Check out Isabel Kershner in the Times, on a clash in Hebron over two "hotly contested" sites in occupied territories that Israel is claiming as national heritage sites:
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu laid out a $100 million government plan to rehabilitate what he called “archaeological and Zionist heritage sites,” during a special cabinet meeting held in northern Israel at Tel Hai, the scene of a 1920 battle between Arabs and early Zionist settlers.
He said he intended to include the Cave of the Patriarchs, also known as Ibrahimi Mosque, the Hebron shrine revered by Jews, Muslims and Christians as the burial place of Abraham, on the list of about 150 sites. In 1994, a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, fatally shot 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers inside the shrine.
Mr. Netanyahu said he also planned to include Rachel’s Tomb, a shrine just inside the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
-The sites are not contested. They are in Palestinian territory.
-She said one Israeli soldier was injured and there were no reported Palestinian injuries–wrong.
-She quotes Netanyahu talking about how Jews should be familiar with their archeological sites… What about the cemetery they are building their tolerance museum over? I guess we shouldn’t have expected Kershner to mention that!
yet another step in the headlong march by zealots not seeing how their actions are dooming them
Just another day in the Judith Miller memorial newsroom.
Make up the B teen horror movie–can not lose. Ref: Goebbels, Streicher, their mentor B ernays.
“She quotes Netanyahu talking about how Jews should be familiar with their archeological sites…”
First, to be really frank, who gives a shit what Nutty-Yahoo says? Second, they cannot even rightly revere their sites, because they turn them into excuses for more theft. The activities done in the name of archeological sites, both ancient and supposedly being uncovered, are false pretenses – even they are skewed by the occupation. Everything is skewed by the occupation, every institution, everything.
First of all – both Abraham and Jesus are not considered a prophet in Judaism- and secondly, most of Zionist leaders have been committed Atheists. Therefore, their claim to any religion-based is null and void. The only religious document which supports their bogus claims is Zionist-funded Scofield Bible.
link to biblebelievers.org.au
Judaism is a precursor to both Islam and Christianity, to deny the claims of Judaism is to deny the claims of all Abrahamic religions.
Quite the website too btw, classic Rehmat stuff. Didn’t know you were waiting for the rapture…..
So, yonira, what is your attitude toward Jews who are self-declared atheists?
Many of my relatives are self-declared atheists. My uncle, who is a rabbi, had to struggle w/ whether he really believed in God, before he became a rabbi. Its not an uncommon theme in Judaism.
…So, they are Jews that don’t believe that Abraham or Jesus (or anyone, really) are prophets of God, right? Since they don’t believe there is a God at all? So your own family are denying the claims of Judaism and, by extention, all Abrahamic religions?
But let’s go back a step — they’re denying the claims of Judiasm. Doesn’t that mean they are renouncing themselves as Jews? Or do you consider being Jewish racial, rather than religious or cultural?
“Judaism is a precursor to both Islam and Christianity, to deny the claims of Judaism is to deny the claims of all Abrahamic religions”
There seem to be many rather bold assumptions in this statement.
And what assumptions would those be Olive? please explain.
Judaism is the bastard child of the Nile Valley Mystery System. The Ten commandments are a complete rip off from of the 42 Negative Confessions. You’re religion is a complete rip off, a fraud and you use it to justify your colonization of Palestine. FUCKIN DISGUSTING.
Abraham is considered the father of the Jewish people who spoke to God and God spoke to him. He is not referred to as a prophet but as a father, but speaking to God and God speaking to you and telling you the future all adds up to prophecy.
What sort of a father was Abraham ?
According to the Bible, a really bad one.
Abraham was a coward, a liar, a pimp, and possibly a rapist.
Worst of all, he didn’t even have the moral strength to protect his children.
Out of fear for his own life, he twice pretended his wife was his sister, (“My sister very clean”) and left her to another man .
Sarah told him to shag the slave girl in order to get an heir. We are not told how enthusiastic Hagar was about the business, but no-one cared. She was a slave girl.
