‘It Comes with the Territory’: How Israel’s Archaeologists Legitimize Annexation
PALESTINE ISRAEL GAZA GENOCIDE, 14 Jul 2025
Dikla Taylor-Sheinman | +972 Magazine - TRANSCEND Media Service
Rafi Greenberg, Tel Aviv, June 2024. (Oren Ziv)
Weaponizing antiquities is part of Israel’s colonial legacy, says Rafi Greenberg, whose colleagues have largely remained silent about Gaza’s destruction.
1 Jul 2025 – On 2 Apr, the Israel Exploration Society abruptly canceled what would have been the country’s largest and most prestigious annual gathering of archaeologists. The Archaeological Congress, an annual fixture for nearly 50 years, was called off by its organizers following pressure from far-right Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu to exclude Tel Aviv University professor Raphael (Rafi) Greenberg. “I will not let the wild weeds of academia who are working to promote boycotts of their fellow archaeologists spit into the well of the heritage from which the people of Israel drink,” the minister wrote on X.
In the eyes of Eliyahu and the right-wing NGOs who agitated for Greenberg’s ousting, the professor’s most immediate offense was an open letter he penned a month prior. There, he had urged Israeli and international colleagues to boycott the “First International Conference on Archaeology and Site Conservation of Judea and Samaria” at the luxury Dan Jerusalem Hotel in the city’s eastern half — the first of its kind held in internationally-recognized occupied territory.
Though the Archaeological Congress ultimately took place online last week with Greenberg’s participation, the controversies surrounding both conferences raise deeper moral and political questions about the role of Israel’s archaeology community, as Israel deepens its assault on Palestinian cultural heritage and religious sites in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and the government moves toward annexing the West Bank — in part through the weaponization of archaeology itself.
In May, Israel’s Heritage Ministry officially commenced the excavation of Sebastia, north of Nablus in the West Bank, with plans to turn the site into the “Shomron national park” — severing the acropolis and ancient village from the Palestinian town to which it is connected.
But the more consequential development began in July 2024, when MK Amit Halevi from Netanyahu’s Likud party advanced a legislative amendment that seeks to apply Israeli antiquities laws to the West Bank. Specifically, the proposed legislation would extend the jurisdiction of Israel’s Antiquity Authority (IAA) from Israel proper to Area C of the West Bank — around 60 percent of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.
The bill represents the culmination of a five-year campaign by settler regional councils and far-right groups to portray Palestinians as an existential threat to so-called “national” (i.e. Jewish) heritage sites in the West Bank. The left-wing Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh called the legislation an “experiment at achieving annexation through antiquities.”
The IAA’s resistance to extending its reach into the West Bank may have slowed momentum, but it hasn’t derailed the larger goal. In what appears to be a strategic pivot, lawmakers in recent committee meetings proposed forming a new body under the Heritage Ministry to manage activities across the West Bank, not just in Area C. This move skirts the controversy while still aiming at the same outcome: imposing Israeli civilian law over West Bank antiquities.
Indeed, the workaround has faced considerably less blowback from the archaeological establishment. With the exception of Emek Shaveh, cofounded by Greenberg, resistance within the archaeology community to the proposed legislation has largely centered on its implications for Israeli archaeology and Israel’s international reputation.
+972 Magazine sat down with Greenberg to discuss what this latest legislation would mean for Palestinians in the West Bank — which some of the most public opposition entirely failed to mention — who are already suffering from unprecedented levels of state-backed settler violence. Among other things, we explored the fraught relationship between Israeli archaeologists and Palestinians, the “politicization” of Israeli archaeology, liberal appeals to academic freedom, and why Israeli archaeology has little to say about the destruction of Gaza.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To start, do you view the postponement of the Archaeological Congress in April, after the heritage minister agitated to block your participation, as a positive development or a negative one?
I have had a complicated relationship with the archaeological community for decades because I’ve been very critical of what I call the colonial heritage of Israeli archaeology. But this conference was organized by a younger set of archaeologists. It was actually a chance to talk — at least for a few minutes — about some sensitive issues in a fully archaeological setting.
