(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - Saeb Erekat, the head of the Palestinian negotiating team, last week lectured to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni that he and his Canaanite forefathers lived in Jericho 3,000 years ago before the arrival of Joshua and his Sons of Israel. The Palestinians have invented thousands of years of a new history of their own. All of a sudden, the biblical Canaanites are Arabs, Jesus is a Palestinian, and Moses is a Muslim. Fathi Hamad, the interior minister in the Hamas government in Gaza, said recently: "We all have Arab roots and every Palestinian in Gaza and all over Palestine can prove their Arab roots, whether they be in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or anywhere else....Speaking personally, half of my family is Egyptian." Prof. Rafi Israeli, an expert on Islam from Hebrew University, says the link that the Palestinians have tried to create with the ancient Canaanites is "absurd." "The early origins of the Arabs who came to this country are in the Arabian peninsula....The Palestinians don't really have roots here. They know this very well, so they are trying to invent origins for themselves." "Whenever you offer historic or archaeological criticism of this nonsense, learned scholars the world over immediately insist that you 'respect the narrative.' It doesn't matter one bit to them whether there is historical truth there. If we do not debunk this, it will be accepted as fact. If you repeat a lie thousands of times, it eventually becomes accepted as true, so we mustn't keep quiet." Prof. Nissim Dana of Ariel University adds: "In the Koran...there are 10 passages which state that Allah bequeathed the land to the Jewish people. In all of these instances, it is written that there is not only the right but the obligation placed on the Sons of Israel to inherit the land. On the other hand, there is no mention in the Koran of bequeathing the land to Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, or any other nation not called the Jewish people." As for the claim that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites, Dana notes that "the Koran says the Canaanites were ordered expelled from the holy land by Allah after they had defiled the land." The writer was a reporter for Ha'aretz between 1983 and 2009 and currently writes for Israel Hayom.
2014-02-10 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive