Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Elder of ZiyonThe museum says it has over 70,000 artifacts indexed, which sounds like an impressive number, until you look a little closer.
For example, about 7000 of those artifacts comes from a single person, a teacher named Nabīl ‘alqam, who would wrote individual Arabic proverbs on single pieces of paper - and donated the entire collection.
'Alqam also printed out some other folktales, like this one called "The Fart."
If you look at the oldest pieces in the collection, there are only four artifacts supposedly from before 1850.
Two of them are miscategorized. This photo of a mosque in Lod is probably from 1981, not 1081:
This wedding photo is not from 1847 as it is listed. Maybe early 1900s.
That leaves two artifacts from before 1850, both of them Latin maps.
One is a 1651 map of Biblical Canaan.
The other is a 1838 map of Palestine, showing the land divided up by the Jewish tribes.
Both of these maps feature sites from the Jewish Bible. They have no Arab place names that I can find.
The more the "Palestine Museum" puts out, the less it appears that there is anything that can be remotely called Palestinian history that existed before Zionism.
