Sabine Sterk: History Cannot Be Rewritten Into Existence
There is a difference between interpretation and fabrication. That line is being crossed with increasing boldness in the discourse surrounding Israel. What we are witnessing is not a healthy debate over competing narratives. It is an attempt to overwrite documented history with politically convenient fiction.
For example, the claim that Jesus was a Palestinian is not just inaccurate. It is intellectually dishonest. Jesus lived and died as a Jew in Roman Judea. He spoke within a Jewish cultural and religious framework. He observed Jewish law. He preached to Jewish audiences. There is no ambiguity here. The term “palestinian” as a national identity did not exist in his lifetime. It did not exist for centuries after. To assign him a modern political identity is not reinterpretation. It is appropriation designed to serve a contemporary agenda.
This is not an isolated distortion. It is part of a broader effort to sever the Jewish people from their historical roots in the land of Israel. The narrative that Jews are foreign colonizers collapses under the weight of evidence. Jewish presence in the land is not a matter of belief. It is documented across archaeology, literature, and external sources spanning more than three thousand years.
Jerusalem was not symbolically Jewish. It was concretely Jewish. It functioned as the political, spiritual, and cultural center of Jewish life long before the emergence of Christianity and long before the rise of Islam. This is not based solely on Jewish texts. It is confirmed by external observers, including those who were openly hostile to the Jewish people.
Even the Romans, who destroyed the Second Temple and exiled large portions of the Jewish population, acknowledged this reality. They did not conquer an abstract idea. They conquered a people rooted in a specific land with a defined capital. Attempts to minimize or deny this connection are not reinterpretations of history. They are denials of it.
The renaming of Judea to Palestina by the Roman Empire was not a neutral administrative decision. It was an act of suppression following Jewish revolts. It was meant to erase Jewish identity from the land. The name was borrowed from the Philistines, a long extinct group unrelated to the Arab populations that would arrive centuries later. To treat that imposed label as evidence of an ancient Palestinian nation is a distortion layered on top of an original act of erasure.
The Arab aka “palestinian” history does not begin in antiquity as a national identity tied to the land in the way the Jewish connection does.
Erased Names, Invented Narratives
The facts here are not complicated, but they are often avoided because they cut directly against popular political claims.
The Quran does not mention “Palestine” even once. Not as a land, not as a people, not as a nation. The term simply does not appear in the text in any form.
Jerusalem is also not mentioned by name in the Quran. There is no direct reference to the city using the name Jerusalem. The closest connection comes from a single verse, Surah Al Isra 17:1, which refers to the “farthest mosque” or Al Masjid Al Aqsa. The verse describes a night journey from Mecca to this distant المسجد, but it does not name the city. The association of that المسجد with Jerusalem comes from later Islamic tradition, not from the explicit wording of the Quran itself.
These are not minor details. They matter because they reveal how much of the modern political language surrounding the conflict is retrofitted onto ancient texts.
When modern narratives insist that Palestine is an ancient, Quranically rooted national identity, they are not citing scripture. They are projecting contemporary politics backward.
If the goal is clarity rather than propaganda, then the conclusion is straightforward. The Quran does not mention Palestine. It does not name Jerusalem. Everything beyond that is interpretation layered on top of silence.And silence, in this case, speaks volumes.
The problem arises when one history is elevated by deleting another. That is exactly what is happening. Jewish archaeological evidence is dismissed or politicized. Ancient Hebrew inscriptions are ignored. The existence of the Jewish Temple, once universally acknowledged across religious traditions, is now sometimes openly denied. This is not scholarship. It is ideological revisionism.
The consequences of this are not confined to academic debates. They shape how the conflict is understood and, more dangerously, how it is justified. If Jews are reframed as outsiders with no legitimate historical claim, then their presence becomes inherently illegitimate. From that premise, hostility can be reframed as resistance. Violence can be reframed as justice.
This is where historical distortion becomes morally consequential. It does not stay in textbooks. It spills into rhetoric, policy, and action.
The story of 1948 is another example of selective framing. It is often reduced to a narrative of unilateral dispossession, stripped of its broader context. The United Nations proposed a partition plan that would have created both a Jewish and an Arab state. Jewish leadership accepted it. Arab leadership rejected it. War followed, initiated by surrounding Arab states against the newly declared State of Israel.
Removing the context of rejection and war transforms a complex historical moment into a simplistic accusation. That simplification fuels grievance without fostering understanding.
Peace cannot be built on partial truths. It certainly cannot be built on falsehoods.
There is a persistent idea that acknowledging Jewish historical claims somehow undermines “Palestinian” rights. It does not. Recognizing one does not negate the other. The land has been home to multiple peoples across centuries. That reality demands coexistence, not erasure.
The refusal to acknowledge Jewish indigeneity is one of the most significant barriers to peace. It signals not a willingness to compromise, but a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the other side’s existence. If one side is framed as a historical accident or a colonial intrusion, then there is nothing to negotiate. There is only something to undo.
That mindset guarantees endless conflict.
A sustainable resolution requires intellectual honesty, “Palestinians” must recognize that Jews are not foreign interlopers but an ancient people with a documented and continuous connection to the land.
This is not a political concession. It is a factual acknowledgment.
History is not a battleground where facts can be reshaped at will. It is a record that constrains narratives, whether convenient or not. When that record is manipulated, the result is not empowerment. It is instability.
The current trend of historical revisionism does not bring clarity. It deepens division. It replaces complexity with slogans and substitutes evidence with ideology. That may be effective in mobilizing opinion, but it is disastrous for any serious attempt at peace.
Truth is not optional in conflicts rooted in identity. It is foundational.
You cannot build a future by denying the past. You cannot demand recognition while refusing to offer it. And you cannot achieve peace by teaching generations that the other side has no rightful place in the story.
History does not bend to politics forever. Eventually, reality asserts itself. The question is how much damage is done before that happens.
If there is to be any hope of resolution, it must begin with a simple principle. Facts matter. Not selectively. Not conditionally. Completely.
Anything less is not just misleading. It is dangerous.
