|
Trending Topics
|
Palestinian Authority's Future Is Not in Rewriting History
(Jerusalem Post) Daniel Taub - In the wake of the latest UNESCO resolution on Jerusalem spearheaded by the Palestinian Authority, thoughtful Palestinians should have doubts about the long-term value of repeated Palestinian efforts to subvert the facts of history to a political agenda. Consider the Palestinian campaign to re-brand Rachel's Tomb. Until the 1990s, Palestinian schoolbooks referred to this site, located outside of Bethlehem, as the Tomb of Rachel, while Muslim scholars frequently described it as "Rachel's Dome, the Jewish place of worship." Starting in the mid-1990s, the tomb was re-branded as the "Mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah," and Palestinian textbooks were rewritten accordingly. This rewriting of history flew in the face of Muslim teachings, in which Bilal ibn Rabah, Muhammad's first muezzin, was buried in Damascus, and which had always revered the tomb as the burial place of the matriarch Rachel. I served as the head of the Israeli side of the Culture of Peace track of negotiations with the Palestinians during this Orwellian rewriting of history. In examining textbooks for deliberate distortions of history for political ends, we recalled the famous saying of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts." Deliberately distorting the facts of history and teaching falsehoods solely to advance political goals is a form of child abuse. The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to the UK.