Archaeology
Becomes A Curse
For Jerusalem's Palestinians
By Jonathan Cook
26 September,
2008
Countercurrents.org
From just outside Jerusalem’s
Old City walls, the simple stone and cinder-block homes of Silwan
cascade southwards into a valley known as the Holy Basin.
The Palestinian residents are used to living in the shadow of history
and religion, given dramatic physical form as the great silver dome
of the al Aqsa mosque and the looming presence of the Mount of Olives.
But of late, history has become a curse for most of Silwan’s
residents.
“We have cameras everywhere watching us night and day,”
said Jawad Siyam, 39. “Armed Israeli guards wander through our
alleys. Our open areas, the places where I played as a child, have
become no-go zones.”
The reason is the growing number of settlers who have moved into Silwan
since the early 1990s claiming a biblical right to the land. At least
50 Jewish families, comprising 250 people, have taken over Palestinian
homes dotted across Silwan and turned them into secure compounds over
which Israeli flags flutter.
Similar takeovers are occurring out of sight in other Palestinian
areas of occupied East Jerusalem. The settler organisations, backed
by private donors from abroad, hope to make a peace agreement impossible
and so ensure East Jerusalem never becomes the capital of a Palestinian
state.
But only in Silwan have the settlers defied the law so publicly, openly
recruiting an array of official Israeli bodies, from the Antiquities
Authority to the Jerusalem municipality.
Silwan’s takeover is being masterminded by a shadowy organisation
known as Elad, which unusually has been preferred over the Nature
and Parks Authority to run an important archaeological site in the
village centre.
With funding provided by secretive backers in Russia and the United
States, Elad has transformed Silwan into the “City of David”.
Even the signposts in the area are oblivious to the existence of the
Palestinian village and its tens of thousands of residents.
The heart of the City of David is an archaeological park that is being
relentlessly extended into ever more corners of Silwan.
“The settlers began by taking over homes around the site,”
said Mr Siyam, whose grandmother’s home was one of the first
to be seized in 1994 after her death. “Then they were given
the main excavation site, and built new homes in the park. And now
they are finding new sites, fencing off more land and digging under
our houses.”
Many homes in Mr Siyam’s neighbourhood have developed cracks
in the walls, he said, after excavations began last year to unearth
a drainage channel believed to be from the period of King Herod. Residents
fear their foundations have been damaged.
The dig was intended to run 600 metres underground to the walls of
Jerusalem’s Old City, but was halted by the courts in February
after it emerged that the archaeologists were digging without licences.
Nonetheless, Elad has recently begun work on other tunnels.
The organisation’s main focus is the City of David site itself,
over which it was given control in 1998 in a dubious deal with the
Parks Authority and Jerusalem municipality.
Elad has poured money into excavating the area and subcontracted Israel’s
main archaeological body, the Antiquities Authority, to oversee the
uncovering of what appears to be the original location of Jerusalem.
“This is an important site, but Elad has a very clear agenda,”
said Yonathan Mizrachi, a former archaeologist for the Antiquities
Authority. “They want to use archaeology, even bogus archaeology,
to provide cover for their political agenda of pushing Silwan’s
Palestinians out.
“What is so disturbing is that they seem to be setting the agenda
of the Antiquities Authority, too.”
Mr Mizrachi and two other archaeologists have been leading alternative
tours of the City of David since January in a bid to challenge Elad’s
claims that it has unearthed the 3,000-year-old palace of King David,
thereby making Silwan the capital of an ancient Israelite kingdom.
But the dissident archaeologists face a Herculean task. Last year,
350,000 tourists were led around the site by Elad guides. The intermittent
alternative tours are lucky to muster a dozen visitors.
“If Elad can convince people that this was once the home of
King David, then it will be easier for them to justify their takeover
of Silwan and the removal of the Palestinian population,” Mr
Mizrachi said.
The archaeologist in charge of the City of David excavations, Eilat
Mazar, has ostensibly uncovered such evidence in the form of ancient
stone walls she said belong to King David’s palace.
But Rafi Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University,
who was among those excavating the site in the late 1970s, called
the work being done under Elad’s supervision “bad science”.
Once his concerns were widely and publicly shared by archaeologists
in Israel. In the mid-1990s Elad faced a legal battle over its damaging
of ancient relics. In 1997 the Antiquities Authority cautioned against
handing the park over to Elad. And in 1998 archeologists from Hebrew
University in Jerusalem petitioned the Supreme Court over Elad’s
mismanagement of the City of David site.
However, as Elad’s control of Silwan has tightened, and the
City of David’s popularity has grown, the voices of dissent
have fallen quiet. The budget-constrained Antiquities Authority needs
Elad’s funding, and Israeli archaeologists, dependent on the
Authority for work, dare not criticise its involvement with Elad openly.
When news emerged in June that, in what the Antiquities Authority
later admitted was “a serious mishap”, dozens of skeletons
from the early Islamic period unearthed in Silwan close to the al
Aqsa mosque had been discarded without inspection, no archaeologist
would speak on the record.
Instead, it has been left mainly to international scholars, including
renowned historians and archaeologists, to launch a petition demanding
that the site be removed from Elad’s control.
Mr Mizrachi said despite the City of David site being one of the most
studied in Israel, no physical evidence shows that King David ever
used the buildings. Little more can be deduced than that the remains
date to the Canaanite period 3,000 years ago. “Even if we did
find a Hebrew inscription saying ‘Welcome to King David’s
palace’, that would not justify Elad’s political aims.
The residents of Silwan and their ancestors have been living here
for hundreds of years and their rights cannot be ignored. Every time
a Christian site is found in Israel should the Vatican be given the
land and Israelis evicted from their homes?”
Such arguments have fallen on deaf ears.
According to a series of reports in the local media, the government,
state archeologists, the Jerusalem municipality and the police have
all colluded with Elad and another settler organisation, Ateret Cohanim,
in extending the settlers’ control of Silwan.
A series of court judgments going back more than a decade have found
the settlers falsified documents to seize land and property from Palestinian
families and that they built in contravention of local planning laws.
The judgments have been ignored and the evictions gone unenforced
by the police and the municipality. The Israeli government is also
continuing to fund the security guards who keep watch over the illegal
homes.
Last month, Yossi Havillo, Jerusalem’s legal adviser, pointed
out that the municipality’s refusal to enforce a long-standing
eviction order against eight families in a settlement known as Beit
Yehonatan was likely to “arouse concern of discrimination and
of the municipality’s implementation of demolition orders against
Arabs, but not against Jews”.
He was referring in part to a decision in 2005, under pressure from
Elad, to order the demolition of 88 Palestinian homes in the Bustan
neighbourhood, just below Elad’s archaeological site. Uri Sheetrit,
the city engineer, justified the demolitions on the grounds that the
valley is liable to flooding. The orders were temporarily suspended
under international pressure.
In contrast, the municipality is still assisting in the expansion
of Silwan’s settlements. In May, it began approving a plan submitted
by Elad for a new housing complex, synagogue, kindergarten, library
and underground parking for 100 cars.
Councillors also backed the confiscation of land from nine private
Palestinian owners to create a car park for the City of David. In
July the courts overruled the decision.
In a familiar pattern, said Mr Siyam, the day the court ruling was
issued, the police raided the homes of the Palestinians who had filed
the petitions and arrested them. Similar arrests occurred earlier
in the year when residents petitioned the courts to halt the excavations
under their homes.
Meanwhile, Shuka Dorfman, the director of the Antiquities Authority,
recently told reporters that he was against “bringing politics
into archaeology”.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash
of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments
in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
This article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.