They sent me links to these two English Wikipedia articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khirbet_el-%27Ormeh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryat_Arbaya
And the Hebrew Wikipedia article
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/הרס_אתרי_מורשת_ישראלית
My gut tells me that since the only sources that any of these Wikipedia articles use regarding the sites' supposed destruction by "Palestinians", come from Zionist publications, over-representing specifically religious right-wing publications — that this is in all likelihood propaganda which is used to promote Zionist settlement of the West Bank under the pretext that these ancient sites need to be "protected" from the "barbarous" Palestinians that are apparently going around bulldozing them for no reason, because they're apparently Just That Evil™ or something... Despite one of these sites also being designated as a Palestinian Heritage Site. Uh-huh. OK.
The Zionist even acknowledged that talk about Palestinians destroying archaeological sites "is commonly used in right-wing rhetoric", but claims from interactions with supposedly liberal Zionist archaeologists on social media to have "confirmed that it's Actually that bad, it's Not Just Propaganda".
The context of this is that I had pointed out that the Barzilai Medical Center was built on top of the former Shrine of Husayn's Head, which was built in the 10th century and was blown up by the IOF in 1950 on the order of old Moshe in a deliberate attempt to erase Palestinian history and further the displacement of the Palestinian people. This Zionist was, prior to my pointing this out, apparently completely unaware of this having ever happened, despite being Very Concerned about how Hamas had launched rockets at the medical center as a very pathetic sort of "gotcha" to the people pointing out how the Zionist Entity has very thoroughly destroyed the medical infrastructure of Ghazza.
So I think this Zionist wants me to acknowledge this supposed "too" because they want me to say "both sides bad", distracting from the acts of the Zionist Entity — or in other words that Zionists make sense of their own horrific acts by saying "well, They do it Too, in fact They're Worse Actually™" — and this Zionist simply cannot stand the thought that their government is deliberately trying to erase their country's actual history in order to trick them, and so they end up using Palestinians as a scapegoat.
But Hey, whoop-whoopity-whoop, what if there is some tiny corn-piece of truth in this giant pile of horseshit? I can't find a page on decolonizepalestine.com about archaeological sites, but this is clearly a talking point that a lot of Zionist settlers are exposed to, even though it's clearly not often discussed outside of the Zionist Entity itself.
- MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]·5 months ago