Free Stolen History: How the Palestinians and Their Allies Attack Israel's Right to Exist by Erasing Its Past by David Meir-Levi Page A

Western academics sympathetic to the Palestinian cause has been crucial in the effort to fictionalize Middle Eastern history. In his book The Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian History, 3 for instance, Keith Whitelam, a professor at Sheffield University in the UK, not only attacks the historicity of Biblical texts and the very existence of the kingdom of Israel and ancient Israelites, but also asserts that modern Israeli archaeologists have attempted to erase Palestinian history in their analyses of the material uncovered in their excavations.
    This book is significant because it is the first attempt to use Western historical methodology to validate the propagandistic assertions of Palestinian leaders; and the first attempt to ground claims of the high antiquity of the Palestinian people in archaeological and epigraphic evidence. It is worth focusing on The Invention of Ancient Israel because it summarizes the work and worldview of other scholars and thus has status as a representative text.
    The three core theses of Whitelam's book, a now oft-quoted "seminal text" for the anti-Israel academic establishment, can be summarized as follows:
    1.) Over the past century or so, Palestinian history has been intentionally silenced, stifled, choked, erased, and/or minimized by Zionist archaeologists and their supporters, and unintentionally by other Biblical scholars and historians.
    2.) Today's Palestinians are the direct descendents of the Philistines (whose name was corrupted by the Romans into "Palestinians") and other non-Israelite inhabitants of ancient Palestine, and so in fact they have the true historic claim to the Holy Land as a homeland.
    3.) Until recently, modern Biblical scholars and archaeologists have colluded (perhaps unwittingly) to create a fictitious, invented, history of Israel to justify the Israeli claim to a Jewish homeland, and to legitimize Israel's slaughter of Palestinians.
    Although they are proposed in the reasoned language of academic discourse, these ideas are actually propaganda masquerading as scholarship.
    In arguing that some of the last century's greatest Biblical scholars (many of whom are, or were, neither Jewish nor Zionist) have knowingly falsified "Palestinian history," Whitelam is talking about the intellectual giants of Ancient Near Eastern Studies: individuals such as William Foxwell Albright, Martin Noth, John Bright, G. E. Wright, Albrecht Alt, and William Dever. All of these giants of Biblical Studies were believing Christians, but none were fundamentalists who took the Bible literally. All searched the extra-Biblical corpus of ancient near eastern texts and archaeology to throw light upon the Bible and upon Israelite history, but none sought to prove Biblical history correct. None ever discussed the antiquity of the "Palestinians," because in their day the concept of a "Palestinian people" had not yet been invented.
    Whitelam has no such compunctions. He constantly refers to "indigenous" Palestinians in an effort to connect today's Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with the ancient non-Israelite peoples of that ancient geographic entity often called Palestine, which is more or less the territory of modern Israel . But he offers absolutely no evidence for this "continuum," and rigorously ignores the voluminous evidence against such a claim.
    The term "Palestine," like its fore-runners "Philistia" and "Palestina," refer in all instances of their appearance in Greek, Latin, and later texts to a vaguely defined area inhabited by a variety of different peoples and cultures. Sometimes it contained several different independent nation-states (Philistines, Israelites, Samaritans, Judeans, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, Jebusites, among others); and sometimes it was subsumed entirely within a larger empire (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ottoman). Never was there a political entity with defined