by Chrissy Stamey
Narrative control over the Holy Land’s inhabitation currently hinges upon a false dichotomy of both recognition and silence–the ability to make invisible the Palestinian while projecting the Israeli. The public image presented by archaeological projects is not relegated to just that of Israeli tourism, although tourism and archaeological excavation often trod over the Palestinian hand-in-hand under the direction of government and private organizations. The fate of national history depends upon the spatiality–and story–that emerges through archaeology in Israel, and this story has disproportionately swayed towards the marginalization of the Palestinian out of the history and land of Israel-Palestine.
This paper will assess the historical context of archaeological research in Israel as originating from colonialism. The utilization of archaeology as a mode of creating knowledgepower directly relates to its appropriation today by the Zionist ideology in Israel (Said 2003). Additionally, archaeology is weaponized for the purpose of land dispossession and settlement colonialism–the inherent physical spatiality of archaeological excavation is key in this analysis. The governmental institute for Israeli archaeology–the Israel Antiquities Authority–has structurally incorporated capitalist logic and organization into the practice of state-funded archaeology work in Israel, allowing for private Zionist organizations to assert their influence on the direction of public archaeological work. This structural bias appears in the form of systematic corruption and the politics of recognition in historical narratives. The praxis of archaeology as a vehicle of apartheid will be analyzed through the metaphor of the root, relevant both in terms of the strangulation of Palestinian living spaces by apartheid-like architecture and via the historical genealogy of a modern Israeli national heritage. The Jewish Israeli national history is artificially constructed by the disappearance of Islamic presence from the archaeological record, and relationships between Palestinians and their national identity through shared heritage suffers because of unreliable, Zionist-influenced archaeology.
History of Archaeology in the Holy Land
Under the watchful eye of European colonialism emerged the field of biblical archaeology, a foundational realm of material culture studies that created a chance for Westerners to materialize the immaterial heritage of Judeo-Christianity. These early excavations, exclusively led by European academics, began a new intellectual field that merged both the spiritual history of Judeo-Christianity and the radical new science of archaeology, allowing for European explorers to possess the past through a knowledge supported by quantifiable fact and reasoning (Galor 2017, 5). Archaeology, unlike literature and biblical studies, revolutionized European exploration of the Holy Land through the ability to grasp, dig, and hold the ‘objective’ ancient past as opposed to an intangible conception of spiritual heritage. Early archaeological excavations of the Holy Land coincided with a colonial desire to definitively know the human world, and the focus of archaeological excavation onto areas of biblical importance continued throughout the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine. While the origins of biblical archaeology exhibited an ethically dubious exertion of colonial power over native Palestinian peoples, the findings of these 19th century European excavations did not yet translate into a canonized national heritage for Zionist Jews. Archaeology emerged as a technology of nationalist colonialism with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 (Murphy et al.), which reframed archaeological research in the Holy Land into a project of establishing a cultural history canon for the Jewish ethnostate.
In the aftermath of the Six Days War of 1967, Israel occupied multiple Palestinian-Arab regions previously determined autonomous in the original establishment of Israel: West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and Eastern Jerusalem (Murphy et al.). These territories passed between the control of Israeli and Palestinian authority throughout the 21st century before Israel definitively occupied the West Bank and Gaza again after the Second Intifada in 2002 (Murphy et al.). Official control over these regions remained legally dubious throughout the turn of the century, but nonetheless, Israel has conducted a project of settlement colonialism to bypass official ordinances of land ownership since the 1990s (Weizman 2007, 3). Archaeological excavations organized by the Israeli government have additionally been weaponized into a way of taking Palestinian land through legal land dispossessions and excavation permits (Weizman 2007, 2). Consequently, the conflict between Israel and Palestine spills into the archaeological world through the violent politics of material culture and land rights.
The Institution of Archaeology and Zionist Politics
The Israel Antiquities Authority, or IAA, is the governmental body created to protect antiquities and oversee the process of archaeological research in Israel. While organized under the direction of the Israeli government, the IAA is theoretically a politically neutral entity concerned with maintaining the integrity of archaeological research within state borders. The escalation of settlement colonialism and nationalistic sentiment in Israeli politics has weakened the integrity of this organization through the outsourcing of administrative positions and the influence of right-wing settler organizations like El-Ad.
