Is Saudi Arabia Zion?
Is Saudi Arabia Zion? 08/07/2016 11:48 am ET | Updated 2 hours ago James Dorsey Senior fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies By James M. Dorsey Kamal Salibi, one of the Arab world’s foremost contemporary historians, kicked up a storm when he concluded in a 1985 linguistic exegesis that Judaism’s Zion was not located in Israel but in Saudi Arabia. Israelis, Jews, Saudis, Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians found common ground at the time to denounce Mr. Salibi in stark terms. Israelis, Jews and evangelists charged that Mr. Salibi’s bombshell book, The Bible Came from Arabia, constituted an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State and undermine its historic claim to modern day Israel. Israeli historians and rabbis denounced the theory as mythology, science fiction and nonsense. Saudis, afraid that Israelis might take Mr. Salibi seriously and attempt to colonise the mountains of Sarawat, which the scholar believed was the Jordan valle