Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Zachary Foster

Showing posts with label Zachary Foster. Show all posts

Sunday, September 03, 2023

No, 9/11 wasn't because of US support for Israel

The increasingly deranged Zachary Foster, formerly a decent researcher, now blames 9/11 on...US support for Israel:

The US-Israel alliance was according to Al-Qaeda one of the reasons for 9/11. The US’s unconditional support for Israel is a massive security risk and endangers Americans.

The US’s support for Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing is risking American lives.

First of all, this is an unbelievably stupid take. If you follow his logic, that means that US policy should adhere to whatever Islamic terrorists demand, because if they kill any Americans, it is America's fault for not doing what they say.

With that mindset, the US should insist that all American women wear the hijab and the US censor most TV shows, because Islamists have railed against the US exporting pornography and immorality to the world.

Secondly, even Bin Laden didn't prioritize the issue of Israel in his 1998 and 1996 fatwas.

His 1998 fatwa gives three grievances against the US: US troops in Saudi Arabia, the US war in Iraq, and US support for Israel was #3 - and his "proof" is that the US was destroying Iraq in order to help Israel, somehow.

In other words, Israel was just tacked on as an afterthought in his fatwa to appeal to Islamist antisemitism. We know that because his 1996 fatwa, which was much longer, mentioned the "Zionist-Crusader Alliance" a few times but had very little to actually say about Israel's supposed crimes considering its length. The target was America: "If there are more than one duty to be carried out, then the most important one should receive priority. Clearly after Belief (Imaan) there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land [Saudi Arabia]." Bin Laden was complaining about attacks on Muslims by Israel but also "massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina."

After 9/11, Bin Laden again gave a bunch of reasons for 9/11 - and suddenly Israel was on the top of the list. OBL thought that he could attract more Muslims to join him with more antisemitism - anyone who actually believes his reasons for attacking the US in this missive really don't understand anything about Islamist terrorism. and Bin Laden added that the Jews were planning to destroy Al Aqsa. But he also complained about Bosnia, supposed US support for Russians in Chechnya and India in Kashmir, pro-US Arab governments, "stealing wealth," US "occupation" of Arab countries, and US "starvation" of 1.5 million Iraqi children due to sanctions. (Child mortality in Iraq in fact did not rise at all during the time of US sanctions, but some people apparently believe Bin Laden's letter as an accurate source of information.)

The Bin Laden letter was a recruitment letter for Muslims, not a real explanation of why he attacked the US.

Obviously, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda altogether have had an antisemitic philosophy. But no one can read the Bin Laden fatwas and think that he was obsessed with Israel - he was obsessed with the US. He would have attacked the US if Israel didn't exist.

At the same time, no one can read Zachary Foster's tweets and think he is anything but obsessed with Israel.

Not surprisingly, his claims have been getting lots of responses from 9/11 "truthers" - apparently they are now the audience he is attracting.

I try to spend my time only refuting intelligent arguments against Israel and pointing out their hidden bias and falsehoods, like the arguments given by the UN, or Amnesty or other NGOs. Their hate for Israel is masked behind sophisticated propaganda that takes effort to tease out and expose. However, this might be the last time I waste any time on Foster since his anti-Israel arguments have now descended into farce.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The dumbest anti-Israel argument yet

I've mentioned Zachary Foster before. He is an academic who used to come up with very interesting research on the history of the region. But over the past year or so, he apparently got addicted to "Likes" on Twitter for his anti-Israel posts and then went from someone who could look at things somewhat objectively into a troll.

Unlike most anti-Israel trolls, he tries to come up with novel arguments. However, perhaps because he has become blinded by his popularity among the anti-Israel idiots, he has lost any of his previous ability to think.

Last week, Foster proved this twice.

A tweet of his pointed to the Save the Children report I mentioned last week as having prompted Palestinian children to give the responses that the anti-Israel NGO wanted them to give.

