One of the things that has struck me in the past week of insanity is the level of self-deception permeating Palestinian society. That’s not to say I didn’t know about the Palestinian narrative that denies any Jewish connection to our indigenous land of Israel. But because I am a natural optimist and very much want to believe that peace would be possible under certain circumstances (no matter how unlikely) I didn’t let myself fully digest just how pervasive Palestinian rejectionism is.
But watching Palestinians riot over metal detectors at the Temple Mount and claim that there was never a Temple there at all, the only thing I could think of was this:
It isn’t just that Palestinians are willing to reject all archeological evidence of the Temple and reject all the Islamic sources that take it as an undisputed fact that the Temple was there. But the very name for Jerusalem in Arabic is مدينة بيت المقدس / Bayt al-Maqdis or The City of the Beit HaMikdash, of the Temple! Al Quds is shorthand for the Arabic word for the Beit HaMikdash and yet they continue to deny its historicity!
The Palestinians are denying the Temple’s existence in the city that they daily call the City of the Temple! This is would be like white people from Delaware insisting there were never any Delaware Indians who lived there.
If people are able to accept and promote such a ridiculously absurd rejection of reality, what chance does anyone have of getting them to compromise on anything?
There is a famous quote attributed to Johnathan Swift that says:
“You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.”
And therein lies our problem. We work so hard at grounding our arguments in facts and history but at the end of the day none of that really matters. If someone truly believes that Jews murder babies to put their blood in matzah, you’re not going to change their mind by pointing out that both murder and eating blood are against Jewish law. Similarly, if the Palestinians truly believe that no Temple existed & “Al Aqsa is in danger,” no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.
It is time we stopped acting guilty, trying so hard to explain away absurd arguments as though they were legitimate points of discussion. The Jews have come home to be sovereign in our own land once more and if we continue to act guilty by legitimizing these arguments, caving in to pressure from terrorists and preventing Jews from praying at our holiest site, no one is ever going to take us seriously, let alone make peace with us.