When she did get pregnant, and had a son, she got uppity. Abraham’s wife told him to dump her out into the desert. He, gutless wonder that he was, did. No thought of defending his child or his child’s mother.
No surprise, then, that when the sky-dictator told him to slice his second son’s throat, he obeyed.
Again, he failed in a basic duty that is recognized as such throughout the world.
Abraham was a moral degenerate, without a shred of decency.
RE: “The activities done in the name of archeological sites, both ancient and supposedly being uncovered, are false pretenses…” – VR
SEE – Archaeology in Jerusalem: Digging Up Trouble, Time 02/08/10
link to time.com
“The group also has plans for a parking lot, a synagogue, 11 new houses for settlers and a cable car to the Mount of Olives, where many believe the Messiah will arrive.”
Nice article Dikerson3870, and everyone knows you cannot have the Messiah returning without the indispensable “cable car.”
A while back I wrote an article called “Skewed Science, Colonialism and Ethnic Cleansing,” which touches on this subject, not exhaustively but accurately –
SKEWED SCIENCE, COLONIALISM AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
Excerpt:
One must ask with all candor, do the Zionists claim ownership through some archaeological digs during the tearing down of Palestinian homes or afterwords? This attempt to “reclaim” some ancient footprint while removing the current one of the Palestinians. So, let’s look for a moment at a hypothetical – even if there are ancient Israeli artifacts found on Palestinian land how does this automatically translate into the Palestinians being ethnically cleansed and a Zionist population replacing them? In short hand, it does not.
Israel Finkelstein, professor of archeology at the University of Tel Aviv says Biblical archeology has been popular in Israel since the nation’s founding in 1948. As Jews poured into Israel from all over Europe following the Holocaust, the “national hobby” helped newcomers build a sense of belonging. “There was a need to give something to the immigrants, to the melting pot,” says Finkelstein. “Something to connect them to the ground, to history, to some sort of legacy.”
Yet – “In Israel, biblical archeology was used to justify illegal settlement policy,” says Hamdan Taha, director general of the Palestinian Authority’s department for antiquities and cultural heritage. “Land was confiscated in the name of God and archeology. It’s still going on with the construction of bypass roads and the building of the separation wall inside the Palestinian land.”
The archaeologists sought out Old Testament sites and renamed places according to biblical tradition, in effect “recasting the landscape of the West Bank” in biblical terms, says Columbia University anthropologist Nadia Abu el-Haj, author of Facts on the Ground, a history of Israeli archeology. Those terms, she says, “the [West Bank] settlers now pick up.”
In 2005, Ariel Sharon said the tomb justified the Israeli presence in the West Bank. “No other people has a monument like the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah are buried,” he told the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit. “Therefore, under any agreement [on the West Bank], Jews will live in Hebron.”
Other contested sites include Joseph’s tomb in Nablus and Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem. “It’s not real archeology,” Finkelstein says. “It’s based on later traditions.”
However, it is not only Palestinians that question what is taking place: In 1999, Ze’ev Herzog, a Tel Aviv University colleague of Finkelstein’s, convulsed the Israeli public with an article in the weekend magazine of the newspaper Ha’aretz asserting that archaeologists had shown definitively that the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ origins was not factual. Outraged letters poured into the newspaper; politicians weighed in; conferences were organized so the distressed public could quiz the archaeologists. But once the issues were addressed, feelings cooled. However, that does not mean that the same process is not taking place, using the archaeological spade as an excuse or a justification for criminal acts.
So the West and Israel constantly try to mold the vision, particularly in the United States, of the “biblical” holy land – and archeology has been used as such – to crystallize for “Christians” in the West that Israeli’s and the holy land setting are the only two things that belong together – Palestinians are merely shrugged off as interlopers. This is important because the place where the most support for Israel is found is among fundamentalist Christians (outside of other Zionist Jews), and the United States is where Israel gets it’s biggest check.
