Back in 2016, I posted about the opening of the then new $24 million Palestinian Museum, a colossal waste of money with no exhibits.
That still seems to be the case, as this recent propaganda piece – which tries to put a positive spin on it – seems to acknowledge:
As the access to the West Bank is not always easy, the flagship project of the largest Palestinian NGO Tawoon-Welfare Association, was conceived from its start in 2016 to overcome and bypass geographical and political boundaries. To do so, from the outset it developed vast digital programming, along with activities on the premises and in galleries abroad.
This meant that the pandemic reinforced its already existing global outreach.
One of its major digital platforms is Palestinian Journeys. It contains a very telling timeline of ‘palestinian history’:
Note how it begins only at the beginning of Ottoman rule in 1516. Which is strange for a people that claims to have a history going back one million years/or the Canaanites and Jebusites from over 3,500, or 5,000 or 10,000 years ago/or Philistines from 6,000 years ago. Even the Palestinian Information Center’s Timeline of Jerusalem went back as far as the Islamic Conquest!
Interestingly, despite clearly not wanting to go back too far to reveal the fact the Jews were here first, they do implicitly acknowledge that fact:
Sovereignty over Jerusalem held special significance for the Muslim empire, which early on embarked on projects to rebuild the city’s walls and to renovate the Dome of the Rock (1537-1540). At the same time, the Ottomans acknowledged Christian and Jewish rights to sites of religious significance, managing a complex arrangement of privileges and access rights to these sites through a system known as the status quo. These regulations and understandings were based on accumulated customary practice and included rights acknowledged by earlier Muslim rulers and the decisions of Muslim courts in support of these rights, as well as Christian and Jewish commitments to adhere to customary practice.
A museum with no exhibits, whose digital platform represents their history as beginning with Turkish-Ottoman Rule almost 1500 years after the destruction of the second Jewish Temple. Says it all really.
