Temple Denial

Temple Denial refers to the assertion that none of the Temples in Jerusalem ever existed or were not located on the Temple Mount. Israeli writer David Hazony has described the phenomenon as "a campaign of intellectual erasure [by Palestinian leaders, writers, and scholars] ... aimed at undermining the Jewish claim to any part of the land", and compared the phenomenon to Holocaust denial.Daniel Levin calls Temple denial a "relatively new phenomenon" that "has become a central tenet of Palestinian nationalism". He stated: "The Islamic land trust is destroying Judeo-Christian ruins beneath the Temple Mount so as to deny any connection between Judaism and Christianity and Jerusalem."

Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, used the term "Temple Denial" in his 2007 book, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City.

The New York Times noted that "Temple denial, increasingly common among Palestinian leaders, also has a long history: After Israel became a state in 1948, the Waqf removed from its guidebooks all references to King Solomon's Temple, whose location at the site it had previously said was "beyond dispute.""

According to Gold and Dennis Ross, at the 2000 Camp David Summit Yasser Arafat insisted that "the Temple" existed near Nablus, not on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. However, in the recollection of Ehud Barak, Arafat specificially referred to Solomon's Temple. According to Gold, in the wake of Arafat's remark at Camp David, Temple denial "spread across the Middle East like wildfire", and even "subtly slipped into the writing of Middle-East based western reporters".

In 2005, in a book entitled From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back; The Islamic Consolidation of Jerusalem, Yitzhak Reiter describes the growing tendency of Islamic authorities to deny the existence of the Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount, characterizing it as part of a campaign to increase the status of Jerusalem and the Temple mount in Islam as part of the effort to make Jerusalem a Muslim city under Arab governance. According to Reiter, this narrative "reflects the mainstream in many Islamic communities around the world", and is promoted by "religious figures, politicians, academics and journalists".

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