BBC pulls documentary claiming story of Jewish exodus from Jerusalem is a 'myth’

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

BBC pulls documentary claiming story of Jewish exodus from Jerusalem is a 'myth’

Israeli-born filmmaker accuses BBC of bowing to 'political naivete’ and 'subconscious political pressure’.

By JTA | May.02, 2013 | 2:01 PM | 30

An Israeli-born filmmaker is slamming the British Broadcasting Corp. for pulling his documentary on the Jewish exodus from Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Ilan Ziv said in a blog post on April 27 that the BBC exhibited "a mixture of incompetence, political naivete, conscious or subconscious political pressure and ultimately, I believe, a lack of courage of broadcasters when they are faced with the complexity of the Middle East issue and the intense emotions, fears and aggression it generates."

At issue is the documentary “Exile: A Myth Unearthed,” which theorizes that many Jews did not leave Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple, and that many modern-day Palestinians may be in part descended from those Jews. The BBC had been scheduled to show the documentary, cut and renamed "Jerusalem: an Archaeological Mystery Story," late last week before it was taken off the schedule at the last minute.

The film was screened for a week at the Jewish Film Festival in Toronto. It was shown on Canadian TV and is scheduled to be shown in France and Switzerland.

The BBC told The Guardian that it dropped the film because it did "not fit editorially" with the tone of the season, which has a theme exploring the history of archaeology.

According to the watchdog group HonestReporting, critics of the decision to drop the film have accused the BBC of succumbing to “unnamed pressure groups,” which HonestReporting says is a reference to “Jews” or “Zionists.”

Simon Plosker of HonestReporting wrote in his blog on the group's website that the BBC may have been "more concerned at upsetting anti-Israel elements by showing a film with such a heavy concentration on Jewish history in the Land of Israel."

Meanwhile, the BBC named Danny Cohen, who attended a Jewish day school in London, as its director of television. Cohen, 39, previously served as controller of the BBC 1 channel, where he oversaw its London Olympics coverage last year.

In his new position, the Oxford graduate will oversee the four main BBC channels, along with BBC Films and the BBC archive. He reportedly is a front-runner for the job of director-general of the broadcaster when the position becomes available.

Supporters of Israel and the Palestinians have roundly criticized BBC coverage of the Middle East.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/bbc-pulls-documentary-claiming-story-of-jewish-exodus-from-jerusalem-is-a-myth-1.518768

This is already common knowledge among most historians, even in Israel. But I guess someone thought it wouldn't be prudent to have the masses seeing this stuff... they might put 2 and 2 together....

[OriZ 3,157]

MOST historians?

Various anti-Israel groups argue that the Palestinians are like Israel’s “Native Americans. However, the truth of the matter is that the Jewish people are the closest thing to an indigenous people within the Holy Land, while the Palestinian Arabs ancestors sprung out from centers of empire.

Despite all of the facts proving the contrary, some anti-Israel activists have falsely compared the Palestinians to the Native Americans. For example, during this years’ Palestinian Solidarity Week at the University of Maryland at College Park, the UMD Students for Justice in Palestine hosted a lecture titled “Two Trails of Tears: From Turtle Island to Palestine.” In this lecture, the UMD Students for Justice in Palestine held a discussion on “settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, broken treaties, and racist policies as a form of systematic oppression for the Palestinian and Native American peoples.”

Unfortunately, the UMD Students for Justice in Palestine is not the only anti-Israel group to seek to compare the Palestinian cause to the Native American struggle. This type of rhetoric disregards Jewish history within the Land of Israel dating back to antiquity and is an attempt to re-write history by anti-Israel groups in order to belittle the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. This propaganda is so popular among anti-Israel groups that in one anti-Israel protest outside of Nablus, Palestinians even dressed up like Native Americans in order to make a political point. Many Native American’s find this offensive and an unethical form of cultural appropriation.

As Ryan Bellerose, a member of the Métis nation in Canada, wrote in the Metropolitan, “The Palestinians are not like us. Their fight is not our fight.” He continued, “We natives believe in bringing about change peacefully, and we refuse to be affiliated with anyone who engages in violence targeting civilians. I cannot remain silent and allow the Palestinians to gain credibility at our expense by claiming commonality with us.” He resented Palestinian claims that the Native Americans are like the Palestinians. “I cannot stand by while they trivialize our plight by tying it to theirs, which is largely self-inflicted. Our population of over 65 million was violently reduced to a mere 10 million, a slaughter unprecedented in human history. To compare that in whatever way to the Palestinians’ story is deeply offensive to me,” he explained. “The Palestinians did lose the land they claim is theirs, but they were repeatedly given the opportunity to build their state on it and to partner with the Jews — and they persistently refused peace overtures and chose war. We were never given that chance. We never made that choice.

