(IsraelNN.com) Knesset Member Ibrahim Abdullah Sarsur, who heads the southern Islamic Movement inside Israel, published an official announcement Sunday according to which a nation he called the “Arab Jebusites” founded the city of Jerusalem – which he referred to using the Arabic name Al Quds – a long time before the Jews showed up there. 

The prophet Mohammed's ascent to the heavens from the Al Aqsa compound made it a central Muslim location for all times, he said. The prophecies of Islam came true in the year 638 CE, Sarsur added, when Jerusalem was captured by the Muslims and Khalifa Umar Ibn Al-Hattab received the keys to the city from the Christian Patriarch Sofronius in a public ceremony.

Sarsur added that Jerusalem was and is the great test that Allah – the Muslim name for G-d – is testing the Muslims with, and that “the Israeli occupation, which is fated to disappear as the Crusaders' and British occupations did, is different from the previous occupations because the Jews claim to have “rights of forefathers” to the land and “a false G-dly promise.” Sarsur said that actions for the “Judaization” of Jerusalem are contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention and are a serious breach of international law.
 
"We, as Muslims, along with the noble ones among the Christians... ask only that Israel take its hands off of Al Quds and the Al Aqsa Mosque, stop trampling the rights of Arabs and Muslims in the city... act to distance the extreme Jewish elements from the Al Aqsa mosque, forget about the possibility of holding Jewish prayer of any form or size in the [Temple Mount] and certainly forget about the  possibility of shared Jewish custodianship over it, because this will be a red line after which the face of the region and the world will be completely different,” he warned.

The Jebusites (Yevusim in Hebrew) are mentioned in the Bible as the nation from which King David captured Jerusalem. Nowhere in the Bible or in the work of archaeologists, historians and researchers is a connection made between them and the Arabs, who conquered Jerusalem more than 1,600 years after King David's times.