Jewish history is being rewritten as 'Palestinian'.

Ancient Jewish sites are deliberately being relabeled, absorbed, and archived as "Palestinian heritage" — while the institutions overseeing the erasure accuse Israel of "occupation."

The United Nations ruled that the Cave of the Patriarchs (pictured), among the oldest living Jewish sites on earth, were mosques and Palestinian property. (photo: Dan Rosenstein/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, the grandson of Holocaust survivors.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Last week, the United Nations took the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel and filed it in the world’s records as endangered Palestinian heritage.

The danger it named was the Jews. The place is Sebastia, the hilltop city King Omri raised 3,000 years ago, and the threat entered on the record is an Israeli plan to protect the ruins. A Jewish king’s capital, filed as Palestinian, with the Jewish state named as the peril it must be saved from.

If it were the only case you could call it a blunder. It is not the only case. It is one entry on a long and growing list, and the list, taken whole, shows a pattern that ordinary politics cannot explain.

The move belongs to one faith above all, and it is older than any of the institutions now taking it up. Wherever the Islamic conquest reached it left the same signature: When it beat a people, it announced their end by raising a mosque on their holiest ruin.

The Dome of the Rock went up on the Temple Mount 13 centuries ago, on the exact stone where the Jewish Temple had stood, and it is still the first thing the eye finds over Jerusalem. Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, became a mosque the week Constantinople fell. The cathedral of Córdoba became the Great Mosque, and the basilica of Damascus became the Umayyad mosque. A sultan in Delhi built a mosque out of the smashed columns of 27 Hindu and Jain temples and carved the boast into the gate himself, and named it Quwwat-ul-Islam, the Might of Islam.

It did not matter who the conquered were — Jews, Christians, Hindus — they would all be subjected to the same move on, and the conquerors documented their intent so there could be no mistaking it. Where the liberated hold power today they are clawing the record back. India has gone to its courts one temple at a time and won. The Jews have reclaimed several of their holy sites. Though Ironically, those liberated peoples are being branded “occupiers” and “expansionist” for doing so.

Where conflict with Islam persists, the deliberate erasure of the past continues, as was the case in Iraq and Syria when ISIS destroyed relics of ancient pre-Islamic civilization, and as continues today in Judea and Samaria.

Rachel’s Tomb sits a mile from Bethlehem, prayed at by Jews for thousands of years, and an Islamic trust began calling it the Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque in the 1990s. That same trust drove bulldozers into the ancient fill of the Temple Mount in 1999 to open a new mosque, and hauled out 6,000 tons of earth with no archaeologist allowed to watch. Volunteers have since sifted half a million pieces of the First and Second Temples out of the debris it dumped, and Israel’s own Supreme Court found the trust had broken the antiquities law 35 times over.

Hours after Joseph’s Tomb was handed to Palestinian control in October 2000, a mob burned it and painted the dome green. That same month a crowd in Jericho torched a synagogue floor that had held its mosaic for fourteen centuries.

This process continues today, in 2026. Now at Bethlehem, where three ancient reservoirs cut in the time of the Hasmoneans and Herod once carried water to the Second Temple. The Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, has announced it is considering building a mosque on them. The same move, one more time.

And while the mosque is planned above, the history below is already going. An illegal quarry has ground two kilometers of that 2,000-year-old aqueduct into gravel, and the Israeli group that fought the quarry in court for fifteen years is called Regavim. Remember it.

The bricks are the old way, though, and the old way is slow. There is a faster one now, and it needs no mosque at all. Instead today you change what the record says a place is, and you do it in the rooms where the world keeps its records.

The United States, in the last month of the Obama Administration, lifted the veto that had shielded Israel for decades and let the United Nations Security Council pass Resolution 2334, which declares that every inch of Jewish presence beyond the 1967 line, the West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem alike, has no legal validity and is a flagrant violation of international law.

East Jerusalem is the Old City. The Old City is the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Jewish Quarter. One clause turned the oldest ground of Jewish civilization, in the world’s highest legal record, into occupied land where the Jews are the trespassers.

This in turn became the backbone of the case the International Criminal Court opened against Israel, and of the World Court’s ruling in 2024 that the Jewish presence beyond the line is unlawful and must end. And a quieter clause told every government on earth to treat everything past that line as no part of Israel. Europe was listening, and it built a policy on those words.

Then there is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has spent a decade rewriting the cultural record one vote at a time. It passed a resolution on Jerusalem in 2016 that named the Temple Mount only by its Muslim names and wrapped the Western Wall’s own plaza in quotation marks under a Muslim name, as though the Jewish name were the doubtful one.

The erasure was so plain that UNESCO’s own director general broke with her members to say it out loud, that the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount in Arabic) is also the Har HaBayit (Temple Mount in Hebrew) whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, and that to deny any faith’s tie to Jerusalem betrays the city.

