Archeology in Jerusalem: Uncovering the Past or Rewriting the Future?

Silwan is a Palestinian neighborhood just a stones throw from the Old City with clear views of the al-Aqsa mosque. It is also the home of 5000 years of history binding together the varied stories of different nations and peoples. And it is the home of the original Jerusalem, which in Biblical history is the place where King David built his capital 3,000 years ago. Today, however, it is the home of a new story: one of archeology in the name of politics and dispossession. But this isn’t a story you will hear from the “official” tours run by Elad, a right-wing settler organization that has slowly taken control of Silwan over the past twenty years. As is often the case in Israel, you have to seek out alternative sources of information to find out what is really happening. Our alternative source was aptly named the alternative archeology tour (you can visit them at http://www.alt-arch.org/), which was conducted by Rafi Greenberg, a professor of Archeology at Tel Aviv University.

We began at the City of David Visitors Center (run by Elad) where there has been much excitement and conjecture over whether the structure below the Center was once the Palace of King David, something that has been accepted by many as fact even though it has yet to pass the muster of archeological standards for such determinations. Professor Greenberg basically painted a picture of archeology at this site as focused solely on confirming what is written in the bible, with little to no interest in the history of the everyday people of that or previous periods, something of great value for understanding cultural life in ancient Jerusalem--not to mention the thousands of years before the Biblical story of David. This lack of interest in the histories of the people and cultures that lie beneath Silwan mirror a lack of interest in the people living there today, which professor Greenberg would argue is based on motivations for the future make up of greater Jerusalem.
To apply for a National Geographic grant, professor Greenberg told us an archeologist must answer the following questions on page 13 (the ethics page) of the grant proposal: how does your project affect the community? What are you doing to mitigate that effect? Have local people been involved in the decisions that will affect their environment? How will you leave the site after completing the excavation? Of course, if you answer these questions in the negative, your grant proposal will most certainly be rejected. Yet, that is what is happening in Silwan. People’s homes are being damaged because of excavations being done under them, while others are in danger of losing their homes to make room for future excavation sites and even a proposed “archeological park."

The politicization of archeology in Silwan is all done with the complicity of the Israeli government at the urging of Elad. The Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), for example, once in opposition to handing over archeological sites to settlers because of their intentions to build over them, is now Elad’s subcontractor. And although archeology is one of the main tools by which to get Palestinians to leave their homes, it is not the only means. Settlers have been using legal, buying homes for millions of dollars, quasi-legal, absentee landlord laws, and illegal means, forged documents and the like, to make room for the ever growing number of settlers living in Silwan.

Even though one could argue that most of this is technically legal according to Israeli law, where does it leave the village of Palestinians and the greater Israeli public at the end of the day? For the two weeks I have been here, the story is one of settlers wedging their way into Palestinian villages and towns in East Jerusalem and the West Bank with very little noise from Israelis, although there are a growing number of people and organizations that are speaking out. And the Israeli government remains complicit if not altogether supportive of these settlement expansions, which have been roundly rejected by the International community. Yet they continue to grow, while the peace process continues to shrink.

(The house on the top has been demolished to make room for the "archeological park," and the one on the bottom is one of many that belongs to settlers)

To get a more detailed picture of the politics of archeology in Jerusalem, please read Professor Greenberg’s article, “Contested Sites,” and for more information about Elad, go to this article in the Guardian.