Columnist: Jewish history in Palestine is a myth

Excerpt of a column by Bassem Barhoum, regular columnist for the official PA daily

Headline: “Liberating the history of Palestine will pave the way for its liberation”

“Before the Zionist movement took control of Palestine and Judaized it, it attacked its history. This attack has made the mission of every neutral and objective researcher difficult, because the colonialist orientalist discourse and the Bible studies discourse took control of the ancient and new history of Palestine. This was by turning the Bible into a history book, and literary myth into historical fact. The goal of taking control of the ancient history of Palestine is to claim ownership of the land…

In the 1920s, one of the most important decisions made by the Zionist leadership was to establish a history faculty at Hebrew University in occupied Jerusalem, and later on in all the Israeli universities, which includes the most important of the Zionist historians and [the historians] from the European states and the US. This was in order to weave a Zionist historical story claiming Jewish ownership over Palestine while deliberately ignoring the history (sic., an abundance of evidence proves Jewish history in Israel)…

Perhaps it should be emphasized that it is not an exaggeration at all to say that liberating Palestine from the Zionist rule and the strange claim of exclusive Jewish ownership over Palestine passes through liberating the history of Palestine, and through turning it into a culturally and religiously pluralistic and diverse history, as it always is…

Liberating the Palestinian history is a strategic matter that requires serious action.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 3, 2023]