In January, the Polish government passed a law making it a crime for anyone to “accuse, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” Even prior to the passage of this law, Warsaw had initiated a libel probe against Jan Gross, a Polish-American historian who has written extensively on the participation of Poles in the murder of Jews during and immediately after World War II. Gross comments on the current situation:

In the past few years, Palestinian leaders have added to their familiar, scurrilous claim that Israel plans to seize or destroy the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock the assertion that there never was a Jewish Temple there, and that the site had no significance to Jews before modern times. Nadav Shragai argues that, to counteract this effort to rewrite history, it is not sufficient to turn to the wealth of archaeological evidence, which might not prove persuasive to a Muslim audience. Instead, he urges Israel and its defenders to build their case on Islamic sources: