Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas holds a leadership meeting in Ramallah, in the West Bank, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas falsely claimed in a speech on Wednesday that the first and second ancient Jewish temples were in Yemen, not Jerusalem.

“[Israel] is trying to change the historical and legal status of the Islamic and Christian holy places, especially the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque,” Abbas said while speaking at the 32nd Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council meeting in Ramallah. “[The Al-Aqsa Mosque] is the target of the most hideous plot by the occupation. They spread incitement for its destruction, and the building of a Jewish temple in its place.”

Abbas continued, making his central false claim: “In the Noble Quran – and I believe that also in other divine books – it says that the [First and Second] Temples were in Yemen,” he said. “People who like reading about religion can check it out.”

Abbas’s comments about Yemen were flagged by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which reported on and translated his remarks.

“[The Jews say:] ‘This is ours and that was ours, and this is where Solomon’s Temple was,'” Abbas added. “I am telling you, a large part of history is falsified. People who read the Quran know this.”

However, Abbas’s claims are contradicted by significant historical and archeological sources, which suggest two temples did stand in Jerusalem — one of which was destroyed in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and the second of which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans.

Eric Cline, who is a professor of classical and ancient near Eastern studies and of anthropology at The George Washington University — as well as Director of the GWU Capitol Archaeological Institute — points out further problems with the claim there were never Jewish temples in Jerusalem:

The earliest Moslem rulers appear to have called the city Iliya, a variation on its Roman name of Aelia. Over the centuries the name gradually changed to Madinat Bayt al-Maqdis (“City of the Holy House”) or simply Bayt al-Maqdis (the “Holy House”), similar to the Hebrew designation of the Temple (and sometimes the city and indeed the whole country) as Beit ha-Miqdash (the “House of the Sanctuary”). As Professor Moshe Gil has pointed out, the Arabic name Bayt al-Maqdis “was applied to the Temple Mount, to the city [of Jerusalem] as a whole, and — frequently — to all of Palestine.” Eventually the name for Jerusalem was further shortened to al-Maqdis and then finally became simply al-Quds (“the Holy,” probably borrowed from or related to the similar Hebrew ha-Qodesh), by which name the city is still known in the Arabic-speaking world today.

Nonetheless, Abbas is not the first Palestinian leader to have claimed that Jews do not have a historical connection to Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular, Cline points out. During the failed Camp David peace summit in 2000, former PLO President Yasser Arafat reportedly said, “The Temple didn’t exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus … There is nothing there [i.e., no trace of a temple on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism].” He then repeated the claim to the French President later in the year, saying, “But the ruins of the Temple don’t exist! Our studies show that these are actually Greek and Roman ruins.”

Then, in January 2001, Ekrima Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was quoted in The Jerusalem Post as saying: “There are no historical artifacts that belong to the Jews on the Temple Mount.” He also reportedly said: “There is not [even] the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place [the Temple Mount] in the past. In the whole city, there is not a single stone indicating Jewish history.”

Experts have noted these claims have the aim of painting the Jewish presence in the land of Israel as illegitimate and not connected to history. However, the first recorded reference to the people of Israel is in the Merneptah Stele, which dates back to 1209 BCE, further undermining the point Abbas and others try to make.