In 2015 Netanyahu corrected himself after falsely claiming Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews only after he met with the former mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini during World War II
Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month in an interview with Jordan Peterson in Canada that the Arabs dispossessed and kicked out the Jews from the Land of Israel after they conquered the area in the seventh century C.E.
A number of historians Haaretz spoke with denied these claims and said Netanyahu’s claims are ’amusing’, and they misrepresent and distort history.
In an interview on Peterson’s podcast conducted two weeks ago, Netanyahu spoke about his version of the history of the Jews in the Land of Israel.
“For the first two millennia of their 3,500-year history, the Jewish people have lived in the Land of Israel, fought off conquerors, sometimes were conquered but stayed on their land,” said Netanyahu. “The loss of our land actually occurred when the Arab conquest took place in the seventh century.”
The Arabs did something that no other conqueror had done – “they actually started taking land from Jewish farmers. They brought in military colonists that took over the land and gradually over the next two centuries the Jews became a minority in our land. So it is under the Arab conquerors the Jews lost their homeland,” said Netanyahu. “The Arabs were the colonialists and the Jews were the dispossessed natives,” he added.
Throughout the interview, Netanyahu repeated the narrative that the Arabs expelled the Jews from their historic homeland, and used a number of different words to describe it, including: expelled, dispossessed, kicked out, and threw out.
Historian Dr. Milka Levy-Rubin of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, who specializes in the early Islamic period in Israel, said Netanyahu’s statements are “a mistaken and distorted picture” of history. Prof. Yehoshua Frenkel of the department of Middle Eastern history at the university of Haifa said: “His words are amusing, like a time capsule from before World War I that was forgotten on the shelf.”
Netanyahu made a number of mistakes during the interview: First, he ignored that the Jews had been exiled and suffered from foreign invasions a number of times throughout history before the Islamic conquest. “As for earlier periods, of course during the First Temple period the 10 tribes were exiled from the land, and let us not forget the Babylonian exile, too,” said Levy-Rubin.
“As for the Second Temple period and the Bar Kokhba revolt – the Romans ‘only’ destroyed the temple, burnt down Jerusalem and emptied the entire land of Judea of its Jewish residents. Moreover – they imposed a sweeping ban on Jews entering Jerusalem, a ban that was left standing until the end of the Byzantine period,” added Levy-Rubin.
She also completely rejected Netanyahu’s claims about the Islamic conquest of the land of Israel: “I am not familiar with any sources showing the exiling of Jews or others from the land during the Arab conquest or of any testimonies of such an expulsion. There is no archaeological evidence that points to destruction or devastation, [in fact] the opposite.”
Frenkel reinforced what Levy-Rubin said and explained that the victory of the Arab tribes over the Byzantines and the growth of Islam did not cause devastation. Not a single archaeological site has signs of destruction and burning, but in fact many testimonies from Eilat to the Golan Heights show continuity, he said.
“At the time, the Muslim interest was to continue and conquer and levy taxes from the local residents. At the first stage of the conquest the Muslim conquerors already preferred generous capitulation and surrender offers over fighting,” added Levy-Rubin.
Not only did the Arabs not expel the Jewish residents, but Frenkel says “the Muslims are the ones who allowed the Jews to return and live in Jerusalem, and the Jews were even [allowed to participate] in the building of the Dome of the Rock, and it seems that in the could also participate in the ritual and service there in the early stages, and they had great influence on the Muslims during the period of the conquest and for decades afterward,” said Frenkel.
Because of the agreements with the occupiers, the residents could remain in place and continue to run their lives as they had until then, “including their religious rituals – without any limitations”, said Levy-Rubin. At the same time, these agreements allowed those who wanted to leave to do so along with their property. Only in later periods, from the eighth century and on, were various regulations enforced gradually, which restricted the lives of the non-Muslim population in the public sphere.
Netanyahu also said the Arabs kept the land barren and empty, a “wasteland,” and built just a single new city – Ramle. Levy-Rubin said this claim is distorted too.
The Umayyad Caliphate (from 661 to 750 C.E.) invested a lot in the land of Israel. “First and foremost in Jerusalem – we all know the mosques on the Temple Mount, but also in a lot more places they invested in development, including in Tiberias, the Hebron Hills region, the Negev, and of the course the coastal strip where the Muslims encouraged settlement.”
Netanyahu quoted famous travelers to the Holy Land during the podcast, none less than Mark Twain, who described the land as “a vast wasteland” and “barren” before the Jews returned.
“The fact that the land [of Israel] in general was settled sparsely does not prove anything. There was a continuity of Muslim settlement since the conquest,” said Levy-Rubin. In the interview, Netanyahu attacked the Palestinians for distorting and misrepresenting history, and said it’s quite amazing that none of the facts he put forward in his books “has ever been challenged… I make an effort to be very rigorous about the facts,” he said.
Frenkel added that Netanyahu lectures without getting into or spending too much time on complex facts, but reality is much more complex and not one-dimensional.
In 2015, Netanyahu also distorted other periods of Jewish history, when he said Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews only after he met with the former mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini during World War II. After drawing criticism, Netanyahu corrected himself.
Earlier this month, Netanyahu said former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt said “over my dead body” when he was asked why he would not bomb Auschwitz during the Holocaust. In this case too, historians said he was distorting reality and proposing an alternative reality.
