...Israeli and Palestinian hikers are taking to the hills in the footsteps of their ancestors...In northern Israel's Ramot Menashe Park, guide Innon Kahalany recently led a group..Kahalany said..."People don't like a history lesson, I try to make it easy," he said. (he's from Zochrot)
Some 45 miles south, in the West Bank, Palestinian guide Saleh Jawad led a dozen hikers up a grass knoll to the ruins of the ancient village of Khirbet Kfar Ana, now used as grazing lands...The conversation quickly fell to tracing a Palestinian connection to the land from biblical times.
"This is exactly what this struggle is about," said Jawad. "It's the feeling that I'm walking on the land of my ancestors."
Many Palestinians assert they are the descendants of the biblical Canaanites, who inhabited the Holy Land before the Hebrews conquered it. "We never left the land and they can see that," said George Rishmawi, a hiker who leads a walking group of Palestinian eco-tourists.
...Jawad's three-year-old group was established by environmentalists, including Raja Shehadeh, who wrote a book about the diminishing trails of the West Bank.
[see here]
Rishmawi has created the Palestine Trail — part of a larger regional project called the Abraham Path, a planned 1,200-kilometer (750-mile) route that would follow the route of the patriarch revered by both Jews and Muslims from Turkey, where he reputedly first heard the call to God, to his burial place in the West Bank city of Hebron...
This recalled to me the "velvet" hills of another related story, here.
But it all relates to a two-part piece I did, "One Canaanite Eyes" (part I here and part II here).
This is absurd history however, anti-Zionists will buy into anything, no matter how weird and unsubstantiated, to drive their animosity. Just as their dislike of Israel and Jewish nationalism is illogical, so too do they believe in illogical 'evidence'.
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