I was going to talk about what [Greek archaeologist and Brown University professor] Yanis Hamilakis and I call the “archaeologization” of Greece and Israel. These are two countries that have been valued by the West since the 18th and 19th centuries almost entirely for their past. And historically, this caused the West, and later the Zionist movement, to undervalue whoever was living in the country — who supposedly had no proper understanding of the past.
My claim in the paper I was going to read at the conference was that archaeology has played a role in this [dehumanization of Palestinians] and it began not with Israeli archaeology but with proper colonial archaeology of the 19th century — British, German, French archaeology. Israelis then inherited that [legacy], and as a settler colony, it was convenient to continue to hold that point of view.
This sort of primitive approach to archaeology is the one that animates the settler groups and people like Israel’s Heritage Minister. [In their view], only people who connect to specific antiquities from specific times and specific cultures have a right to the country, whereas the rest have no right to the land, to its antiquities, to anything.
So, on the one hand, I was pleasantly surprised that my paper was accepted; this was a chance to present it to the archaeological community, which by and large does not want to talk about this issue. And at the same time, it set up this clash between the conference organizers and the right-wing agitators, who had me on their blacklist for a long time.
But the context of the clash between the Heritage Minister and conference organizers was such that it reverberated with a broader struggle in Israel between so-called pro-democratic forces and the so-called authoritarian or ethnocratic forces in Israel. And a very significant plurality of archaeologists belong to the liberal democratic camp, so for them, the conference became an issue about academic freedom and freedom of expression.
For that reason, it was easy for most of my archaeology colleagues [and the conference organizers] to take my side. Or — as one of my former students wrote to me on WhatsApp — “they insist on having the right not to listen to you, to be able to make the choice to ignore you.” They were not going to let the heritage minister make that choice for them.
While the session in which I ultimately presented last week was well-attended, with over 120 participants, it was a brief 15 minute interlude in what was otherwise an insulated bubble. There were about 12 papers read on West Bank and East Jerusalem excavations by Tel Aviv University and other researchers or by scholars from Ariel University [in the West Bank settlement of Ariel] — papers that would be excluded from most international venues. An Ariel University scholar was disinvited from the World Archaeological Conference during the same week.
In their arguments for expanding the IAAs jurisdiction to the West Bank, the right-wing settler NGOs allege that Palestinians in the West Bank not only have no idea how to take care of the antiquities in their midst but are actively destroying them, vandalizing them, and stealing them. Can you discuss the legislative moves being taken right now in the Knesset to expand the IAA’s jurisdiction? How does it relate to annexation?
The trope that you mentioned of the local people not taking care of antiquities or destroying antiquities is as old as archaeology itself. And then here in Israel, you have that extra layer of what the settler colonialists see as a divine and historic right to the land.
But the actual move itself to broaden the IAA’s jurisdiction to the West Bank is very much a political move, because the settlers don’t have a true interest in archaeology. In fact, Zionism was quite slow to adopt archaeology in Israel as a vehicle of [establishing a Jewish connection to the land] because the [Jewish] antiquities here in Israel are not too impressive or obvious, and there are only a handful of them.
It’s not like Greek temples that, as my colleague Yanis Hamilakis says, are like skeletons all over Greece; you can see and point out white marble and columns everywhere. In Israel, most of the antiquities that you see are probably not Jewish. If you walk through the countryside and see a ruined building or a castle, it’s likely to be Islamic, Christian or something else.
So archaeology doesn’t give settlers a very obvious point of attachment to the landscape. And yet the settlers claim that all of the West Bank, beneath the surface, is fundamental to Jewish history — that it is where the Bible was written.
When I was actually engaged in cataloging all the known, surveyed, and excavated antiquities sites in the West Bank and subsequently tried to translate that into a map of heritage points, only a tiny minority of sites could really be ascribed with little doubt to a specific ethnic or religious group. Most sites are eclectic; they have stuff predating Judaism by thousands of years. They have stuff after the times of Jewish independence in [ancient] Palestine, from different Islamic dynasties and Christian control.
