Syro-Palestinian Archaeology - Archaeology, History and Modern Arab-Israeli Politics

Archaeology, History and Modern Arab-Israeli Politics

More information: Politics of Archaeology in Israel and Palestine

Nineteenth-century Zionism was founded on the fact that Jews had lived in the land of "Israel" for at least 3,000 years, and that the migration of European Jews was thus a return to an ancestral homeland. The role of early Zionist and then Israeli archaeology was thus to assist in creating a sense of national identity: its most wide-ranging expression in the post-World War I era was the joint project of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society and the Va‘adat Shemot (Names Committee) to rename Arab Palestine according to the template of biblical Israel, replacing all Arabic place-names with Jewish names. Today this attitude, while present in the wider Israeli community (both secular and religious), finds its most vehement expression in the settler movement, which justifies its encroachments on Palestinian lands with the argument (inter alia) that God's promise of the “Land of Israel” to Abraham, provides the Jews a “divine right” to Judea and Samaria. Israeli (and Jewish) scholar Nachman Ben-Yehuda, quoting Y. Shavit, lists the following aspects of archaeology that have been placed in the service of Zionism: (1) confirming the essence of the biblical narrative; (2) proving the continuity of Jewish settlement in Israel as well as its size; (3) “to emphasize the attitude of Jewish settlers to the land”; (4) emphasizing the practical side of life in the land; (5) providing the contemporary Jewish presence with a deep “structural-historical” meaning; and (6) “to provide the new Jewish presence with concrete symbols from the past which can be transformed into symbols of historical legitimization and presence.”

Some Palestinians have argued that they, not modern Jews, are the genuine descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the land. Some have been, in essence, offering the world a reading erasing ancient Israel from the region's history. As a practical expression of these views the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly sought to demonstrate that the Israelites had no place in Jerusalem or on the Temple Mount in either the First and Second Temple periods, with results that have alarmed serious archaeologist: for example, renovations on the Temple Mount conducted by the Islamic Religious Authority, especially in the area adjoining and underlying the El-Aqsa Mosque, have dumped debris and fill without investigating for evidence of an ancient Israelite presence, and have contributed to the bulge in the southern wall of the Temple.

The political dispute has repercussions for scholars. Keith Whitelam's "The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History" (1996), for example, argues that not only have traditional biblical scholars constructed an imaginary “ancient Israel,” (i.e., one which owes its shape to an uncritical acceptance of the bible), they and some Israeli scholars have conspired to deprive the Palestinians of their history. Whitelam goes on to point out how Israeli archaeological surveys of the West Bank are also expressions of land claims by the contemporary Israeli settlers. The Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who conducted some of these surveys, has explicitly rejected the identification of the ancient inhabitants of the land as “proto-Israelites”, but Whitelam and others maintain that he has played into the hands of the present-day right-wing settler movement. On the other side of the debate, conservative scholars have accused Whitelam and other like him who question the historicity of the Old Testament of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.