Foster saw one (probably bogus) statistic in the report, and thoroughly misunderstood it. Here's his description in a newsletter he sent out to his fans:

59% of kids in Gaza are self-harming, the highest youth self-harm rate in the world.
The 2 million people of Gaza have lived through 7 wars and 16 years of blockade. An entire generation has never left the strip. Their caloric intake is controlled by the Israeli military. The amount of electricity they consume is controlled by the Israeli military. And so the children of Gaza have the highest self-harm rate in the world, 3X higher than the European average.

This is a perfect example of how an academic favors propaganda over facts.

Israel does not limit food into Gaza at all. At one point, it did, but that policy ended in 2010.

Israel does not limit the amount of electricity into Gaza. Gaza's power plant fuel problems are the result of poor infrastructure and Hamas/PA infighting.

But after repeating the lies of the anti-Israel crowd, Foster is proud of his finding that 59% of Gaza children self-harm. But even Save the Children's biased report makes no such claim.

It says "more than half of caregivers reported noticing a trend in harmful coping mechanisms among children and young people, including substance abuse, self-harm (59%) and suicidal thoughts (55%)."

Since the average caregiver (parent) in Gaza has about four children, then the 59% figure should be divided by four to give an estimate of the number of children reportedly engaging in these practices. Which means that Gaza children are probably less likely to self-harm than their European counterparts! (It is possible that more than one per family could engage in such activities, but we simply don't know from the Save the Children report.)

Foster, of course, didn't correct his statistic. That would require intellectual honesty. Instead he went through my timeline to try to find something wrong I may have tweeted. And this is where he apparently came up with a profoundly stupid argument.

I tweeted an article by Ed West pointing out that, nowadays, Jews in Western Europe have to take many more security precautions to simply go to synagogue than those in the East like Hungary.

Foster responded:

the most dangerous place in the world to be Jewish today? You guessed it ... Israel!

why is Israel putting millions and millions of Jewish lives in danger everyday? And why are you supporting a state that is endagering Jewish lives?

... why do you support endangering Jews? Are you anti-semitic?

The Forward article he linked to notes that more Jews in Israel are killed for antisemitic reasons than in any other country - because antisemitic Arab terrorists target Jews there more than they do in the US or Europe.

Again, this academic shows how his hate of Israel has destroyed his previous ability to think rationally.

The stupidity is breathtaking.

By Foster's logic, since 43,000 British civilians were killed during the Blitz in 1940-1, then Great Britain is responsible for their deaths - not Germany.

The US is responsible for the thousands murdered in the World Trade Center in 2001 - not Al Qaeda.

As I responded, "Call me old fashioned, but I think that the people who want to kill the Jews are the ones endangering the Jews."

The concept that murderers are responsible for murdering is apparently too advanced for anti-Israel Ph.Ds.

But the stupidity goes beyond that. After 1948, and more so after 1967, Arabs attacked local Jews in Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and elsewhere - forcing them to leave. Now the antisemitic Arabs attack Jews in Israel, because that's where they are, just as they attack identifiable Jews in Brooklyn and Stamford Hill.

But only idiots and anti-Israel activists could argue that Jews who miraculously still exist in Yemen or Syria are safer than those in Israel.

Successful terror attacks are not the proper metric of security for Jews. The metric is being able to walk around freely wearing a kippah or tichel or tallit without fear. The metric is being able to keep synagogues unlocked. The metric is to be able to walk around with a kippah and not expect to be berated as either Christ-killers or baby-killers or slave owners while on the bus or on campus.

Safety is a state of mind based on everyday events more than exceptional terror attacks. Normal people know this.

But highly educated anti-Israel activists look at the world through only one lens - how to twist any new pieces of information into ammunition, no matter how stupid these arguments are.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Interesting analysis of the evolution of Palestinian identity by an anti-Zionist

Zachary Foster has become a popular anti-Zionist tweeter in recent months, to the point of becoming essentially a troll more interested in scoring points than in facts. (Before he blocked the terrific Adin Haykin, they had a number of entertaining exchanges.)

Yet in the past, I have found his scholarly papers to be very interesting and illuminating, and they tell a story that does not at all support the current Palestinian lies about their history. Sadly, he seems now to be more addicted to "Likes" than to the truth.

