Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
11 August
WORLD ARCHEOLOGY REJECTS ISRAELI COMPLAINT
On this day in 2009, the World Archaeological Conference was in session in Ramallah. Israel complained that Israeli archaeologists had not been invited (they had) and that Palestinian names were being used for sites in Palestine, eg Haram Al Sharif instead of names Israel prefers. WAC President Claire Smith issued a statement: “Since it is difficult for Palestinian archaeologists to interact with the international community, WAC decided to bring members of the international community to Palestinian archaeologists”.
مؤتمر الآثار العالمي يرفض اعتراض اسرائيل
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2009 ، انعقد مؤتمر الأثارالعالمي ( WAC) في رام الله. اشتكت إسرائيل من أن علماء الآثار الإسرائيليين لم تتم دعوتهم (وقد تمت دعوتهم) وكذك اشتكت من استخدام الأسماء الفلسطينية لمواقع في فلسطين ، مثل الحرم الشريف بدلاً من الأسماء التي تفضلها إسرائيل. أصدر رئيس مؤتمرالأثار العالمي كلير سميث بيانًا: "نظرًا لأنه يصعب على علماء الآثار الفلسطينيين التفاعل مع المجتمع الدولي ، فقد قررت WAC إحضار أعضاء من المجتمع الدولي إلى علماء الآثار الفلسطينيين".
How Israel erases Arabic from the public landscape
The Israeli government has begun omitting the Arabic name for Jerusalem from its street signs, erasing not only the language from the Israeli consciousness, but Palestinian identity itself.
Bulldozing history: How Israel uses archaeology to entrench occupation
Heritage destruction is but one of the many mechanisms in which Israel maintains domination over the Palestinians. Accelerating with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been conducting an aggressive campaign to appropriate or destroy Palestinian heritage sites in order to support its narrative of exclusive ownership. Israel's attempts to gain total control of the Haram Al-Sharif, which continues to be under the custodianship of Jordan as an Islamic waqf, have intensified. These efforts are coming from both the government and fanatical settler groups who are hoping to destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque and build a third Jewish Temple...
In terms of archaeological practice, international law is clear: Israel is not permitted to carry out excavations at any sites in occupied territories. Yet, according to a Diakonia report, Israel has excavated 980 archaeological sites in the West Bank since 1967 and has appropriated many archaeological artefacts...
[T]he practice of carrying a bible in one hand and a trowel in the other, which began with the British colonial archaeologists, is being continued by Israel. To this end, Israel wants to manipulate the historical narrative to serve its interests in the present and to eliminate the possibilities of a Palestinian future.
Archeology demolishes the Biblical narrative
In a critical piece on Shlomo Sand's works, Daniel Lazare notes "the archaeological revolution that began to unfold in the 1980s.
"Earlier archaeologists had accepted the biblical narrative as more or less accurate, taking it for granted that a flight from Egypt had occurred, followed by a conquest of Canaan under Joshua. But then the narrative fell apart: researchers were unable to find evidence of a Hebrew presence in Egypt at any time, much less the 13th century BCE when the Exodus was most likely to have occurred. The country’s eastern frontier [with Egypt] turned out to have been especially well fortified during that period: border guards monitored the comings and goings even of ‘Shasu’ nomads.
"So why was there nothing about a mass escape of Hebrew slaves? Searches of sites where the Israelites were said to have camped during their forty years in the wilderness came up dry. So did surveys conducted elsewhere in the Sinai.
"After the 1967 war, when Israeli archeologists gained access to the West Bank, the heartland of ancient Israelite culture, they expected to find the rich cities of the Book of Joshua. But instead they found evidence only of a society impoverished by centuries of Egyptian taxation. Jericho turned out to have been poor and unfortified in the 14th century BCE and totally abandoned in the 13th, when its walls supposedly came tumbling down. The city of Ai, whose destruction is celebrated in Joshua 8, was also found to have been abandoned. The same was true for Gibeon, Kephirah, Beeroth and Kiriath Jearim, mentioned in Joshua 9:17. All were empty. Extensive land surveys revealed something even less expected: a development pattern that, beginning around 1200 BCE, was entirely self-generated. Instead of being implanted from outside, the Israelite hilltop culture had grown up entirely on its own.
Modern archeology, Lazare notes,
"showed that the Israelites, far from conquering the whole of Canaan, had taken root in one very small corner...the conquest of Canaan never occurred and that the dual monarchy of David and Solomon, supposedly the wonder of the ancient world, was a myth."
But in 1936, the atheist Ben-Gurion told the British authorities Peel Commission that the Bible was the Jewish people’s “Mandate.” It was a fake mandate.
23-minute video on Israeli archeology in the service of ethnic cleansing. (Inspiring family at 15:30 in.)