According to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, 12 million Native Americans used to inhabit North America in 1500. They were the continent’s first original indigenous human inhabitants and some of the tribes referred to their ancestral homeland as Turtle’s Island. Yet today, after experiencing massacres, persecutions, outright racism, ethnic cleansing, systematic oppression, and having their traditional lands colonized by European settlers who refused to permit them to live beside them even if they were peaceful and adopted aspects of European culture, their population size was reduced to 237,000 in 1900.

During the infamous Trail of Tears, about 20,000 Cherokees were forcefully expelled from their homes and sent on a death march, where up to 8,000 of them perished. The Cherokee nation endured all of this suffering, despite the fact that they were very much assimilated into the society, rejected utilizing violence, and had legal documents in their possession demonstrating what land was supposed to belong to them. It was one of the darkest chapters in American history.

Despite all Palestinian propaganda points to the contrary, the Palestinians are not Israel’s “Native Americans.” In fact, the Jewish people, composed of the twelve tribes of Israel, not Muslim Palestinian Arabs, made up the majority of the population in Israel up until 135 CE, when the Jewish people through massacres, brutal oppression, persecutions, and ethnic cleansing were forcibly made into a minority within their own country. Just like the Native Americans, the fact that Jews were made into a minority within their own country does not rob them of their indigenous status nor does it imply that they abandoned their country.

In fact, Jews continued to live in Israel throughout history, regardless of which regime was in power. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates that in 1517, well before the Zionist movement existed, there were only around 300,000 people living in Eretz Yisrael, where 5,000 of them were Jewish. According to the Ottoman Turkish Census of 1893, there were 371,959 Muslims, 42,689 Christians, and about 9,000 Jews living in Israel. These statistics demonstrate that Jews were living in the Land of Israel well before Zionism and the Balfour Declaration. Muslims were never the sole inhabitants of the land like the Native Americans were in the United States.

Arab Muslims only started to arrive in Israel in the seventh century and only made up a majority of the population in Mamluk times, 1260-1560. Yet, most modern Palestinians are not even descended from Arab Muslims who arrived in the seventh century. Yoram Ettinger, writing in Israel Hayom, said, “Palestinian Arabs have not been in the area west of the Jordan River from time immemorial; no Palestinian state ever existed, no Palestinian people was ever robbed of its land and there is no basis for the Palestinian claim of return.” He asserted, “Most Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the Muslim migrants who came to the area between 1845 to 1947 from the Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Bosnia, the Caucasus, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, India, Afghanistan and Balochistan.”

On March 31, 1977, Zahir Muhsein executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization said in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.” He continued, “In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

He explained, “For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

There are even some Arab Muslims who are prepared to admit the historic truth that the Palestinians have not been in Israel for all eternity. Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian academic, wrote in his book Palestinian Identity, “There is a relatively recent tradition which argues that Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots.” He continued, “Among the manifestations of this outlook are a predilection for seeing in peoples such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Philistines the lineal ancestors of the modern Palestinians.” Khalidi cautioned against making such assertions claiming that the Palestinians are descended from such ancient peoples and argues that Palestinian national identity is relatively modern.

However, the fact that the Palestinians are not the original inhabitants of Israel nor ever lived as the sole exclusive people within the Holy Land is not the only reason why the UMD Students for Justice in Palestine and other anti-Israel groups are incorrect in their assessment. While the Native American population has shrunk from 12 million people in 1500 to 237,000 in 1900, the world’s Palestinian Arab population has grown from 660,641in 1922 to 11.2 million in 2011. Furthermore, while the Native Americans in the Trail of Terrors were forced off their ancestral homeland and sent on a death march, the Palestinians in 1948 were given the option of having their own state on part of the Jewish nation’s ancestral homeland, while the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state were to be granted equal citizenship rights.