A 2011 unpublished master's thesis by Foster also upends current Palestinian lies, especially from Rashid Khalidi.

The period 1914-1923 is what, the most influential of these writers, Rashid Khalidi, has called the “critical years,” in his widely-praised award-winning work on the subject, Palestinian Identity. He argues that as a result of the “rapid, momentous, and unsettling changes” from the outset of World War I in 1914 to roughly 1922 or 1923, “the sense of political and national identification of most politically conscious, literate and urban Palestinians underwent a sequence of major transformations. The end result was a strong and growing national identification with Palestine.” Importantly, Khalidi writes, this full-fledged national loyalty was felt by a “significant proportion of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine”and by 1922, “important elements of the country’s Arab population had already come to identify primarily with Palestine” (my emphasis). He adds that the “most common self-description of political groupings during the mandate was as Palestinian Arab.”....Although Khalidi might like to think that “no one” could possibly dispute the widespread existence of a Palestinian identity during this thirty year period, with careful attention to evidence rather than hyperbole and polemic, I believe we can gain a much more accurate understanding of precisely when, how and why a unique Palestinian identity became widespread.

Foster then demolishes Khalidi, showing that he primary identification of Palestinian Arabs before the 1936 revolt were with their cities, or with Syrians/Egyptians or Arabs in general.

Foster uses interesting analysis methods to come to this conclusion. For example, "not a single book was written on the history of Palestine out of sheer passion and love for Palestine until the 1930s. As we stated previously, this is in complete contrast to the city histories – all of which seem to have been written out of the authors devotion and love for the hometown." And then, "In 1936 and 1937, alone, eight books were published on the Palestine issue, more books than had been published in the preceding sixteen years combined. If the historical works are a guide to identity in Palestine, then, it seems that the major shift from city to Palestine did not obtain until the mid-late 1930s."

This is also fascinating (I put footnote text in parentheses):

The other major work on Palestine in the pre-1936 period is al-Barghouthi and Totah’s Tarikh Filastin, but, as previously mentioned, this was written at the behest of the British authorities to be used in the Mandatory education system. To be sure, this does not make the book irrelevant for the study of Palestinian identity. It does, however, suggest that it was not necessarily a natural idea for an Arab intellectual to pen a book on “the History of Palestine” in 1923.(Indeed, Totah wrote his Ph.D dissertation on the history of Arab education. Palestine is a totally irrelevant analytical category in his dissertation, as discussed above.) And, indeed, this point is reinforced throughout the text, such as in their etymological discussion of this place we now call Palestine. Four names are offered which have historically been used to describe the region, Filastin being merely one of them. (The other three are ‘ard kana’an, ‘ard al-mi‘ad, and al-‘ard al-muqqadisa.)

Those translate to the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land and the Holy Land. Foster doesn't mention that Khalil Totah was a Christian Quaker; while he was born in Ramallah his view of Palestine was through the lens of the Bible rather than as an Arab. It is curious that Foster doesn't spend more time talking about how religion was a more important marker of identity than being a citizen of "Palestine" as well.

As far as identifying as Palestinian, Foster notes,

While Filastin emerged as a geographical, social and political space by the 1920s, it seems that “al-‘Arab” (the Arabs) or “al-Muslimin” and “al-Masihiyyin” (the Christians) were still preferred over “al-filastiniyyin” (the Palestinians) throughout the Mandate period to describe the region’s inhabitants. Very rarely is the word Palestinian used to describe the people of the region, who instead preferred to describe themselves, their culture, their land and their people as Arab.

One reason that Foster doesn't mention is that Jews at the time enthusiastically identified as Palestinian, and Palestinian Arabs - especially the literate ones who were espousing nationalism - didn't want to be identified with the Jews.

Foster, quite reasonably, uses "loyalty" as a metric to see whether nationalism was more important to Palestinians than their hometowns or Arabness (he also seems to ignore clans, which were much more important in how Palestinian Arabs self-identified.) I'm still not convinced that most Palestinian Arabs identified as being loyal to Arab Palestine even into the 1940s. Here's why.

