As Israelis were evacuated from Jewish-only communities in the Galilee due to fires this month, Hatim Kanaaneh reflects, “Are you aware that within recent memory your own residential locales had Palestinian names and were inhabited by humans, some of whom with features not really different from your own and who were before their expulsion actually part of the best educated nation in the Middle East? They lived right where you live now but without all those fire-hazardous pines.”
Israel’s top diplomat, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotoveli waves the bible and an empty book of Palestinian history at Palestinian-Israeli Members of Knesset and tells them they don’t exist, and then says they are trying to Islamicize the holy sites and eradicate the Jewish connection to them.
Israeli leaders suggest that the UNESCO resolution to include Palestinian sites as world heritage sites is ‘anti-Semitic’ and that it denies Jewish connection. But UNESCO says the cave of the Patriarchs has Jewish significance, just that it’s in Palestine! That’s the problem.