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Politics, archaeology collide in Jerusalem excavation

— Photo: AP

The City of David, near Jerusalem’s Old City: a subterranean water tunnel hewed by Judean King Hezekiah 2,700 years ago.

JERUSALEM: Underneath the homes and ragged streets of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan lie the remnants of a glorious Jewish past: coins, seals, a water tunnel hewn by a Judean King 2,700 years ago, a road that led to a Biblical Temple.

But archaeology is hard-wired into the politics of modern-day Arab-Israeli strife, and new digs to unearth more of this past are cutting to the heart of the charged argument over who owns the ancient city of Jerusalem today.

Israel says it’s reconnecting with its ancient heritage. Palestinians contend the archaeology is a political weapon to undermine their own links to Jerusalem.

Lying on a densely populated slope outside the walled Old City, the area is known to Israelis as the City of David, named for the legendary monarch who ruled a Jewish kingdom from this spot 3,000 years ago. It is the kernel from which Jerusalem grew. But Silwan is in East Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in 1967 and which Palestinians claim for the capital of a future state.

The organisation funding the digs, the Elad Foundation, is associated with the religious settlement movement and is committed to preventing Israel from ever ceding the area in a peace deal. At the same time, the City of David digs have expanded through the neighbourhood, carried out by respected Israeli government archaeologists with funding from Elad.

Fakhri Abu Diab, a Palestinian activist in the neighbourhood, said the Elad Foundation has made it clear that he and his neighbours are in the way.

“They want the land without the people,” he said.

More than 50 metres under Silwan on a recent afternoon, a visitor walked for half an hour in darkness and knee-deep water through Hezekiah’s tunnel.

The Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles recount the tunnel’s origins: Hezekiah, King of Judea, dug it to channel water inside the city walls ahead of a siege by Assyrian armies. Measuring 530 metres long, the tunnel was dug around 700 B.C. by two teams that started from each end and met in the middle, an engineering feat brought to life by their chisel marks, still visible on the walls, and recounted in an inscription they mounted on the wall.

The dig regularly yields important and colourful finds such as 2,500-year-old pins used to hold robes closed, and seals stamped with the names of Yehochal ben Shlemiyahu and Gemaryahu ben Shafan, two figures mentioned in the Biblical book of Jeremiah. — AP

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