Foster is only looking at written texts of the time for evidence of loyalty. While literacy soared in Palestine between 1900-1948, a significant number of Palestinians, especially in rural areas and villages, were still illiterate in 1948, and there is no evidence that they identified with "Palestine." Moreover, Arab actions during the 1948 war speak louder than the printed word that Foster relies on. While many defended their own towns, practically none defended anyone else's town - they fled along with their own community members. There was no loyalty to, or sacrificing for, an Arab Palestine. The loyalty Foster sees is the written loyalty of intellectuals, a theoretical loyalty that they were trying to instill in their readers, not a reflection of actual loyalty that would make one fight for and die for one's country.

Indeed, it was the Arab intellectuals who fled the fastest in 1947-48. While the Jewish Palestine Post took heroic measures to ensure that it would put out a paper every day even during the worst fighting and when its own building was bombed, the Arab newspapers in Jaffa and elsewhere simply stopped publishing when the war reached them.

Last issue of "Falastin", blaming the British for Arabs fleeing Jaffa

So while Foster proves that loyalty to Arab Palestine was close to nonexistent before 1936, he doesn't go far enough because of his reliance on written materials as evidence of "loyalty" without keeping in mind that the loyalty espoused was more theoretical and prescriptive than real. It ignores the larger context that includes the people whose mindset hadn't changed for centuries. These were Arabs who easily moved from one part to another of the Arab world for economic reasons or because of wars, who did not accept the Western division of the region with arbitrary borders as relevant to their lives, and who thought that they could migrate to other Arab areas in 1948 as many of their ancestors migrated to Palestine - never dreaming that their fellow Arabs would refuse to accept them and treat them as brothers upon their arrival.

Their identity as Palestinians was forged largely because of their mistreatment by the rest of the Arab world and its refusal to integrate them in their own societies in the 1950s, not from the Arab intellectuals of the 1910s or 1930s who created a new nationalism as a response to Zionism. The shame of their being so badly mistreated by their own people is what fuels the desire to create theories after the fact of a pre-1948 Palestinian identity, an identity that was extraordinarily weak.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Guess who wanted to see Arabs transferred out of Palestine in the 1940s?

Zachary Foster of Princeton University tweets a "gotcha:"

This appears to be an accurate representation of what Weitz wrote in his diary in 1941. But what Foster leaves out is that David Ben Gurion rejected Weitz's desire to create a transfer committee in 1948, during the actual fighting.

Was the idea of population transfer mainstream in Zionist thought? It wouldn't be a huge surprise if there were prominent Zionists who felt that this was the best possible solution to avoid huge amounts of bloodshed. What the critics of Israel don't want people to realize is that while transfer is considered a war crime today, up until the 1940s it was considered a viable solution for many conflicts (see India/Pakistan for a classic example, as well as some 20 million Europeans transferred in the years after World War II.) Before World War II there were mass population transfers also to avoid ethnic conflict that were approved by the League of Nations.

Jews at the time are being subject to the international law of today. That is yet another form of antisemitism.

In 1944, a prominent group of people promoted the idea of population transfer of Arabs out of Palestine.

The British Labour Party.

The Palestine Post⁩, 26 April 1944⁩

If anything, based on all available evidence, the Labour Party was far more enthusiastic with the idea of population transfer of Arabs than the Zionist Jews were.

Yet no one today damns the British Labour Party as promoting ethnic cleansing in the 1940s. Only the Jews of the 1940s are tarred with that particular brush. And they still are today, despite all the evidence showing it is a lie.

Without context of how the world not only accepted but promoted all kinds of population transfers in that time period, the charge against Zionist Jews of the 1940s is deceptive at best, and a malicious slander at worst.

Which goes to show yet again that antisemitism never went away - it just morphed into new and sophisticated forms.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Smotrich is right - there were no Arabs who identified as Palestinian a century ago (update: few)

From Times of Israel:

Far-right lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday that the Palestinian people were “an invention” from the past century and that people like himself and his grandparents were the “real Palestinians.”

