Reporting on yet another remarkable archaeological finding in Jerusalem, Jonathan Tobin writes today that:

This matters because many influential archaeologists, as well as Palestinian propagandists, have dismissed Jewish ties to Jerusalem by claiming that the Kingdom of David mentioned in the Bible was an insignificant entity and that its capital in Jerusalem was nothing more than a village.

I could not agree more. But his sentence triggered a thought and a reminder of post-Zionist mirror-climbing about when the Palestinian nation was born. The exercise is, of course, aimed at disproving the argument that Palestinian national identity is largely a consequence, a response, and, therefore, a by-product of Zionism and Israel’s establishment. The argument suggests that part of the reason why Palestine never came to exist as a nation-state is because those for whom the nation-state was meant to be established did not see themselves as a distinct nation until much later in history – when it was too late.

Even if one takes the absurd claim that the birth date of Palestinian identity goes back to 1834 – as argued Joel Migdal and Baruch Kimmerling in their book, The Palestinian People: A History – the notion that “Jerusalem was nothing more than a village” would more aptly apply to Jerusalem at the time of the Palestinian nation’s “birth.” Though still prevalently populated by Arabs in the early 1800s, Jerusalem’s population counted about 2,000 – out of a whopping 8,750.  By 1870, Kimmerling and Migdal would have you believe that most Palestinians had a well-formed national consciousness. Still, most Arabs could neither read nor write. They had grown in number, surely, but so had the Jews. Jerusalem still looked like a village, albeit a larger one – 22,000 people, half of whom were Jews – and the main means of communications to propagate the messages of national identity from Jerusalem to the rest of the world were pigeons and smoke signals (plus the mail, carried by horse and donkey). The village, incidentally, was not the capital of anything.

Clearly, those who make the silly claim about Jerusalem having been a village back when, in fact, it was already an important pre-Israelite centre, don’t realize that in much more recent times, when the centrality of Jerusalem would serve their argument, Jerusalem was… well, nothing but a small village, and too full of Jews to play the magnet for nationalism that some pro-Palestinian propagandists now attribute to it.