Jad Isaac and Walid Mustafa
Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), 20105, 241 pages
Dr Nassri Qumseieh, Head of Board of Directors of ARIJ, introduces this atlas with an expressed mix of joy and bitterness. Joy, because this publication will serve as a key reference to decision makers in Palestine and in the Arab world. Joy, because it conveys an important message to the international community, especially in the US and Europe, about the reality of the situation in Palestine that has been heavily distorted by Zionist narrative. Joy, because it delivers to the Arabic and Palestinian generation of young thinkers the message to embrace the history of Jerusalem and Palestine that extends over more than six thousand years. Bitterness stems from the deteriorating and tragic situation of Jerusalem which has come as a result of the Zionist expansion plan that aims at all but erasing the original features of this Arab, Palestinian city by brutally imposing the Israeli occupation on every corner of the city, faking its history, and displacing the original inhabitants, all with the aim of making Jerusalem lose its Arabic identity.
He reminds the reader that Edward Said, in his book Blaming the Victim: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, has stressed that Palestine was a homeland for a remarkable civilization many centuries before the Hebrew tribes appeared. He further emphasizes that evidence has shown that geographical Palestine over millenniums has offered ideal conditions to the numerous civilizations that have emerged in the Bilad Al-Sham in general and in Palestine in particular. The civilization of Palestine was never a property of a tribe or a kingdom, but was actually the accumulated result of numerous nations and kingdoms that have passed through and resided in this land.
The historic fact that the land of Palestine never solely belonged to Jews has been denied by the Zionist project. It has not shied away from using forged archeological and historical evidence for the promotion of Zionist political and economic ideologies. In order to promote the false claim of “a land without people, for a people without a land,” the Zionist project has, furthermore, reverted to religious argumentation, alluding to ‘the promised land.’ Many studies of the Old Testament have been undertaken with the aim of dispossessing the name Palestine of any meaning or historic value – up to the point where the Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharony stated, “The nation of Israel is the first and only that took this land as a homeland.” Furthermore, the Zionist project has utilized political and economic tools for their purpose that resulted in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. Their aims were implemented on Palestinian land in blatant disregard for Palestinian and Arabic official responses.
Very few initiatives made an effort to stand against Zionists or to make use of Palestinian historical and archeological evidences to highlight the truth that has been manipulated. Much of Palestine’s archeology has not survived Zionists. Before, during, and after the British Mandate, archeologists and scientists, mostly of western origins and Zionist ideology, have come to Palestine. They undertook their excavations led by the fallacious story of the ‘promised land,’ disregarding their scientific conscience.
The Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ) has built its endeavors on the efforts of robust research, so that geography and history can be the backbones to national efforts of insisting on Palestinian right to this land and to a free country that radiates from Jerusalem, the heart of Palestine. Based on unbiased scientific methodology, this atlas provides one step forward, tracking the history and geography of Jerusalem from the Canaanite era until today. It aims at telling the story of our role and of other civilizations in building this city and this country.