Speaking in Paris... Smotrich said there was “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people,” a comment that was met with applause and cheers from attendees, as seen in a video from the event posted online.

“Do you know who are the Palestinians?” asked the head of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party and Israel’s finance minister. “I’m Palestinian,” he said, also mentioning his grandmother who was born in the northern Israeli town of Metula 100 years ago, and his grandfather, a 13th-generation Jerusalemite as the “real Palestinians.”

We've discussed this topic many times before, and Smotrich is correct. Palestinian identity is a response to Zionism. Palestinian "culture" is a modern invention, and one that is explicitly political.

Here's an Ottoman map of the region from a 1913 work "Jughrafiya-i Osmani" that doesn't even say Palestine.

Even though there was no subdistrict of the Ottoman Empire known as "Palestine," one would expect every map to at least mention it if it was so important.

But there is another piece of evidence that shows that there was no historic Palestinian people - and that is their surnames.

Even among Palestinians, you can see lots of surnames that show where they originated - al-Masri from Egypt, al-Sham from Syria, al-Hindi from India, al-Mughrabi from Morocco, al-Turki, al-Yamani, and dozens of others.

Have you ever heard of anyone with the name al-Filastini?

I think I may have seen it once or twice, but it is exceedingly rare. Looking through Facebook, I see lots of people who claim that name but they all seem to be pseudonyms - I couldn't find one who listed a relative with the same name. I certainly cannot find anyone with that name in old newspapers or books.

This indicates that even as Arabs would happily take on the names of the cities or even regions they were from (like al-Haurani from the Hauran region of Syria) essentially no one ever thought of themselves as "Palestinian." Nabulsi from Nablus, sure - but Filastini? Essentially no one.

No one can rewrite the history of their family surnames. And when we see so many Arabic surnames that proudly describe where they came from, and practically none say "Filastini," you know that nearly none identified as Palestinian.

UPDATE: I should say "few." Zachary Foster has traced the beginnings of the term Palestinians to refer to the Arabs of Palestine in Arabic and he finds they began at the turn of the twentieth century, largely but not only as a response to Zionism. (h/.t Yoel)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Not only was Jerusalem never the capital of Muslim Palestine - it wasn't even a PART of what Muslims called Palestine

Here is the abstract of the academic article "Was Jerusalem Part of Palestine? The Forgotten City of Ramla, 900–1900" by Zachary J. Foster of Princeton University, published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2016:

When the Muslims conquered the Levant in the seventh century they at times changed the meaning of ‘Palestine’. They preserved its erstwhile sense as a region but also came to see Palestine as synonymous with the city of Ramla. From the tenth to the early twentieth century, dozens of Muslim exegetes, travellers and chroniclers explained that Ramla and Palestine were the same place. Others thought Palestine was a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem, or that Palestine had much more to do with Ramla than it did Jerusalem. The association had much to do with the cultural tendency in the Arab Middle East to conflate cities and regions as well as the critical role Ramla played in Palestine for much of its history: it served as the capital of the District of Palestine for more than three centuries, its economic hub for many more and its imagined geographical centre up until the early nineteenth century.

The article brings large amounts of evidence from Arab geographers and writers that what they considered "Palestine" was really Ramla or the region around it, and Jerusalem was a completely separate place.

Most cities never came to mean the same thing as their parent regions. But Ramla was not like most cities. Ramla become the seat of the most powerful empire in the world when the seventh-century Umayyad Caliph, Sulayman ‘Abd al-Malik (d.717) moved the seat of Islamic power from Damascus to Ramla. Soon enough, the city emerged as the political, geographic and economic centre of the District of Palestine during the Umayyad (661–750) and most of the Abbasid (750–1258) periods, for it lay at the crossroads of the key trading routes within the District of Palestine as well as the route connecting Damascus and Cairo. Although a massive earthquake in 1068 left some 15,000 people dead and the city in total ruins, Ramla recovered during the Crusader (1095–1291), Fatimid (909–1171) and Ayyubid (1171–1260) periods and remained the most important regional trading hub well into the Mamluk period (1250–1517). The town recorded steady population growth even after the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century. (Jerusalem, by comparison, was a small and sleepy town for most of Islamic history. It had never been located on any major trading routes and its defensive walls were destroyed by an Ayyubid ruler in the early thirteenth century and only rebuilt in the 1530s by Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’.) And so even though Ramla’s population size, economic prosperity and political relevance diminished significantly from the late sixteenth century onwards, names have never been so easy to change. And so the city continued to be associated with Palestine; indeed, it continued to be known as Palestine as late as the eighteenth century if not later.