In fact, “biblical” archeology is used as a way to silence Palestinian history. It is a “nationalist archeology,” that builds that bridge to an intrusive and brutal occupation, connecting the ancient past with the colonial enterprise.
Complaints are also being registered that not only is Byahoo’s plan appropriating “Jewish” sites in Palestine, it deliberately ignores non-Jewish historical sites in Israel – which is to say, most of the country’s history.
A TENABLE VIEW
On the problems of ‘minimalism’ and the formation of the Old Testament there is an article which I consider very informative in the (fairly conservative) Eerdman Bible Commentary on ‘The Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls’ by Daniel Harlow of Calvin College, showing how this formation took a long time and more than one language.
If we promote the term ‘Palestinian archaeology’ it might become easier to inform the public of how ancient, according to scientific and literary evidence, the Philistine/Palestinian presence, starting in at least the twelfth century, is.
Beyond that I have an distressingly unscientific wish that some historical foundation will be found for Genesis 20-21, where the Philistine presence predates even Abraham and so would go back to the twentieth century. Netanyahu surely wouldn’t like that.
That is interesting MHughes976, because I find the problem with the biblical narrative. I can understand why someone like Mr. Harlow would try to plant the scrolls in the hands of a Jewish population to save the literalism view of the bible, and even if this were the case you cannot attribute this to the idea of a Jewish people as presently proposed by Zionists, because they are not Levantine descendants. I can also understand how he would like to trace the presence of the Palestinians to just the 12th century, in order to remove them as the ancient people of the region and to plant the mythical view of the current Jewish population as predating the Palestinians. Unfortunately, none of it works, because there is not only no evidence, but contrary evidence. In fact, all of the stories found in the bible can be traced to other religious origins, just like all of the stories attributed to Jesus can be traced back to numerous religions. In fact it is more likely that the Palestinians can be traced back as part of the ancient population involved in Judaism of the region . The only diaspora a Jews that makes sense is their evangelism across other continents, not a biological lineage.
I don’t think I chose my words about Harlow very well and didn’t clearly separate his views and topics from mine.
Harlow’s point is that the Hebrew Bible was, on the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the process of being revised and reedited, along with its Aramaic and Greek counterparts, well into the first century of the Christian era. So the account of ancient times, going back to the 2oth century before Christ, that we find in our Bibles is influenced by the theology and general beliefs of that later time. This was the time when the people who considered themselves to be Jews were reacting both positively and negatively to western cultural influence and also exercising some cultural influence on the wider western or Greek world.
Harlow doesn’t mention archaeology except for the DS Scrolls and has no anti-Palestinian agenda as far as I know. I was saying for my own part that I think there’s good scientific reason for promoting the term ‘Palestinian archaeology’ and for reminding people of certain facts, including that the first non-Biblical mention of the Philistines/Palestinians (among the Sea Peoples) is dated to around 1175, little more than 30 years later than the first non-Biblical mention of the Israelites in the Stela of Merneptah of around 1205.
In my less scientific and more politically motivated moments I would like to find some evidence for the clear but otherwise unsupported statements in Genesis 20-21 that the Philistines were there even before Abraham, taking them all the way back to the 20th century before Christ. Netanyahu could put that in his pipe and smoke it.
If you say that this is all a bit of a distraction and that the situation in the 21st century of this era cannot depend in the situation in the situation in the 20th century of the previous era I would not argue. Still, my mind does tend to be full of old things.
“Harlow doesn’t mention archaeology except for the DS Scrolls and has no anti-Palestinian agenda as far as I know.” Yes, I believe you are correct in this assessment, actually those from Calvin and the classic Reformed camp are not made of the same stuff that current Fundamentalists portray. There is still a streak of true scholarship in their ranks (or should I say scholarship as far as can be found among a conservative element) , and they have not been bitten by the same strange “prophetic” bug found among those who are unreserved supporters of Israel. They have other skeletons in their closet (Africa), but none that reflect the wrong sentiments in regard to the IP conflict.