The IAA has fallen prey to a series of capitalistic reorganizations that center the influence of private companies over the integrity of unbiased, public archaeological excavation (Kletter 2019, 59). Officially, the IAA receives funding from the Israeli government, but decisions regarding excavation location and methodology have become increasingly directed by private companies who engage in economic deals regarding tourism and cultural development of archaeological sites. One of these powerful organizations is El-Ad, a real-estate group dedicated to the creation of a Jewish national ethnostate by establishing Zionist-oriented tourist sites around archaeological regions of East Jerusalem (Peace Now 2020). El-Ad controls one of the most politically contentious archaeological parks in Jerusalem, the City of David park located in the Silwan Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem (Peace Now 2020), which has been developed for tourism against the original wishes of the IAA (Kletter 2019, 17). The IAA’s resistance to private corporation involvement in archaeological affairs has been steadily worn down throughout decades of lobbying, lawsuits, and political coercion from uber-rich, right-wing Zionist groups who convert public archaeological heritage sites into tourist centers of settler propaganda. Despite internal resistance from IAA archaeologists, El-Ad has redirected the focus of IAA excavations towards East Jerusalem Palestinian land deemed desirable for Jewish settlement, turning the public archaeology sector into a “subcontractor” to the El-Ad’s metaphorical “landlord” (Kletter 2019, 57). El-Ad has effectively demeaned the IAA–and public archaeology in Israel–to a technology of colonialism through the forced removal and development of Palestinian neighborhoods for Israeli tourist sites by way of public land dispossession. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic structure of the IAA allows for corporate corruption of public archaeology and prevents resistance from IAA archaeologists who “do not enjoy academic freedom” as civil servants–speaking against El-Ad incurs a risk of removal without pay (Kletter 2019, 164).
Institutional public archaeology, like the IAA, additionally evokes colonial power dynamics through the politics of authority recognition. Permission to excavate in the state of Israel requires a license from the government granted by the IAA; Neither foreign nor domestic entities can conduct excavations without this explicit permission (Kletter 2019, 68). This process is generally standard for all archeological excavation, but the matter of authority becomes greatly problematized when the land being excavated is under dubious legal control. According to the Hague Convention of 1993, UNESCO law, and other international law (Kletter 2019, 166), Israel is legally prohibited from conducting excavations in occupied land, which embeds deep ethical doubt into the respectability of archaeological excavation on Palestinian land. Israel shirks responsibility for this infringement by utilizing settlement colonialism to assert control over occupied Palestinian land, complicating the matter of ownership within international law. The creation of archaeological parks on Palestinian land is almost immediately followed by a new Jewish settlement built nearby, thereby carving out legally justifiable Jewish settlement ownership from the previously Palestinian landscape (Peace Now 2020). These settlements often emerge as pockets within larger Palestinian neighborhoods, further severing the cohesion of continually weakened Palestinian communities through the disruption of the neighborhood landscape. Additionally, the authority of the Israeli government to control Palestinian land can be granted by the recognition politics inherent in legal excavation permits. Demanding a license before excavation validates Israel’s authority over the land being excavated, as well as any antiquities unearthed from that site–which, naturally, become the property of the IAA, not the Palestinians who previously owned said land. Excavation permits represent the colonial power asserted over Palestinians living within Israeli occupation, who are marginalized from the project of archaeological excavation in Israel and occupied Palestinian land through material heritage and land dispossession.