The Persian traveller Nasr Khusraw (d.1088) was the very first Muslim to say it explicitly. ‘The city of Ramla is called Palestine in both Sham and the Maghreb’, he wrote...
Soon enough, a slew of other writers across the lands of Islam embraced the nickname. The Andalusian geographer and historian al-Bakri (d.1094) noted that Ramla was known as Palestine; the high official in Mamluk Syria Ibn Fadl Allah al-‘Umari (d.1349) claimed that Filastin was also called Ramla in his definition of the Holy Land and commented elsewhere that Sulayman bin ‘Abd al-Malik bin Marwan (d.717) founded the city (madina) of Filastin; the famous Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta (d.1369) also explained after his visit to Jerusalem and Ashkelon that he ‘traveled to the city of Ramla (madinat al-Ramla), which is Filastin (wa hiyya Filastin)’.

...But we have more explicit evidence that Palestine may have been considered a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem. Consider that the great historian al-Waqidi (d.822) consistently listed Jerusalem and the Land of Palestine separately in his account of the conquest of the Levant as if they were separate places. ...
Similarly, a number of other Muslims from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, including the famous biographer Ibn Khallikan (d.1282), Egyptian historian Ibn al-Furat (d.1405) and the Jerusalemite scholar and judge al-Din al-‘Ulaymi (d.1522), described the Kingdom of the Kurdish Ayyubid Sultan al-Mu‘azzam in the early thirteenth century as ‘expansive, from Homs to al-‘Arish, including the Islamic coasts, bilad al-Ghawr, Palestine and Jerusalem’. In this instance, there is no reason to assume that these writers meant Ramla only when they wrote Palestine, as this list included both cities and regions, leaving us with the impression that Palestine may have been considered a region based around Ramla that did not include Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was not even a part of "historic Palestine." It was Christian pilgrims who consistently associated Jerusalem as the most important city of what Christians considered Palestine, and that idea eventually influenced Muslims.

Finally, Foster notes that Palestinians consciously wanted to change history to de-emphasize Ramla and emphasize Jerusalem in the 20th century for purely political reasons:

In other cases there may have been wilful intent to delete Ramla from memory. The historian Muhammad al-Husayni wrote in his 1946 history book about Palestine that ‘we have chosen to focus on Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis) because it has been, and remains, the political and religious capital of this Arab country since the Arabs and Muslims first arrived, save for a brief moment (burha wajiza) in which it was transferred to Ramla’. Whether or not we define the three and a half centuries that Ramla was the political capital of Palestine as brief, or the seven or eight centuries that Ramla was the most important regional economic hub as ephemeral, or the millennium of the linguistic and cultural role that Ramla played in Palestine as fleeting, al-Husayni probably wanted us to believe in Jerusalem’s time-immemorial importance and Ramla’s time immemorial irrelevance. But the record suggests that Ramla was a central part of Palestine’s history...

...And Jerusalem was not.

This is not to say that Jerusalem was not considered part of the Muslim world - of course it was. But it was not part of what Muslims - even colloquially - called "Palestine" for most of the history of Islam. Jerusalem was not a place of pilgrimage and it was not treated as important by most Muslims throughout history.

The claim that Jerusalem is the "eternal capital of Palestine" is complete fiction.

Zachary J. Foster is not a Zionist by any measure - his Twitter account is quite anti-Israel and he even throws in a gratuitous and irrelevant anti-Israel comment in a footnote of this paper. Which makes his research in this area even more compelling - he has completely ripped apart any historic claims that Palestinians have for Jerusalem as their traditional capital.

UPDATE: Israellycool found this article as well.

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