PLUNDERING PALESTINE - Jerusalem Quarterly

course of the Wall. “It’s all ours,” they explained, waving their hands over the land and
what lay beneath it. 1
When the Men in Black declared “It’s all ours,” they were in violation of international
law (particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention) but nonetheless operating within the
bounds of a certain kind of Israeli legality. In an important new book, Eyal Weizman
points out that “on the same day that Arab Jerusalem and the area around it was
annexed to Israel, the Israeli government declared the archaeological and historical
sites in the West Bank, primarily those of Jewish or Israelite cultural relevance, to be
the state’s ‘national and cultural property’, amounting to de facto annexation of the
ground beneath the Occupied Territories, making it the first zone to be colonized.” 2
The manner in which Israeli law undergirds illegal activity in this colonized zone–and
the destruction of the non-renewable resource of the cultural heritage of Palestine–
concerns a number of authors in this special issue of Jerusalem Quarterly. New
opportunities for archaeological looting provided by the construction of the Wall are
carried out by agents of the Israeli state, and accompany the “matrix of control” (Jeff
Halper’s phrase) represented by the Wall. Similarly, the construction of Road 6, whose
north-south course also produces more annexation of West Bank land, was accompanied
by Israeli ‘salvage archaeology’ that yielded a range of “material objects…sherds and
ceramics and an extensive cemetery…variously attributed to periods ranging from the
Iron Age, Persian, Hellenistic and Early Roman to late Byzantine.” 3
In his article in this volume, Adel Yahya notes that about 1,500 archaeological sites are
isolated between the Wall (in its western course) and the Green Line, including over
250 ‘high potential’ sites–a tempting array indeed for Israel’s ‘salvage’ operations.
These state operations are joined on the other side of the Wall by what Adel Yahya
calls Palestinian ‘subsistence looters’, driven by poverty and enabled by the lack
of Palestinian security and enforcement. Palestinians “looting in their backyard”
are integrated into Israel’s ‘legal’ market of antiquities, where Yahya estimates they
receive perhaps 1% of the value of the objects they offer.
Like Morag Kersel in this volume, Yahya opposes the legal trade in antiquities–both
in Israel and Palestine–as a course that leads both to illegal looting and the destruction
of a cultural heritage that belongs to all. Kersel offers a carefully-considered review of
“the historical antecedents, the current practice, and the future initiatives” of cultural
heritage law and the trade in antiquities, including Ottoman, Mandate and current
Israeli legislation. While noting the inequities in the interim (Oslo) agreements,
where Palestine is obligated to safeguard archaeological sites but there is no Israeli
reciprocity, Kersel examines the Palestinian Draft Cultural and Natural Heritage Law
2003 and cautions that confirming a legal trade in antiquities may further endanger a
heritage already in peril. The Jerusalem Quarterly would welcome interventions on
this critical question from its readers.
[ 4 ] EDITORIAL Why are Those Men in Black Camping Near the Wall?