Wow. LA Times almost gets it right.

Great Op-Ed piece in the LA Times today.

King Herod's return

How Israelis and Palestinians put their own spin on archeology to claim an ancestral homeland.

By Walter Reich, WALTER REICH is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"For Israelis, such finds are seen as an emblem of the Jews' ancient and unbroken connection with the land, going back 3,500 years, that justifies the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. For Palestinians, they're seen as a way of legitimizing Israel — the creation of which turned many of them or their forebears into refugees — and are therefore often dismissed as myth or fantasy."

What I don't agree with is the last paragraph:

"Only when each side recognizes the historical right of the other to live in the region will it be possible to begin to talk about peace and a fair reckoning on Jerusalem. And only then will it be possible to put Herod's vengeful ghost back into his haunted archeological tomb."

If the Jewish "claim" to its historical, legal, moral, religious land is accepted, then the "palestinian" have no "historical right" to Jerusalem or any part of Eretz Yisrael.

Kal V'Chomer... if the Arab/Muslim world continues its refusal to acknowledge history and fact, then there is nothing to discuss. You can't draw people to the table of they refuse to admit that the table exists.