Entendu que les découvertes « bibliques » justifient le vol des terres palestiniennes, toute découverte est biblique jusqu’à plus ample informé, sans qu’il soit possible de s’informer.
Located in the West Bank, permits to excavate around Qumran are not issued by the Palestinian Authority, but rather by Israel’s Civil Administration. It’s a bizarre arrangement, which critics say allows Israeli officials and religious pseudo-scientists to cooperate in raiding cultural treasures.
Archaeology in the West Bank—specifically, who has the right to dig, interpret, and store artifacts—is a wedge issue that ties into broader struggles over resource control in the occupied territory. “Are we trying to be nationalist?” Price said. “In this conflict of religious ideas that affect the political situation, you have to take a side somewhere.”
Backed by church funding, today’s biblical archaeologists are often under pressure to deliver distinctly biblical discoveries. “There’s so much riding on that,” said Raphael Greenberg, a prominent Israeli archaeologist and a public critic of the biblical approach. “People feel like if they can’t turn out that information, it defeats their national aspirations or their religious beliefs,” he said.
Though subjected to heavy criticism, the biblical archaeology movement has helped to shape the history of the region. Early writings from the American cohort prompted the creation of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British society, in 1865. This society was financed by archaeologists as well as clergy to conduct surveys and photograph Ottoman-controlled Palestine, but doubled as an intelligence gathering service for the British Army.
Today, Greenberg estimates the majority of funding for excavations in Israel and Palestine comes from religious sources. As a result, he said, researchers are plagued by financial pressure to produce religiously significant discoveries. Recent years have seen multiple claims of finding Noah’s Ark, the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant, and most recently, a fraudulent ossuary that was claimed to contain the bones of Jesus’ family.
According to Ziad al-Khatib, Bethlehem regional commander for the Palestinian Antiquities Police, “The Civil Administration works within the borders of the West Bank and moves items into the Israeli areas,” he said. “They decide which items to be kept, which to move out of the country.”
Al-Khatib describes this system as “legal theft.” Though the Hague Convention disallows moving artifacts out of occupied territory, the Civil Administration transfers huge numbers of them to storage units in disputed Israeli settlement blocs, and others to universities and museums inside Israel. The officer behind these operations works in tandem with foreign archaeologists like Price in a system that discreetly siphons thousands of artifacts out of the Palestinian territories.
The entrance to the Archaeology Department of the Civil Administration (ADCA) is an unassuming steel gate tucked between rows of flowering hedges. The compound consists of three flat-topped units arranged in a “C”, their walls painted a blinding shade of white with thick blue lines along the top. In the middle, a rock and flower garden is arranged inside a lawn of dusty synthetic turf.
The ADCA is a notoriously secretive organization whose leader, the Staff Officer for Archaeology (SOA) — an elusive man named Hananya Hizmi ...