Archaeology and the Suffocating Root
Archaeology is a uniquely spatial field of historic investigation that interacts with its physical environment as a feature of knowledge production. As a tool of colonial oppression, this spatiality has been abused as a means of constricting Palestinian settlements, literally ‘hollowing’ out the land beneath Palestinian feet and entrapping Palestinian communities with wire-fence barricades (Weizman 2007, 15). Archaeological excavation sites can act similarly to architecture in their ability to dominate and divide a space. Like the military barricades of Israeli borders, active excavation sites are marked as private areas restricted from outsider view, lined with fences to keep looters and civilians from contaminating the delicate process of stratigraphy. These controlled barriers are integral for maintaining the methodological security of archaeology research, but there is no coincidence that these fences mirror those which barricade Palestinian neighborhoods from Israeli ones, and vice versa. In the landscape of apartheid, metal fences dominate the landscape, and the bodies allowed to pass between restricted areas are few. The spatial nature of archaeological sites allows for excavations to act similarly to Israeli settlements in the elastic battlefield of settler colonialism, displacing Palestinians living nearby a historical site destined for development. As a result, Palestinian neighborhoods–especially within East Jerusalem–are physically constricted to the point of becoming inhospitable. To complicate the physical politics of settler colonial apartheid, Israeli barricade constriction has adapted into a “war of verticality” as well (Weizman 2007, 12). Starting in 2011, illegal excavation methods have been permitted by El-Ad and the IAA to tunnel underneath the homes of East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhoods, infringing upon the sovereignty of Palestinian private spaces and further undermining the legal protections they hold over property within Jerusalem (Kletter 2019, 176). The metaphorical roots of Palestinian neighborhoods are snipped from below ground, while the wire fences articulating archaeological sites, Palestinian neighborhoods, and Israeli settlements grow further constricting around the Palestinian residents of Silwan. The physical process of archaeological research is weaponized to support an “elastic” geography of borders that Israeli authorities use to push Palestinians off their land by slow, methodological strangulation (Weizman 2007, 6).
Through nationalist culture narratives, the roots of Israeli archaeology extend beyond the physical realm of settler colonialism and into the metaphysical world of heritage genealogy. Archaeological work directed by Zionist organizations often focus the lens of historical narrative on sites associated with Jewish cultural heritage, namely Second Temple or Herodian era sites described in the New Testament of the Bible. These organizations support the excavation and development of these Jewish culture sites to continue the project of a Jewish ethnostate supported by the narrative of a deep-past of heritage in the Holy Land. Selectively developing Jewish heritage sites allows the Israeli state to connect the modern Jewish population to the ancient Jewish communities of the Hasmonean or Herodian kingdoms of antiquity (Galor 2017, 7; Ra’ad 2019, 79), establishing the genealogical roots of a mythicized national “family tree” (Ra’ad 2019, 85-86). The goal of this project is inevitably canonizing a historical indigeneity that precedes Palestinian connections to control of the land (Ra’ad 2019, 91). The validity of the Israeli ethnostate depends upon this pre-existing claim to land ownership (Sommer 2017, 179). The IAA and El-Ad have recently come under fire for committing a kind of “selective” archaeological excavation, often entirely bypassing more recent Islamic levels of habitation in order to access the “culturally important” Christian and Jewish culture material below (Kletter 2019, 129). This selective method of excavation is entirely inconsistent with the respectable procedure of archaeological work, which requires a full and thorough excavation of all strata throughout the dig process. The IAA has additionally failed to recognize any Muslim heritage sites as protected by law in accordance with the number of Jewish and Christian sites declared “holy” and protected by law; There have been “16 declared holy sites for Jews” since 1981 (Kletter 2019, 17). Failure to protect Islamic history in archaeological research further erases Islamic history from the Israeli historical narrative. Lack of representation of Islamic history–and by consequence, Palestinian heritage–has caused Palestinians to become dispossessed from their historical ties to the land as well as their official legal ownership, resulting in Palestinian heritage roots being cut from the historical narrative of the Holy Land altogether.
What of the Palestinian Identity?