The Palestinian Arab leadership chose war instead and approximately 750,000 Arabs fled their homes, never to return, while 160,000 Arabs refused to flee and became Israeli citizens. To date, the Palestinians have rejected every offer to have a state to call their own on part of the Jewish homeland, while Israel’s Arab population has been thriving and now represents 20 percent of the population. Given these facts, how can one refer to the Palestinian situation as settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, systematic oppression, racism and broken treaties? Ironically, unlike in the Native American situation, the only ones who have broken peace treaties are the very people who falsely claim to be Israel’s Native Americans. As Winston Churchill once stated, “A lie gets half way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.”

http://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/united-with-israel/debunking-the-palestinians-as-native-americans-myth/2013/04/29/

No people in the world today have an older claim to the Land of Israel than the Jewish people do. The Jebusites, Amorites, Canaanites, and Philistines do not exist in today’s world. According to the American archaeologist Eric Cline, writing in Jerusalem Besieged, “Historians and archaeologists have generally concluded that most if not all modern Palestinians are probably more closely related to the Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, and other countries than they are to the ancient Jebusites, Canaanites and Philistines.” He claims that all of the ancient inhabitants of the Land of Israel, except for the Jews, have been vanquished.

Nevertheless, Cline proclaimed, “Few would seriously challenge the belief that most modern Jews are descended from the ancient Hebrews.” Cline is backed up by a study that was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. After doing a detailed study titled “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” scientific research found that “Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE and have maintained continuous genetic, cultural, and religious traditions since that time, despite a series of Diasporas.” Thus, given this, it has been established that most Jews are descended from the ancient Israelites that have lived in the Land of Israel since antiquity.

One of the earliest archeological proofs for the existence of the Jewish nation in the land of Israel can be found in Egypt, where a victory monument of Pharaoh Merneptah claims that the Egyptians defeated the Israelites in about the year 1207 BCE. Inside the Israel Museum today, one can find an Aramaic inscription proving that the House of King David really existed. One can also witness within the Israel Museum a cuneiform inscription in which Assyrian King Sennecherib bragged about how he defeated the Kingdom of Judah. He proclaimed, “And Hezekiah, King of Judah, who did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and to countless small villages in their vicinity. I besieged them and conquered them.” None of these archaeological relics would have existed if there weren’t an ancient Jewish kingdom within the Land of Israel.

Indeed, in 66 BCE, Israel had a population of 3 to 4 million souls, of whom 75 percent were Jewish. Jews remained the majority of the population up until 135 CE, when Roman persecutions transformed the Jews into a minority within their own country. From that point onward, the majority of the population in Israel would comprise of Hellenistic Christians. By the seventh century, only 150,000 to 200,000 Jews continued to live in Eretz Yisrael. And by 1517, following the Black Plague and the Crusades, only 300,000 people lived in the Land of Israel, of whom 5,000 were Jews. Yet, for the first time in history, Muslims became the majority population within the country under Mamluk rule, although many more Muslims would migrate to the Holy Land throughout the late Ottoman period up until the conclusion of the British Mandate. Most modern Palestinians are descended from these recent Muslim migrants. During Ottoman times, Jews continued to live in their ancestral homeland, although significantly reduced in size.

Since the Roman expulsion Jewish prayer liturgy has been filled with references of the yearning the Jewish people to return back to their ancient homeland, and for the past 2000 years the Jewish people have prayed at least three times a day to return from their exile.

In 1948 David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, expressed the Jewish peoples indigenous claim and connection to the Land of Israel when he read the Israeli Declaration of Independence in which it is stated: “ERETZ-ISRAEL (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses.” The declaration then annoucned “the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel to be known as the State of Israel. … Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles.”

http://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/guest-blog/jews-are-indigenous-to-the-land-of-israel/2013/04/25/

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Zio mythology and Joan Peters' style Palestinian-denial propaganda are long past their expiration date among reputable historical scholars.

There is no historical evidence of a mass expulsion of Jews from Palestine by the Romans - in fact, historical evidence shows that most Jews remained in the land. Most of this core population of Palestine converted to Christianity in the centuries after Christ, and then in turn after the arrival of Islam, most became Muslim. Many other groups have also added to the gene pool as well and blended into the core population, both before and after the Hebrew Kingdoms.

And the descendants of that core population of Palestine include today's Palestinians.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

You can't claim both a mass Roman expulsion, and a continuous significant Jewish presence in Palestine. That also leaves out significant other groups, not quite Jewish, but also laying claim to the Hebrew heritage, and a lineage back to the pre-Babylonian Kingdom of Israel, even perhaps a few Samaritans, here and there.

[ready4ONE 5,400]

You can't claim both a mass Roman expulsion, and a continuous significant Jewish presence in Palestine. That also leaves out significant other groups, not quite Jewish, but also laying claim to the Hebrew heritage, and a lineage back to the pre-Babylonian Kingdom of Israel, even perhaps a few Samaritans, here and there.

But you can claim that there was a Palestine that never actually existed except as a place name?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

But you can claim that there was a Palestine that never actually existed except as a place name?

Yes. Palestine is a place that went by many names - Canaan, Samaria and Judea, and Palestine, to name a few.