I previously proposed in this column the idea that Muslim scholars should attempt to differentiate between the prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran and the prophets of the Jews who are mentioned in the Torah, since any history student in any major Western university (but not an Arab university) will learn that Jewish history is only an amalgamation of biblical myths about prophets, kings and kingdoms that never existed. In the simplest possible terms, the Israelis have been looking for their “traces” in Palestine for the last 62 years without finding anything so far, to the extent that Israeli archaeologists have stopped looking in Jerusalem. Moshe Dayan, an amateur archaeologist himself, looked for 13 years in the Sinai for the traces of his “ancestors”, but found nothing whatsoever related to Moses or the Wandering Years. I am well aware of the sensitivity of this subject, and it is for this reason that I only propose an idea and let the Muslim scholars – and I mean Muslim archaeologists and historians and not theologians – to confirm or deny what I and my son studied, in an American and a British university respectively. Israel's advocates are so insolent, meanwhile, or obscene, that they actually forge and falsify a modern history that we have lived and seen ourselves. It is thus no wonder that they invented a religion to steal a land from its owners. Recently, I followed four episodes on a U.S. Likudnik website which relied on a French Likudnik website as its source, and which concluded that the child Muhammad al-Durrah was not shot dead by Israeli soldiers while in his father's lap in Gaza in 2000 and that the footage that the French television and the world media carried, showing the child and his father, was not true. I suffice myself with the above on that subject, and move on with the Israeli peace advocate Uri Avnery, and his article published on August 16, 2009, which was inspired by a dispute between Palestinian residents of Acre and the Jews there, following a decision by the government to remove all Arab names and keep the (fabricated and falsified) Jewish names which are to be written in Hebrew. Thus, for example, Jerusalem became Urshalim. In Acre, the Jewish-dominated municipality threatened to destroy the monument of the Muslim diver Issa al Awwam who fought with Salah al-Din…But then if Muhammad al-Durrah did not exist in 2000, then why would they acknowledge Issa al-Awwam who lived 800 years before him? Avnery cites the Book of Joshua in the Bible, describing it as being ‘genocidal', which is true, since the book mentions that the Lord told Joshua to kill “both man and woman, young and old”. But despite the events of the Book of Joshua, Avnery says that Acre remained a Phoenician city like the rest of the coast of Palestine. The writer wonders who came to the land of Canaan first, and replies that the Arabs had conquered the land which they called Jund Filistin (military district Palestine) in 635 A.D, and that they ruled it since then without interruption except during the Crusader period. On the other hand, the Zionist version claims that the land belonged to the kingdoms of Judea and Israel, although the coast was Phoenician. Avnery carries on by saying that despite all the unrelenting efforts over a hundred years, no archaeological evidence has been found that there ever was an exodus from Egypt, a conquest of Canaan by the Children of Israel, or a kingdom of David and Solomon. The article after that speaks of the “legends” of the Torah about Abraham in Iraq and the exodus from Egypt, the Conquest of Canaan, King David, and the other legends of the Bible, “which are taught as actual history”, and then the destruction of the Temple and the “exile” of the Jews and their persecution. Uri Avnery is neither an Arab nor a Muslim. He is an Israeli who served in the Israeli army before becoming a prominent peace activist, and is also a researcher and an authority on the history of the entire region. I do not ask the Arabs and the Muslims to approve of anything I said above, but only to ask their scholars to study the subject and then enlighten us all. If they fail to do so, we might find ourselves reading a history where Muhammad al-Durrah was not killed, where Jesus committed suicide (I cannot even insinuate at what the Talmud says about the Virgin Mary), and where Muslims attacked the Jews in Palestine in 1948 to uproot them from their own country. A history where there were and there are no Palestinians (recall what Golda Meir and other ultra-Zionists said), where Egypt attacked the Negev in 1956 instead of Israel attacking Sinai, where Arab armies attacked Israel in 1967 and so Israel had to respond in self-defense (I swore that I read this in their writings as I read that the United Nations is ‘Muslim'), where Hezbollah invaded Israel in the summer of 2006, and where Hamas attempted to invade Ashkelon two years later. We might also read that Israel did not kill 1500 Palestinian minors in this decade alone, compared to 135 Israeli minors, that B'Tselem's figures are false and that it is infiltrated or that B'Tselem lies like all peace activists around the world, including Jews, and maybe even that this article itself does not exist except in the readers' imaginations. [email protected]
