Walter Reich Writes About Shiloh & the Temple Mount

Walter Reich, professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and who has written "A Stranger in My House" with a chapter on my views, has an op-ed on a topic I've discussed here many times previously:-

In 1983, I saw how the unearthing of evidence of the Jewish past gives heart to some Israelis. While researching a book on the West Bank, I visited the Jewish settlement of Shiloh, in the northern West Bank. Archeologists were digging at the nearby site of ancient Shiloh, which in biblical times was the first capital of Israel. It was in Shiloh that, according to the Hebrew Bible, the Ark of the Covenant rested. Every evening, the archeologists would display their finds. When they showed artifacts from the Israelite period, the settlers cheered; for them, this was proof that they were now living in the ancient heart of the land of Israel.

Small wonder that archaeological finds like these provoke many Palestinians to deny that such discoveries, and any other evidence of Jewish history in either Israel or the West Bank, have anything to do with Jews. After the recent announcement that Herod's tomb had been found, the Palestinian response was quick and sharp. A Palestinian official said the finding lacked scientific credibility and was driven by ideological motivations.

But this episode of archaeological denial pales in comparison with the decades of denial in the case of Jerusalem's Temple Mount - which is known to Arabs as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary - a case thrown into relief by this week's 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, in which Israel captured East Jerusalem.

In 1930, when Britain administered the area, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem noted that the Temple Mount's "identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute." But at the Camp David summit in 2000, Yasser Arafat insisted that a Jewish temple had existed not on the Temple Mount but in Nablus. And an Arafat aide, Saeb Erekat, said, to President Bill Clinton's amazement, "I don't believe there was a temple on top of the Haram, I really don't."

Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian Authority president, later agreed with Mr. Erekat, as did the mufti of Jerusalem. Mr. Arafat later went further and denied the temple existed anywhere in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, including Nablus.

Today, denial of the temple's existence has become a mainstay of Palestinian rhetoric. "They say that the temple was here," a Palestinian historian scoffed. "What temple? ... What archaeological remains?" And temple denial has turned into temple removal. During the last few years, Palestinians have discarded remains of the first and second temples.

This absurd Palestinian denial of Jewish roots in the land has been matched on the part of Israelis who deny that there was a large and long-indigenous population of Arabs in Palestine when the Zionist movement vastly expanded the number of Jews in the area more than 100 years ago.

Source.