Aerial view of the Temple Mount (photo: Andrew Shiva/Wikipedia)

Six years before, UNESCO had ruled that Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, among the oldest living Jewish sites on earth, were mosques and Palestinian property. It made the old city of Hebron a Palestinian site in danger in 2017, and the danger was Israel.

It did all of this so relentlessly that the United States and Israel finally walked out of the organization. And this July it reached Sebastia, a hill whose mosque stands on a church, on an older church, on Herod’s city, on the Israelite capital, each layer laid to bury the one beneath.

Here is where the grievance becomes an indictment, because the same world that files these votes knows exactly what it is doing, and jails people for it everywhere else. When jihadists took pickaxes to the shrines of Timbuktu, the International Criminal Court tried a man for it and sent him to prison for nine years, the first person it ever jailed for the destruction of heritage alone. The Security Council passed a resolution calling the deliberate erasure of a people’s monuments a threat to international peace.

The phrase the courts and UNESCO use for it is “cultural cleansing,” and they mean it as a crime. So the world has the law. It simply declines to apply it when the heritage is Jewish and the erasers are useful. The same act that sends a man to a cell in the Hague when it is done in Mali earns a UN listing and a European grant when it is done in Judea.

Islam is not the only group repeating its most successful playbooks in Judea and Samaria. Sixty years after the Soviet Union created the school of Zionology to legitimize the hatred of Israel (anti-Zionism), the KGB’s most successful project is repeating the its best move and joining in the erasure.

This time Russia has built a state program to record heritage sites in digital form, run by its Academy of Sciences and by the Hermitage museum under orientalist Mikhail Piotrovsky, and blessed by Putin himself. Its name is the archive of the monuments of Africa and the Islamic world. It works by signing deals with governments; it has signed one with the Palestinian Authority, and the first Jewish sites reported for its cameras are Solomon’s Pools and Jericho, the town where the Bible says Joshua crossed into the land.

In the age of AI, this is one of the most dangerous threats facing Jewish history. Whoever builds the archive writes the label: the name of the place, the centuries it is permitted to have lived through, the people it is said to belong to, and who owns the file underneath. Slide a Second Temple reservoir and the oldest city in Jewish memory into an archive of the Islamic world, and the Jews become a footnote to their own ground.

You cannot rewrite the stone. You can rewrite the caption, and the caption is what becomes part of “reliable sources.”

As George Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Were it only Islam and the remnants of the Soviet agitprop machine, that would be bad enough, but it is the European Union paying for Palestinian building across Area C, the sixty percent of the West Bank left in Israeli hands in the Oslo Accords, and it does it in the open, whole clusters of it with EU flags on the walls, put up without permits against the law and against the Oslo treaty.

Behind closed doors, its plans are even more nefarious. Its own confidential plan from 2022 writes the quiet part down: Fund the building, give Palestinians lawyers in Israeli courts, and monitor Israeli archaeological digs, which the EU calls a tool Israel uses to tighten its grip. Consider that same ground. A Palestinian quarry is grinding a Temple-era aqueduct into rubble, and the heritage crime Europe chose to watch for is Jews doing archaeology.

This May, the EU did the thing that gives it away: It sanctioned Regavim, the watchdog from the start of this story, the one that spent 15 years in court over the quarry eating the aqueduct. It froze the group’s assets and put its director under a travel ban, the same machinery the EU keeps for the world’s worst abusers of human rights. The stated crime was that Regavim lobbies to tear down illegal Palestinian building, including a school the EU had paid for.

Now set that against what the EU itself pays for. It has poured money into the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, which an Israeli court ruled is the farming arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group the EU’s own law calls a terrorist organization. Two of that group’s men, both drawing salaries from the EU-funded body, ran the cell that murdered Rina Shnerb, a 17-year-old Israeli girl, in 2019.

The Dutch government confirmed to its own parliament that its money had paid them, and nine European states went on funding the body after the ruling. It also funds B’Tselem, whose field researcher was caught on a hidden camera helping hand a Palestinian who wanted to sell land to Jews over to Palestinian Security Forces (who would punish them for the crime of selling land to a Jew).

The count of settler violence that Europe leaned on to justify sanctioning Israelis has been shown — by Regavim and by a second Israeli institute, as well as by the Israeli army’s own tally — to be inflated well past double the real figure (with some figures showing that it is inflated more than 10-fold). Nonetheless, Europe used that inflated count to build the file that sanctioned the group dedicated to exposing the pattern of investment from the European Union in the silent occupation of Judea and Samaria.

It is the same tell every time, whether the accuser sits in Brussels, at the UN, or in Moscow. The loudest voice charging the Jews with erasing and occupying and stealing is the hand on the eraser.

Jewish-Soviet writer Vasily Grossman said it plainest, a lifetime ago: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you are guilty of.”

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