A brief pamphlet that I recently came across might have seemed insignificant when it was first published but has achieved prominence due to the current historical revisionism in the Palestinian Muslim world. Titled “A brief guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif Jerusalem,” It was published in Jerusalem in 1929, the year of the Arab riots in Palestine (“the Buraq Uprising”) and the Hebron Massacre. Written from a Muslim perspective, it was published by the Supreme Moslem Council (with the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, at its helm), and it acknowledges and emphasizes the Jewish history of the Temple Mount.
From the section within titled the “Historical Sketch,” pages 4-8: “The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to the universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings (2 Samuel XXIV, 25).”
The New York Times in 2014 noted that “Temple denial, increasingly common among Palestinian leaders, also has a long history: After Israel became a state in 1948, the Waqf removed from its guidebooks all references to King Solomon’s Temple, whose location at the site it had previously said was ‘beyond dispute.’ At the 2000 Camp David Summit, then-Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat is alleged to have told then-American President Bill Clinton that ‘Solomon’s Temple was not in Jerusalem, but Nablus.’”
A short year later, in October 2015, the Times had joined the revisionist Palestinian version of events, stating: “The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitely answered, is whether the 37-acre [15-hectare] site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and al-Aqsa Mosque, was also the location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.”
Within a few days, the newspaper responded to feedback by changing the text to “The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is where on the 37-acre [15-hectare] site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.”
This original publication, though, allows us to see what was universally believed until it was convenient for propaganda purposes to erase the historical evidence and attempt to destroy the archaeological remains of the temples now under the Muslim Waqf control.
