At a time when the right-wing leaders of Israel are contemplating annexing further parts of the Palestinian occupied territories, a referenced and documented white paper has been produced and published by the prestigious Amman-based think tank Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, documenting Arab presence in Jerusalem for over three millennia and specifying the Hashemite custodianship of Christian and Muslim holy sites in the city.

“The Arabs were the first inhabitants of Palestine in history, including in Jerusalem,” the 108-page paper begins. It references archaeological records where Jerusalem is mentioned by name in the Amarna Correspondence, a series of diplomatic letters between Canaanite city-state kings and their Egyptian overlords during the 14th-century B.C. It shows pictures of cuneiform tablets that were uncovered in Egypt in the late 19th century. 

Mahdi Abdulhadi, founder and director of the Jerusalem-based PASSIA think tank, told Al-Monitor that the content of the paper represents a knowledge brief that genuinely reflects the reality in a scientific way, articulating the historic narrative that the streets and quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem have witnessed. He said, “This paper is the legal and legitimate umbrella reflecting what the Hashemites have been entrusted with since the Arab Renaissance till today in a way that ensures the national Palestinian narrative with the Arab and international one in protecting the city’s Arab identity.”

The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, an Islamic nongovernmental institute, has been headed since 2000 by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, the personal envoy and special adviser to Jordan's King Abdullah II.