Over the last century and a half, diggers have discovered a plethora of artifacts, structures, texts, and other ancient relics of Israelites putting together and conducting a civilization just to undermine the later, more legitimate claim that Muslims have to Palestine. The results were so convincing, in fact, that other ancient peoples took for granted that the Israelites - later known as Jews - were actually connected to the land they inhabited.
The result in modern times, say the scholars, is that millions of Jews have "returned" to Palestine with claim based largely on that ancient conspiracy, as if all the artifacts, structures, texts, and other evidence of Jewish civilization actually represents a civilization that predates the arrival of Palestinians.
"I cannot help but admire the ingenuity of it all," says Bir Zeit University archaeologist Dahab Diggr. "In order to undermine the future entity of Palestine, Jews of the second millennium BCE and onward developed a language, culture, political structure, religion, agriculture, commerce, towns, cities, and even armies. The clever ruse made it seem even to contemporary observers as if those Jews had developed an actual civilization, when in fact the whole time it was all just a conspiracy to deprive Palestinians of the pedigree necessary to make an exclusive claim to the land."
As an example, Diggr cited the use of the names "Israel" and "Judea" in inscriptions, documents, and texts long before the emergence of "Palestine" as the term of choice in the second century of the Common Era. "Given the prior use of the Jewish terms, one might assume that Jews were in Palestine before Palestinians. We always have to be on guard for such phenomena."
He also pointed to the almost exclusive use of Hebrew names for places in Palestine before the arrival of Islam 1300 years ago. "The fact that even the Arabic place names appear to be mere translations or corruptions of 'earlier' Hebrew names was a masterstroke," concedes Diggr. "By taking the future Arabic names, giving them a meaningful Hebrew version, and applying them for more than a thousand years before Arabic became current, the Jews make it seem natural that they have some connection to Palestine."
The effort has been so convincing, say scholars, that not only do most people believe Jews had a civilization in ancient Palestine, but even Jews themselves have forgotten it was all a fraud, and maintain the lore, traditions, and liturgy of longing for a "return" to "Jerusalem" and "Zion," ideas nefariously developed several centuries before the Common Era as a way to establish a spurious prior claim to the later, legitimate Palestinian one.
"I'm sure some of the Jewish leaders in their inner circle of Elders still know it's all a put-up job," says Middle East scholar Reza Stinq. "But the rank-and-file probably has no idea their whole history is fake, so they go on sincerely yearning, and in many cases actually implementing, a 'restoration' of 'ancient' Jewish settlement in Palestine."
"It's a difficult perception to defeat," he notes. "Even Muhammad seems to have accepted it."