In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about restarting peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis. However, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered a message to the Palestinian General Council on January 14 that proved peace talks could never work.

In his speech, Abbas declared that Israel “is a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness. The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the Promised Land—call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up” (emphasis added throughout).

How do you negotiate with someone who denies your historical existence?

It is unbelievably ironic that this leader with a Ph.D. in history often rewrites that history to suit his own narrative. Thousands of years of historical and archaeological evidence clearly demonstrate the opposite of what Abbas has repeatedly claimed.

Abbas has a long track record of denying the Jews’ claim to the land of Israel. Jerusalem Post compiled a list of some of the most egregious Abbas-isms in a report on January 16. In August 2000, Abbas said, “They [the Jews] claim that 2,000 years ago they had a temple; I challenge the claim that this is so.” In August 2012, he again denied the existence of the Jewish temple, calling it “the alleged temple.”

In February that same year, he said that archaeological digs in Jerusalem were an attempt by the Zionists to “vindicate the Israeli narrative.” According to him, they have not turned up any concrete evidence of Israel’s history. In January 2014, he accused Israelis of attempting “to change Jerusalem’s landscape in every detail [in order to] invent a history” because they are the victims of “delusional myths” about Israeli ownership of the land.

He claimed in March 2016 that the Palestinians pre-dated Abraham. In May that year, he proclaimed that the Palestinians invented a “Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet more than 6,000 years ago.” As Jerusalem Post pointed out, that is a truly remarkable feat: “[T]he very word ‘Palestine’ was invented by the Romans only in the first century c.e., and there were no expressions of distinctly Palestinian Arab nationalism until the 20th century c.e.”

According to Abbas, Israel has fabricated not only its own history, but even worse, he says that reports of the Holocaust are also greatly exaggerated. In fact, the Jews were actually the ones behind killing millions of their own people! The Post continued:

In his 1983 Ph.D. dissertation-turned-book titled The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement, Abbas asserted that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders “collaborated with Hitler” and wanted the Nazis to kill Jews, because “having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiating table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over.”

The “real” number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was “much lower” than 6 million and might well have been “below 1 million,” Abbas wrote. “Many scholars have debated the figure of 6 million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.”

Asked about his Holocaust writings in a January 2013 interview with a Lebanese television station, Abbas replied: “I challenge anyone to deny the relationship between Zionism and Nazism before World War ii.”

He added that he has “70 more books that I still haven’t published” that he says would prove his claims.

There is a growing push in the Palestinian movement to deny Jewish heritage in the land of Israel. Abbas’s speeches have been dominated by this same anti-history rhetoric. He has denied Israel’s history and the Holocaust for decades, still he continues the charade that he is someone who can be relied upon in peace negotiations.

Here is my response as an archaeologist who digs in Jerusalem: Archaeological evidence of Israel’s historical claim to its own land is everywhere. You would have to be intentionally blind in order not to see it. In fact, I would even say that there is more proof than Israeli archaeologists claim! In many cases, these archaeologists actually downplay their history, because that history is also biblical history.

I am working on an archaeological dig in Jerusalem in an area that is just south of the Temple Mount. You could throw a stone and hit the Temple Mount wall. We are digging in a layer that is 2,000 years old, and what do we find? Implements, pottery and artifacts that clearly reveal a Jewish presence there.

We have found vessels made of stone in this area. In most other places, you will find pottery, not stone vessels. But 2,000 years ago, the Jews made the vessels for the temple out of stone. These vessels had to be as pure as possible, and they considered pottery too impure. So if you dig where the Bible says the temple was anciently, you will find a lot of stone vessels.

If you put a spade in the ground in Jerusalem and dig down far enough, you will find Jewish heritage! That is simply a fact. Any archaeologist who digs in this area would tell you the same, if they are honest. But Mahmoud Abbas claims that Israel’s history is made up. This is a leader who is supposed to work out peace with the Israelis—but he doesn’t even believe Israel’s documented history!

The peace talks may resume at some point, despite Abbas’s comments, because Israel is desperate to make peace. However, your Bible tells us without a doubt that peace negotiations will not work! Hosea calls the Israeli peace process “Judah’s wound.” Israel wants peace, but its peace partners want to destroy it and its history.

That same Bible proclaims thousands of years of ancient Israel’s history—the kind of history that Abbas denies. Dozens upon dozens of indisputable archaeological discoveries also back up this history. If you dig in the ground in Jerusalem, you will find evidence of Israel’s claim to the land.

Denying Israel’s history won’t make it go away. The evidence is there! We have to let the stones speak!

If you want to know more about what the Bible says about archaeology and the history of the Jews in Israel, read Gerald Flurry’s article “Archaeology Thunders: ‘Behold Your God!’”