No place on earth is lied about more. The Jewish tie to Jerusalem is the deepest and best-documented claim any people has to any city, three thousand years in the stone. The denial is the recent thing, invented to take it away.
Jerusalem appears in the Hebrew Bible over 600 times and in the Quran not once by name. It has been the focus of Jewish prayer, three times a day, facing this one city, for two and a half thousand years. Yet the modern argument insists Jews are foreign interlopers here and that the Temples never stood. Here is the record: the presence, the stones, the libel built to bury them, and the simple question of who actually expelled whom.
This is not a matter of faith or feeling. It is the most thoroughly excavated claim in the region, and the ground keeps confirming it.
The capital
Around 1000 BCE, King David made Jerusalem his capital; his son Solomon built the First Temple on the mount. The Babylonians destroyed it in 586 BCE; the rebuilt Second Temple, vastly expanded by Herod, stood until the Romans burned it in 70 CE. Two Temples, a thousand years of Jewish worship on that hill.
The longest presence
Through every conquest, Jews never fully left. By 1844, the first reliable count, Jews were already the largest group in the city (7,120 Jews to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians), and have been the majority since the 1860s, long before Zionism. Jerusalem has had a Jewish plurality for nearly two centuries.
The stones that answer
The Western Wall is a surviving retaining wall of Herod's Temple compound. Beside it, Robinson's Arch carried the grand staircase up to it. And the Temple Mount Sifting Project, sorting earth the Waqf dug out and dumped, has recovered First and Second Temple-period artifacts from the Mount itself, the very evidence the digging tried to erase.
Against a record this deep, the only move left is denial: insist the Temples are a myth, then accuse the Jews of plotting against the mosque that sits where the Temples stood.
A century ago, even the Waqf's own 1925 guidebook stated that the Temple Mount's identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is "beyond dispute." Today that history is openly denied for political ends: Ekrima Sabri, a former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, flatly declared there is "not the slightest evidence" of any Jewish temple there. It is denialism in the literal sense, refusing the archaeology to refuse the claim. The same move, on the Shoah →
The companion to denial is the libel that Jews are scheming to destroy the mosque. It is nearly a century old: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi-allied Mufti, spread it in the 1920s to incite the 1929 riots that murdered 133 Jews, including the ancient community of Hebron. It has been the trigger for violence ever since. The facts run the other way: when fire gutted the mosque in 1969, the arsonist was not a Jew or the State of Israel but a deranged Australian Christian, tried by Israel and found insane. The cry of "Al-Aqsa in danger" has always come before the violence, not after a real threat. More on the libel →
The charge is that Israel "Judaizes" Jerusalem and threatens its sanctity. The one time in modern history that a power ethnically cleansed the Old City and locked a people out of their holy places, it was not Israel.
1948 · Jordan takes the Old City
In the war of independence, Jordan's Arab Legion captured the Old City and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter, a community that had lived there for centuries.
1948–1967 · The desecration
Over nineteen years Jordan destroyed or desecrated 58 synagogues, blew up the historic Hurva Synagogue, and tore up some 38,000 Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, using the headstones to pave roads and latrines. It barred all Jews from the Western Wall for the entire period, breaking the 1949 armistice's promise of free access to holy sites.
1967 · Reunified, and given back
Israel took the Old City in the Six-Day War, and Jews returned to the Wall for the first time in a generation. Then came the act that answers the libel: rather than seize the Temple Mount, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan handed day-to-day control to the Islamic Waqf, and Israel guaranteed access and worship to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. The sovereign left its own holiest site in Muslim hands. Jordan still holds that custodianship →