Who Lived in Gaza Three Hundred Years Ago?
Topic: Occupation
editor@zionsake.zzn.com posting to https://israel-politics.tripod.com/blog

aliza@manhigut.org 13 Jul 2004

???????????????????????? Who Lived in Gaza Three Hundred Years Ago?
??????????????????????????????? A Report From a Desolate Country
??????????????????????????????????????????????? By Moshe Feiglin

Late one nig
ht, when driving home from a meeting, my car phone started ringing. Who
could be calling me at such a time?

The voice was very clear, and sounded like an educated person.

"Shalom, this is ___. I was given your phone number by ___. Perhaps you have a few minutes to spare?

"I'm a businessman. Most of my business is abroad so that I travel a lot throughout the
world. My hobby is old books, and I'm a frequent visitor to shops specializing in old
books, mainly in Europe. I have a large collection. About a month ago I came across a
book that immediately drew my attention."

I receive many strange phone calls. Once I received a call from the Teachers Organization,
and was asked to give a lecture about civil disobedience in a democratic
country. The lecture took place in the end, and several hundred people came, but none
of them was a teacher. The entire Jewish department of the GSS were there, as well as
quite a few eccentric peopl
e.

"I'd like you to understand", my caller continued, "that I know something about old
books. This one was written in Latin with some Hebrew and Arabic. I read all these
languages. It was written by a priest who visited this country as the envoy of one of the
European kingdoms. He spent about ten years here, three hundred years ago, from 1695
to 1705. The book is a report about what he found here."

"This monk", the person continued, "wasn't just an ordinary priest. Amongst other things
he was a qualified surveyor by profession, having a tremendous amount
of knowledge in several fields. He was very familiar with the Talmud and other Jewish
sources. He reached the ruins of ancient Jewish sites, ruins that had remained desolate
since the exile of the Jewish people, and most of which cannot be located today, and
knew how to refer each site to the sources in which it is mentioned. He drew
amazingly accurate maps (in terms of the technol
ogy of that time) and knew how to
determine the precise distances between the sites by observations of the stars. But he
does not only scientifically describe all the sites he discovered, in alphabetical order,
but also precisely documents the small population that he found in those sites. Take
Gaza, for instance. Who do you think lived in Gaza three hundred years ago? In fact
only a few dozen people lived in Gaza, most of whom were Jews, together with a few
Christians, and a single Arab family."

Now I begin to realize why this person called me. He has come across conclusive
evidence for the justification of our existence here, and he wishes to receive my aid in
publicizing it. I have already encountered many first-rate professionals in the fields of
law and history, who thought that all that was lacking in order to change the situation
here was to present the right facts. I like these people, their knowledge and, not less,
their innoc
ence.

This book will change nothing. I remember how I met with Limor Livnat. (This was
when she hoped that I would support her, and I was therefore a welcome guest. When
her hopes were disappointed I turned into a criminal, a hostile element attempting to
gain control of the party.) She expected that we would demand jobs in the Ministry of
Education. I requested one thing only - that Joan Peters' book, From Earliest Times,
that totally disproves the Palestinian fabrication, be included in the syllabus of the
Ministry of Education. We even spent several thousand shekels of Manhigut Yehudit's
budget to finance some of the costs of publishing an additional edition of the book.

The books remained untouched in our office. Instead of studying Mark Twain's book,
Travels in the Holy Land, that describes his visit to the country about a century and a
half after the priest's visit, and gives a similar description (literary instead of
scienti
fic), Yossi Sarid preferred to include in the syllabus Mahmood Darwish's
exhilarating work, Go, and Take Your Dead With You.

"This is more or less the same situation in Shechem, Hebron, and other parts of the
country", continued my caller. "The country is largely uninhabited and full of ruins of
ancient Jewish settlements. Most of the population is Jewish, there are a small number
of Christians, and virtually no Arabs. I checked in the Library of Congress and other
places and discovered that I apparently own the sole remaining copy of the book.

Someone must take this book, someone who knows Latin, a real professional. This
book must be translated and publicized."

I asked him why he doesn't approach state institutions in this matter.

It transpired that he was well aware that official Israel is seeking the "Palestinian" roots
of this country, and not its Jewish ones.

"I've been following your activities for some time. I t
hought that perhaps you can
suggest how to get this project off the ground."

Both because I wished to look at the book and because I needed to size up this person,
I quickly arranged a meeting in his home. He didn't waste time and gathered together
a few dozen of his neighbors to come to listen to a lecture that I gave in his home that
same evening. I cane to his home an hour earlier. With trembling hands I leafed
through the ancient book, opened the old maps, read the Hebrew quotations, saw the
ancient texts that he had accurately drawn, and even the Arab words in the place
where some Arabs lived. Leafing through the book is like traveling in a time machine.

This is a national treasure that should be kept in its own museum. This is a foundation
stone for all the historical research about Eretz Israel.

The day will come when the Jewish State will value such treasures, and make sure that
every Israeli child is familiar with them
. But we can't wait for the State. Someone
must take upon himself the financing of the research and publicity for this book.

Can someone hear me