The Palestinian Arabs’ efforts to efface any indication that the Jews have a history in the land of Israel can be found here:

Similarly, a regular columnist of the official PA daily claimed that not “one relic” has been found as proof of the Jewish kingdoms:

“Throughout 75 years of Israel’s existence they – and before them Western archaeologists from Britain, Germany, France, the US, and others, who conducted researches and excavations even before Israel existed – attempted but did not find one relic indicating the existence of the alleged Jewish kingdoms in Palestine. Therefore, there was no First Temple and no Second Temple, and there also will be no Third Temple on the Arab land of Palestine.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 22, 2023]

So the Western Wall, part of the original retaining wall of the Temple Mount, does not count as a “relic”? What about the mountains of Jewish artifacts that were found in the thousands of tons of debris that the Palestinians threw out when they were building another mosque inside the Temple Mount, and that Israeli archeologists, horrified at the wanton destruction, managed to collect and tirelessly combed through to find thousands of artifacts that had been in the First and Second Temples? Or are we supposed to have forgotten al about those finds?

The Palestinians have tried everything they can to present themselves as the true inheritors of the Land of Israel. Some of them have concocted a false lineage, presenting themselves as the descendants of the Canaanites, a people who lived in the land in 4000 B.C. Others claim that the Israeli Jews are not from the Middle East at all, but are descended, rather, from the Khazars of Central Asia, who supposedly converted to Judaism in the 8th century. But most of all, they rely on simple denial: there is not “a shred of proof,” there is “not the slightest evidence,” there “is nothing that supports the Jews’ claims,” and so on and so idiotically forth.

Yet ancient Jewish buildings have been found all over Israel – the synagogues unearthed, some completely intact and others in various states of dilapidation and ruin, and the mikvehs, and the ancient cisterns. There are also the 150,000 tombstones on the Mount of Olives cemetery, the oldest, and largest, Jewish cemetery in the world, dating back to 3000 B.C. The Jewish religious texts that have been discovered, especially the carbon-dated Dead Sea Scrolls, that tens of millions of visitors have seen in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, are not a fiction that the Zionists forged. Nor are such proofs of Jewish existence in the Land of Israel as the fifteen letters written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, by the Bar Kochba resisters to Roman rule, found in the Cave of Letters near En-Gedi.

There is the extensive testimony of historians to the existence of the Jews in the Land of Israel, not only from Jewish historians like Flavius Josephus, but also by Greek and Roman historians. The Romans, after all, had conquered the Jews, and then had to contend with the resistance to their rule, and they recorded all of it. Historians in the Middle Ages, whatever they may have thought of Jews, never denied that Jews were the indigenous inhabitants of, and many had remained in, the Land of Israel. that they called “Palestine.” Historians of the Crusades wrote of the encounter of Crusaders with Jews in the Holy Land. Until the Palestinian Arabs made their their preposterous claims, no one, not even those opposed to the Jews, ever denied that Jewish presence going back thousands of years.

How many thousands of histories have been written, in every European language, about the Jews in what the Western world, following the Roman example, called “Palestine”? And once again, let’s repeat: what of the synagogues unearthed? What of the 150,000 Jewish graves in a cemetery that dates to 3000 B.C. What of the tens of thousands of artifacts unearthed in the archeological sites in Israel: the menorahs, the pottery, the coins, the oil lamps, the utensils, the frayed textiles? What of the similar artifacts that were found by in the hundreds of tons of soil from inside the Temple Mount that the Palestinians deliberately dumped out when building a mosque?

The Palestinian insistence that there is “not the slightest evidence” linking Jews to ancient “Palestine” is not the least of the nonsense that they feed the credulous, including their very selves. And all we can do is to keep sweeping back that tide of denial, evasion, and lies, hoping that with each sweep of that broom, the truth — or some of it – will stick.