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When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, visited Jerusalem this month, the itinerary his Israeli hosts laid on involved more archaeology than anything else. On his first day, Benjamin Netanyahu took Rubio underground to excavations near the Western Wall. On the second day, Israel’s prime minister gave his American visitor the honour of inaugurating a tunnel burrowed under a Palestinian district, along a Roman-era street nicknamed the Pilgrimage Road, in a “City of David” archaeological park established by an Israeli settler organisation.
Both events were intended to emphasise Jerusalem’s Jewish roots and its status, Netanyahu stressed, as “our eternal and undivided capital”.
While Rubio was on this tour of ancient Jerusalem, Israeli planes bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City, pulverising three decades of archaeological work.
The battle over history has long been part of the broader Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Officials from the Israel Antiquities Authority have followed Israeli troops into occupied zones in search of artefacts.
But that struggle has seldom been as conspicuous as in the past month. Rubio’s tour was designed to underline a shared Judeo-Christian history focused on Jerusalem that binds the evangelical base of the Republican party to the state of Israel.
Along with their wives, Netanyahu and Rubio were accompanied by a man who embodies that bond, Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Baptist pastor, the current US ambassador to Israel and an unapologetic advocate of Israeli territorial expansion.
He has said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and rejects the term West Bank in favour of the Israeli rightwing use of the biblical terms Judea and Samaria for the occupied territory.
By organising a tour that portrayed its foundations as entirely Jewish, Netanyahu and Huckabee were seeking to bolster the historical case for total Israeli control of Jerusalem, rather than a divided city that would emerge out of any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Netanyahu has devoted his political career to destroying any possibility of a Palestinian state and he now has allies with a controlling stake in a US administration. Its attachment to a two-state solution is erratic but many influential figures in it would support large-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
To underpin the pursuit of absolute Israel conquest as the solution to the Middle East conflict, independent archaeologists say, Netanyahu and his US backers are seeking to construct a history shorn of all the complexities of a land that has been disputed and shared over millennia.
Rubio called the “Pilgrimage Road” tunnel “perhaps one of the most important archaeological sites on the planet”. It follows the route of a first-century road leading to the site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif.
The settler group Elad, which established the City of David archaeological site on expropriated Palestinian land in the Silwan district, has presented the road as the route taken by Jews to the temple during the lifetime of Jesus Christ.
The enterprise was declared illegal by the UN as it was built on occupied territory as part of a broader effort to dispossess Palestinians, and a UN commission of inquiry last year denounced its use of archaeology for political ends.
“Despite its rich, heterogeneous history, the narrative presented at the City of David site focuses only on the site’s Jewish history … disregarding all other periods and cultures,” the commission said.
Alon Arad, the head of an independent group of archaeologists, Emek Shaveh, pointed out that the “Pilgrimage Road” tunnel had already been opened once before, in Donald Trump’s first term, by his first ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, using a sledgehammer to break down a wall in 2019.
“This whole festival now is completely bizarre,” Arad said. “The fact that the settlers and the evangelists and other rightwing Americans found each other a perfect match is not news. But this ceremony is just bad archaeology and another proof that the whole City of David archaeological park project has nothing to do with either archaeology or heritage.”
A large stone stepped structure on the site has been claimed by some archaeologists as the biblical City of David, but the claim is hotly disputed. Arad also accuses the Elad organisation of using discredited methods
“Archaeologists stopped digging in tunnels at the beginning of the 20th century,” he said. “The fact that they are excavating in tunnels under people’s houses without their permission makes this whole thing bad archaeology. Once you excavate in a tunnel, you have a very narrow perspective. This whole branding of the Pilgrimage Road is an attempt to Judaise the entire heritage of this region. It is the best example of the term ‘tunnel vision’.”
Emek Shaveh has also denounced Israel’s bombing of the archaeological warehouse in Gaza City on Sunday, when Rubio was being guided around the Western Wall.
“Since the beginning of the war, Israel has damaged or destroyed hundreds of protected cultural sites and artefacts,” the group said in a statement. “The warehouse contained approximately 30 years of archaeological work in the Gaza Strip and housed tens of thousands of items. Some were removed but many were destroyed.”
The IDF gave Palestinian archaeologists and the French-run École Biblique, which supports the site, three days to empty the warehouse before it was bombed but there was only time to remove some of the artefacts in a single convoy of trucks.
“We couldn’t go back for a second mission because of the lack of trucks and the availability of the people and mainly because of the danger, so some of the artefacts were lost,” an École Biblique official said.
The depot had been seized by Israeli forces in an offensive early last year when, the official said, employees of the Israel Antiquities Authority were allowed to inspect it, in violation of international law. On that occasion a global outcry prevented a plan to remove some of the artefacts.
Some of the objects that archaeologists managed to remove before the bombing were broken while being moved in open trucks, the only kind allowed by the Israeli military. They are now at an undisclosed location where they are open to the elements.
The Israeli military department dealing with occupied territories, Cogat, issued a statement saying it had facilitated the rescue mission, which it described as “the transfer of rare archaeological artefacts, mosaics and pottery of the Christian community in Gaza”.
In fact, the artefacts were from multiple periods, connected to multiple civilisations and faiths. “It is an odd characterisation,” Arad said. “I don’t know what the motivation of Cogat was. I can only assume that it is because Israel is still attempting to maintain its foreign relations with the Christian evangelist church in the United States.”
