West Bank archaeological plan ‘annexation by rezoning’

The government says it wants to boost tourism; critics claim it’s creating new settlements under the guise of archaeology.  

The Netanyahu government has approved a plan to greatly expand Israel’s archaeological reach across the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority and left-wing Israeli activists view it as a major step towards annexation of the occupied territory.

“It’s really not about restoration,” Ghassan Daghlas, a PA official who monitors settlement in the northern West Bank told The Jewish Independent. “It means bringing in security, the army, settlers and confiscating land. The archaeological plan is part of an overall plan to Judaize all of the West Bank.”

Echoing longstanding settler allegations, which critics claim are unsubstantiated, that the Palestinian Authority is deliberately destroying antiquity sites to erase the Jewish past, the plan is being presented as an “emergency” step to halt this. But its budget tells a different story.

As the dovish Israeli archaeological group Emek Shaveh points out, the lion’s share of the plan’s 120 million shekels ($A50m) in allocations for the coming three years is earmarked for tourism development and infrastructure as well as educational programs. Emek Shaveh director Alon Arad says the idea is to create new settlements in the form of archaeological tourist attractions.

“Instead of having five, ten or a hundred families, you can have a hundred thousand tourists come,” he says, adding that the model for this is the hugely popular City of David archaeological tourist site in occupied East Jerusalem. In so doing, the government can win over more Israelis to the settler narrative and “normalise the occupation,” Arad adds.

Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, from the anti-Arab Jewish Power party, indicated that the significance of the plan cannot be overestimated, labelling its approval last Monday as “magnificent tidings for Zionism and settlement”.

But the sense that, in addition to contravening international law, the plan may portend a major violation of the Oslo self-rule agreement with the Palestinians is being accentuated by a lack of clarity on whether or not the plan applies to parts of the West Bank known as area B. That is territory where the PA is supposed to control civil affairs, including archaeology.