Daniel Greenfield unravels the historical misconceptions that informed the demand:
“Big Ben” by kev_zilla is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
“The Jerusalem Clock is hidden in London today,” Fatah, the political movement behind the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, asserts in a post titled, “Jerusalem Stolen Clock”.
It goes on to claim that the British military ordered the clock tower dismantled. Then the “British moved the clock first to a new tower across from the municipality of Jerusalem, and transferred it to the British Museum in London, to become the famous British icon, ‘Big Ben’.”
How did Big Ben, which was built in 1859, become a Muslim clock tower from the 20th century?
There are some other slight differences between London’s Big Ben and the “stolen clock” such as the fact that Big Ben is 316 feet tall while the “Palestinian” clock tower was only 42 feet.
But the story of the “Palestinian clock” is also the story of the entire myth of “Palestine”.
When you believe that the Jerusalem of King David and King Solomon was originally yours, you can just as easily believe that London’s Big Ben was originally the property of “Palestine”.
The “Palestinian clock” is as real as “Palestine”. The myth of a “Palestinian” people propounded by Fatah which has spent decades killing over it is also the story of the “Palestinian clock”.
There’s no more of a “Palestinian” people who were dispossessed by the Jews than Big Ben is a “Palestinian” clock stolen and passed off as London’s Big Ben. Both are fake history built out of resentments and garbled stories whose context has been lost, but whose hatreds remain real.
There were never any Palestinians. When the clock was built the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire, the last Caliphate until ISIS. The caliphates had settled it with Arab Muslim clans who dominated Christian refugees fleeing Muslim persecution, along with groups of other minorities from escaped slaves to gypsies, along with the indigenous Jewish population.
The Ottomans had become obsessed with clock towers as a symbol of their empire. But the Ottomans hadn’t invented them, they had adopted them from Europe, and planted them in major cities of the empire to create a common sense of time and belonging for their subjects.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last real sultan of the empire, obsessively erected clock towers to show off how modern the Ottoman Empire was. But by then the Empire was anything but modern and Hamid’s clock tower craze was powered by his German allies. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Hamid a batch of clocks at the turn of the century which the Turks put into clock towers.
The Ottoman Empire erected some of its clock towers in Israel. These clock towers utilized the talents and funds of the indigenous Jewish and the Arab Muslim settler population. The clock tower projects in Israel began in 1901 which is also the date when Wilhelm sent Hamid a whole bunch of clocks. One of these clock towers was stuck on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate which Hamid had previously cut a hole in so that the Kaiser could enter Jerusalem in his tall plumed helmet.
H/T to Kate at SDA for the link.
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