The Other War: The Palestinian Destruction of the Jewish Heritage

Peloni:  This tragedy, which has been ongoing for decades, is far more effective than even the tragedy of October 7 at defeating the Jewish People.  Indeed, the very purpose of the Pals deminishing our past is so that they can be better situated to erase our future.  This must end.  Just as the old conception which held that a terror statelet posed no threat to the Jewish State has been overturned, so too must long held conception that the historical record of our past is not worth the trouble which would be needed to secure it from the malicious intents of our enemies.  This betrayal of the Jewish people and its historical record must be ended.

By | July 15,2024

The Palestinians do not only want to destroy the Jews living in Israel, and to replace the Jewish state “from the river to the sea” with a 23rd Arab state. They also want to destroy the evidence of the Jewish past — 3000 years of Jewish history — in Judea and Samaria. More on this attempted annihilation of the history that connects the Jewish people to their land can be found here: “Palestinian destruction of Jewish archaeological sites must be halted – opinion,” by David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, July 13, 2024:

Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are rich with Jewish national heritage sites.

It is the Biblical heartland. The physical record of the Biblical narrative lies in the ground with hundreds of known archaeological sites, and perhaps thousands of yet undiscovered sites, providing incontrovertible evidence that connects the Jewish People to the Land of Israel.

This is precisely why the Palestinian Authority is systematically destroying archaeological sites in Judea and Samaria, purposefully plundering and erasing Jewish antiquities.

This week the Government of Israel took a first step towards halting the wanton annihilation of Jewish heritage.

For the first time since Israeli archaeological activists conducted in 2020 a broadscale survey of some 300 sites under Palestinian assault, the government decided to back a bill in Knesset, introduced by Likud MK Amit Halevi, that would extend the purview of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) to Judea and Samaria – to manage and preserve historical sites….

Archaic interpretations of the Oslo Accords by Israeli legal advisers have gotten in the way too. They have argued against Israel’s ability to intervene to protect Jewish heritage sites in Area B of the territories, despite the obvious and outrageous PA campaign to obliterate every Jewish/Israeli site possible….

The Israeli Supreme Court in particular has been a comatose, regressive actor in this ongoing saga – foregoing opportunity and after opportunity to force the hand of the Israeli government into action against Palestinian destruction-ism.

The sad result to-date is truly annihilationist: Three thousand years of heritage on its way to near-complete wipe-out within a mere 30 years. This is a tragedy that must be stopped….

The Palestinians are pushing pell-mell to wipe out 3000 years of Jewish history, to efface any connection between the Jews and the Land of Israel. So far they have been doing so without any sustained effort by the Israeli government to protect Jewish archeological sites in Area B of Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank). “He who controls the past controls the future” is the famous remark of Orwell in 1984. The Palestinians have their own version: “He who destroys the past controls the future.” The government of Israel has to fight on three fronts: against Hamas in Gaza, against Hezbollah on the northern frontier with Lebanon, and against the Palestinians engaged in the determined destruction of the Jewish past in Judea and Samaria. It is in this last campaign that the Israeli authorities have been so disastrously derelict in their duties. They must now act to preserve and protect what remains of the Jewish heritage sites. It’s late in the day.

July 16, 2024 | 5 Comments »

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  1. Melissa Steinberg on FB: “It looked like debris. It nearly got discarded.

    Gezer was no ordinary site. The city sits at the junction of the coastal plain and the Judean foothills, on the main road between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean, strategically important enough to appear in Egyptian military records and in the Hebrew Bible. First Kings describes it as a city the Egyptian Pharaoh conquered, burned, and gave to his daughter as a wedding gift when she married Solomon. It was a city people had fought over for centuries.

    What Macalister’s team had just pulled out of its soil was a piece of limestone with text scratched into it. Once the dirt was brushed away, the scratching resolved into letters. Ancient letters. Hebrew letters.

    This was the Gezer Calendar.

    The tablet dates to the 10th century BCE, the era of King Solomon. And unlike the grand victory monuments and royal decrees that usually emerge from ancient digs, this inscription is almost defiantly ordinary.

    It’s a farmer’s list.

    Carved in Paleo-Hebrew, one of the earliest known examples of the Hebrew script, the text breaks the year into agricultural seasons: two months of harvest, two months of planting, two months of late planting. It tracks the rhythm of survival from the flax harvest to the barley harvest to the pruning of summer grapes. The cycle it describes begins in the month of Tishrei and ends in Elul. Those are the same months on the Jewish calendar still used today.

    It is considered the oldest agricultural calendar ever discovered.

    Historians have debated its purpose for decades. Some think it was a government regulation. Some think it was a folk song for remembering the seasons. But the most compelling theory comes from the handwriting itself. The letters are clumsy, uneven, the work of someone still learning. This wasn’t a trained scribe. It was almost certainly a student’s exercise, a child practicing the alphabet by writing out something practical and familiar.

    And at the bottom, scratched in the same unsteady hand, is a name.

    Abijah. In Hebrew, Avi-yah. It means “Yah is my father,” a theophoric name referring directly to the God of Israel. A child doing homework in a provincial Israelite town three thousand years ago signed his name at the bottom of the page.

    That name has outlasted every empire that has since claimed the land he was sitting on.

    The Gezer Calendar matters for reasons that go beyond archaeology. It shows that literacy in ancient Israel wasn’t confined to the palace or the Temple. A child in a regional town, far from Jerusalem, was learning to read and write Hebrew in the 10th century BCE. That points to a society with enough cultural infrastructure to educate its children in provincial towns, not just its scribes in the capital.

    It anchors the Hebrew language to the soil of that specific land. Not as a theological claim. Not as a political argument. As a piece of limestone with a child’s homework on it, pulled from the ground of a city mentioned in the Bible, sitting now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, taken there during the Ottoman period.

    A piece of ancient Hebrew writing, found in Israel, displayed in Turkey.

    Whoever carved those letters had no idea he was writing proof of his existence for a world thirty centuries away.

    He just wanted to remember when to plant the barley.”

    photo

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