In dynamic front lines of settlement colonialism, the historical stories that either side interprets as truth can affect the reality of conflict resolution in the future. In the culture politics of nationalism, history is utilized as a pillar of national identity formation that defines the genealogical borders of in-group status. Positivist, “apolitical” interpretations of history fail to recognize the deeply seeded subjectivity of human interpretation when attempting to “objectively” narrate the history of a people or place (Kletter 2019, 24; Trouillot 1995, 6; Said 2003). Archaeology, an often-self-declared science of rational objectivity (Kletter 2019, 168), can fall victim to the myth of apolitical history narratives by assuming material culture fails to reflect human subjectivity. Yet, unlike the natural sciences, all social sciences cannot exist in a vacuum of apolitical neutrality; Every human interacts with history and material culture in ways that reflect their unique experiences of the world (Trouillot 1995, 23). Attempting to ignore the socio-politics of real human life falsely projects positivist archaeological work as a “pure”, or somehow objective, knowledge, somehow distanced from the “political” by virtue of its scientific rationality (Said 2003, 10). The falsehood of archaeology as producing a politically untainted, “pure” knowledge creates an especially harmful silence in the face of a Zionist, nationalist rhetoric dominating the political sphere of Israel (Kletter 2019, 63). The result of IAA compliance in Zionist political agenda is the suspension of belief in an alternate multicultural narrative of history, a monoethnic Israeli story deeply rooted in biblical Jewish history that further validate the dispossessions of Palestinians who are culturally identified as interlopers in the seemingly eternal national history of Jewish Israel.
In addition to bolstering the Israeli national identity, biased depictions of cultural history reflect negatively onto the self-identity of Palestinians. Archaeology connects cultural groups to their shared heritage by establishing collective histories, and modern relationships with cultural ancestors are made real by accessing the material culture of said historic peoples. Holding a shared history contributes to the creation of an ethnic community (Sommer 2017, 181), meaning that the relationship between shared ancestors and descendants is integral in shaping the identity of a cultural or ethnic group. Biased archaeology distances Palestinians from accurate representation of their Islamic Arab ancestors in the archaeological record of the Holy Land (Ra’ad 2019, 90), thereby damaging the ability for Palestinians to create a comprehensive communal history with their ancestral heritage genealogy. This genealogical inheritance does not necessarily constitute a biological relationship between past and present peoples. The important aspect of forming a modern identity is the “belief in a common descent… history, culture and religion… [to] characterize an ethnic group” (Sommer 2017, 181), thereby prioritizing a shared historical truth of belonging as the foundation of a common self-identity. This means that the stories that Israel tells about itself–and about Palestine–truly matter to the modern definition of what it means to be Israeli, or Palestinian, or a member of any nation state affiliated with the occupation conflict today. The politics of identity are woven into discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict because, at its core, the conflict concerns itself with who is “allowed” to exist as a nation state in the face of massively complex cultural history lineages. Zionists argue that one Jewish state of Israel is the solution to the national conflict; Palestinian supporters alternatively demand a two-state solution that shares the land between two independent nation-states. Negotiating a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict requires a sound understanding of what nationhood means for both Israelis and Palestinians since the creation of a nation state depends upon holding a strong national identity. Severing Palestinian connections to Palestinian cultural history is an active, conscious destabilization of a possibility for Palestinian nationhood (Ra’ad 2019, 91). This destabilization of Palestinian cultural heritage is the project of Zionist policies within the Israeli government, and public archaeology has ultimately been weaponized to erase Palestinians from the historical narratives of the Holy Land. The consequence of Palestinian erasure reverberates throughout modern politics of recognition and national identity in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Conclusion
A post-colonial analysis of archaeological work in Israel has shown that the project of archaeology has been weaponized as a tool of oppression against Palestinians from within the Israeli state. Government-funded public archaeology in Israel has been contracted by right-wing private organizations to displace and forcibly separate Palestinians from their land. The disruption of Palestinian neighborhoods by excavation sites creates unlivable conditions for Palestinian communities through the barriers of apartheid-like architecture. Influence from Zionist organizations has disproportionately skewed the authenticity of archaeological excavation by prioritizing Jewish and Christian heritage sites over Islamic ones. The erasure of Islamic features in Israeli archaeological work selectively develops the history of Jewish and Christian history as accessible to academia and tourists, further denying Palestinian communities access to their own historical roots. Palestinian history has been disregarded as a feature within the rich history of the Holy Land, and the severance of Palestinian history from modern Palestinian communities is a disruption to the cohesive national identity of Palestinians trapped within a settler colonialism regime.
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