{"id":275053,"date":"2016-10-24T12:35:15","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T11:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=275053"},"modified":"2016-10-24T12:35:15","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T11:35:15","slug":"israel-attempts-whitewash-atrocious-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/israel-attempts-whitewash-atrocious-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel attempts to whitewash its atrocious history"},"content":{"rendered":"

(RINF<\/a>) – It was presumably intended as an Israeli history lesson to the world. A video<\/a> posted to social media by Israel\u2019s foreign ministry shows an everyday Jewish couple, Jacob and Rachel, in a home named the \u201cLand of Israel\u201d. A series of knocks on the door brings 3,000 years of interruptions to their happiness. First it\u2019s the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, Hellenists, Arabs, Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottomans \u2013 all straight out of Monty Python central casting.<\/p>\n

\n

Jacob and Rachel are forced by the warring factions to relocate to ever smaller parts of their home until finally they have to pitch a tent in the garden. Their fortunes change only with the arrival of a servant of the British Empire, who returns the title deeds. A final knock disturbs their celebrations. On the doorstep are a penniless Palestinian couple, craning their necks to see what goodies await them inside.<\/p>\n

The chauvinism in portraying Jacob and Rachel as the only normal folk, stoicly enduring barbarians butchering each other in their living room, is ugly enough. But it is harder still to take seriously an account in which the Palestinians suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1948, as Britain departs.<\/p>\n

A mile from my home in Nazareth are the ruins of Saffuriya, a centuries-old Palestinian town until the Israeli army expelled the inhabitants in 1948 and blew up their homes<\/a>. More than 500 villages were similarly razed.<\/p>\n

In places where buildings were left untouched, it is Jews \u2013 not Palestinians \u2013 who squat in someone else\u2019s home. But the falsification runs deeper.<\/p>\n

Next to the rubble of Saffuriya lies the much older Roman city of Sephoris, where Jews settled nearly 2,000 years ago after their failed revolts against the Roman empire. A surviving synagogue\u2019s mosaic floor reveals that the Jews of Sephoris worshipped the sun, so close had they grown to the area\u2019s pagan population.<\/p>\n

Other entanglements abound. In Nazareth\u2019s old city is the world\u2019s only \u201csynagogue church\u201d, where Jesus reputedly delivered his first sermon. It is a reminder that many local Jews would soon be calling themselves Christians, and later Muslims. Farther north, in the town of Bokaya, an ancient synagogue can be found next to churches and mosques. For centuries the Abrahamic faiths lived alongside each other in a communal harmony unknown in Europe.<\/p>\n

In fact, contrary to Israel\u2019s version of history, the most violent clashes \u2013 aside from the Jewish revolts \u2013 coincided with invasions by Europeans, whether the aggressive sectarianism of the Crusaders, or the British-backed creation of an ethno-religious \u201cJewish state\u201d by Zionists. More usually, Palestine\u2019s past was marked by cultural tolerance and genetic\u00a0diversity. Conversions and intermarriages meant the region was a melting pot of identities and beliefs.<\/p>\n

Israel, of course, prefers to obscure that history, because it leads to an obvious conclusion: the region needs less, not more, tribalism and dogma of the sort Israel favours.<\/p>\n

The Jewish majority in Israel lives almost entirely apart from the Palestinians who stayed on their land and are today nominally citizens. Meanwhile, in the West Bank \u2013 known to Israelis as the Biblical kingdoms of \u201cJudea and Samaria\u201d \u2013 Jewish settlers lord it over a ghettoised Palestinian population subject to military rule.<\/p>\n

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been drafting a basic law defining Israel as belonging to a globalised \u201cJewish nation\u201d, not the country\u2019s citizens. And he insists that peace talks take place only once the Palestinians under occupation recognise Israel as such a Jewish state \u2013 a condition that, once viewed as risible, has now been adopted by Washington.<\/p>\n

In a sign of the prevailing mood, Israel\u2019s education ministry has recently banned from the curriculum two novels featuring romantic attachments between Jews and Arabs. At the same time, the \u201cgreen line\u201d that once demarcated the occupied Palestinian territories has been erased from Israeli classroom maps, implying instead that it is all Greater Israel.<\/p>\n

Faced with Israel\u2019s zero-sum policies and diplomacy, Palestinians have grown increasingly anxious about the future.<\/p>\n

Last week a resolution from Unesco, the UN\u2019s scientific and cultural body, gave voice to their concerns. It highlighted Israeli threats to the most important Muslim and Christian heritage sites under occupation.<\/p>\n

Recognising the importance of Jerusalem \u201cfor the three monotheistic religions\u201d, the resolution nonetheless warned that Israel was exploiting its illegal control to erase the Palestinians\u2019 connection to such sites, especially Al Aqsa mosque.<\/p>\n

Hoping to deflect attention away from these criticisms, Israel railed against the UN for denying primacy to its narrative. Al Aqsa must be billed equally as Temple Mount, Mr Netanyahu insisted, referring to a long-lost Jewish temple believed to be buried under the Jerusalem mosque.<\/p>\n

But the ruined temple\u2019s likely location leads to the opposite conclusion Mr Netanyahu has reached: not that the Jews have a stronger claim to sovereignty, but that the region\u2019s peoples and religions are impossibly intertwined.<\/p>\n

That should be the\u00a0chief lesson for the current Jacobs and Rachels, many of them living in armed and relentlessly expanding colonies on stolen Palestinian territory.<\/p>\n

This land was always shared, and there will be no peace until it is again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.Visit his blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(RINF) – It was presumably intended as an Israeli history lesson to the world. A video posted to social media by Israel\u2019s foreign ministry shows an everyday Jewish couple, Jacob and Rachel, in a home named the \u201cLand of Israel\u201d. A series of knocks on the door brings 3,000 years of interruptions to their happiness. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1219,"featured_media":275056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-275053","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1219"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}