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https://honestreporting.com/reuters...historical-revisionism-in-archaeology-report/
There are 35,000 archeological sites all over Israel and the West Bank. They have long been open to study by Jewish and non-Jewish archeologists alike. At those sites, Jewish artifacts of every kind have been found, unearthed, catalogued, exhaustively studied: oil lamps, menorahs, pottery, utensils, coins, combs, and parchments written in Hebrew, the most famous of this last category being the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 in a cave at Qumran. No one has yet found any Muslim Arab artifacts dating before 636 A.D., and very few, save for weapons, after that date.
There was not a single Muslim, Arab or non-Arab, either in Palestine or, indeed, anywhere in the world, until the 630s A.D.
The Muslim Arabs arrived to conquer Palestine from the Byzantines, during a war that lasted from 633-638 A.D. The “Palestinian people,” however, did not exist, and would not be invented, for almost 1400 years after that date.
It was not Arabs, but the Soviet KGB that in the mid-1960s came up with the idea of creating a “Palestinian people.”
The area that constitutes today’s Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, has 35,000 archeological sites full of artifacts that have been conclusively identified as Jewish, including menorahs, oil lamps, pottery, coins (with Hebrew inscriptions),utensils, and texts written on parchment in ancient Hebrew, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, the first ones having been discovered by a Bedouin in a Qumran cave in 1947. Now all of the more than 100,000 fragments from various scrolls found subsequently to the first find, in 1947, are on display at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. Cisterns, ritual baths (mikvahs) and synagogues – all Jewish – continue to be discovered.
Every so often, a site is unearthed that contains a handful of weapons left by Muslim Arabs from various battles with the Byzantines in the seventh century, or later, with the Crusaders between 1099 and 1291, but no evidence of a Muslim Arab presence before 638 A.D. has ever been discovered, and even after, pitifully few Arab artifacts have been found. But this has not prevented the Muslim Arabs who now call themselves “the Palestinian people,” from insisting that they, and only they, have been in the area “for thousands of years.” Of course no one denies that after 638 A.D., Muslims did rule the area until 1099, when the Crusaders conquered what for them was “the Holy Land” and held it until 1087, when most of it was lost to the Muslims, though a small Crusader kingdom managed to hold on until 1291. Over many centuries, various Islamic rulers from outside Palestine, beginning with the Ayyubids, and then the Mamelukes, who ruled from Egypt, kept replacing one another until 1517, when the Ottomans conquered the territory and held it until 1918. It was then formally transferred by the League of Nations to the Mandate for Palestine, which was intended to lead to the creation of a Jewish state, extending “from the river to the sea.”
When one compares the vast amount of archeological, linguistic, and physical evidence of an uninterrupted Jewish presence in the land since 1700 B.C., and compares it to the pitiful handful of sites yielding evidence of an intermittent Muslim Arab presence beginning only in 640 A.D. – that is, more than two millennia later than the earliest Jewish presence – it is clear which side kicks the beam. Israel has been the land of the Jews — even in distant exile they longed to return to “Zion and Jerusalem” — for nearly 2500 years. The “Palestinian people” were invented little more than a half-century ago. How much of this nonsense about the “ancient Palestinian people” should we be expected to tolerate?
The existence of Roman-era tombs does not prove anything about the “Palestinian presence.” It only confirms all the readily available evidence that the Romans were in the Land of Israel as conquerors beginning in 63 B.C.
The “Palestinian people” were invented in the 1960s, at the suggestion of the KGB, as a way to re-present the Arab gang-up on tiny Israel as, instead, a national liberation struggle of a tiny people, the “Palestinians,” to free themselves from their Jewish oppressors and to regain the land stolen from them by those same Jews.
So far, the Palestinians have been claiming a direct line of descent from the Muslim Arabs who arrived from Arabia, conquered the area that the Romans had renamed as “Palestine” between 633 and 636 A.D., with Jerusalem holding out until 638 A.D and Caesarea until 640 A.D. There were no Muslim Arabs in “Palestine” any earlier; Islam itself dates, at the earliest, from the 630s. The Roman-era tombs would have been sealed long before, that is, before the Byzantine conquest in 313 A.D. resulted in the end of Roman rule. Yet the Palestinians are engaged in ludicrous back-dating, claiming that this new discovery of Roman-era tombs built hundreds of years before a single Muslim Arab was in the land, somehow is evidence of the Palestinian – Muslim, Arab — presence in the land during the last 2000 years.
There are 35,000 archeological sites all over Israel and the West Bank. They have long been open to study by Jewish and non-Jewish archeologists alike. At those sites, Jewish artifacts of every kind have been found, unearthed, catalogued, exhaustively studied: oil lamps, menorahs, pottery, utensils, coins, combs, and parchments written in Hebrew, the most famous of this last category being the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 in a cave at Qumran. No one has yet found any Muslim Arab artifacts dating before 636 A.D., and very few, save for weapons, after that date.
There was not a single Muslim, Arab or non-Arab, either in Palestine or, indeed, anywhere in the world, until the 630s A.D.
The Muslim Arabs arrived to conquer Palestine from the Byzantines, during a war that lasted from 633-638 A.D. The “Palestinian people,” however, did not exist, and would not be invented, for almost 1400 years after that date.
It was not Arabs, but the Soviet KGB that in the mid-1960s came up with the idea of creating a “Palestinian people.”
The area that constitutes today’s Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, has 35,000 archeological sites full of artifacts that have been conclusively identified as Jewish, including menorahs, oil lamps, pottery, coins (with Hebrew inscriptions),utensils, and texts written on parchment in ancient Hebrew, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, the first ones having been discovered by a Bedouin in a Qumran cave in 1947. Now all of the more than 100,000 fragments from various scrolls found subsequently to the first find, in 1947, are on display at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. Cisterns, ritual baths (mikvahs) and synagogues – all Jewish – continue to be discovered.
Every so often, a site is unearthed that contains a handful of weapons left by Muslim Arabs from various battles with the Byzantines in the seventh century, or later, with the Crusaders between 1099 and 1291, but no evidence of a Muslim Arab presence before 638 A.D. has ever been discovered, and even after, pitifully few Arab artifacts have been found. But this has not prevented the Muslim Arabs who now call themselves “the Palestinian people,” from insisting that they, and only they, have been in the area “for thousands of years.” Of course no one denies that after 638 A.D., Muslims did rule the area until 1099, when the Crusaders conquered what for them was “the Holy Land” and held it until 1087, when most of it was lost to the Muslims, though a small Crusader kingdom managed to hold on until 1291. Over many centuries, various Islamic rulers from outside Palestine, beginning with the Ayyubids, and then the Mamelukes, who ruled from Egypt, kept replacing one another until 1517, when the Ottomans conquered the territory and held it until 1918. It was then formally transferred by the League of Nations to the Mandate for Palestine, which was intended to lead to the creation of a Jewish state, extending “from the river to the sea.”
When one compares the vast amount of archeological, linguistic, and physical evidence of an uninterrupted Jewish presence in the land since 1700 B.C., and compares it to the pitiful handful of sites yielding evidence of an intermittent Muslim Arab presence beginning only in 640 A.D. – that is, more than two millennia later than the earliest Jewish presence – it is clear which side kicks the beam. Israel has been the land of the Jews — even in distant exile they longed to return to “Zion and Jerusalem” — for nearly 2500 years. The “Palestinian people” were invented little more than a half-century ago. How much of this nonsense about the “ancient Palestinian people” should we be expected to tolerate?