If you take any slice of the history of Israel-Palestine, at any point in time, you will not find a single homogenous culture across the landscape. There’s no time in which everyone in this country was Jewish, Islamic, Christian or anything else. Archaeology in its essence does not provide that kind of certainty and purity that ethnocratic right-wing government ministers might want. So they have to invent it. And then they say the Palestinians are damaging that [exclusively Jewish heritage] and then we will use this as a way of grabbing more land.
So [the settlers] have this very instrumental view of what archaeology can give them. It’s not about antiquities at all — it is about effectively using antiquities as another way of acquiring real estate. At Emek Shaveh, we call it the weaponization of archaeology, or the “Elad model,” after what happened in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. There, Jewish settlers not only acquired [Palestinian] homes but large tracts of empty archaeological space. And by connecting the houses they acquired with the archaeological space, they’ve come to control all of Silwan, or at least the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood. The Elad model is what the settlers are trying to imprint in the West Bank.
It sounds like archaeology is being instrumentalized in much the same way that firing zones, nature reserves, and declarations of state land have been weaponized against Palestinians in the West Bank in the decades following the 1967 War and Israel’s ensuing occupation of the West Bank.
Exactly.
Emek Sheveh frames these legislative moves as another step toward annexation of the West Bank. To push back on this a bit, hasn’t Israel de facto annexed the West Bank already? The archaeological sites in the West Bank today are under the purview of the Civil Administration (a branch of the Israeli military), so there is already an Israeli body that’s dealing with antiquities in the West Bank. And the IAA, which is supposed to only operate in Israel proper, has itself waded into the West Bank. Is this legislative push mostly symbolic? How does it represent a material change from the status quo?
The way things have functioned up until now — that Israel’s Civil Administration has its own archaeological set up in Area C of the West Bank, separate from Israel — has been super convenient for my [liberal] Israeli academic friends. All Israeli archaeological work in the occupied West Bank is done under a legal framework that has occasionally received the stamp of approval from the Israeli High Court, saying Israel’s occupation is a temporary situation and the Civil Administration is in place just to further the interests of people living in that territory until a final status agreement is reached. So scholars from Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, Haifa University, can maintain that their work in the West Bank is legal because it is compliant with the constraints that Israel’s Civil Administration has put upon them.
Now, this initiative to hand over the West Bank to the IAA is blowing their cover. The Israel Antiquities Authority is basically annexing the antiquities of the West Bank to Israel, and then Israeli law will apply at those sites and then anything that you do [in the West Bank], you will basically be recognizing this annexationist law. That puts the academics and the IAA in a very uncomfortable situation.
Nir Hasson wrote in Haaretz that the current bill to extend the jurisdiction of the IAA “officially turns Israeli archaeology into a pickaxe with which to dig for the sake of furthering apartheid.” You’ve written extensively about Israeli archaeology in the West Bank since 1967. How did Israeli archaeology relate to this occupied territory before the last few decades?
I think that this [view of Israeli archaeology] actually belongs to the colonial underpinnings of Zionism, and of Israel itself. One of the things taken for granted in this colonial worldview is [its notion that], “if we love antiquities, and all we want to do is uncover the past 3,000 years or 10,000 years, then why shouldn’t we be allowed to do that? We represent science, culture, progress.”
I insist on saying this because [during the 18th and 19th centuries,] the incoming scholars or excavators were equally contemptuous of Muslim, Christian, or Jewish inhabitants that they encountered here, representatives of a past that had to be overcome by science. [For them,] excavating the antiquities [was simply] the right thing to do — everywhere.
I want to emphasize that [Palestinian dispossession at the hands of Israeli archaeology] is too often presented as Israeli archaeologists excavating Jewish stuff to support Jewish appropriation of land. But it is deeper than that; any work that we do, whether on a Bronze age or neolithic era site, is considered good because we are doing it for the sake of science.
The recent legislation is embarrassing to those who subscribe to this view because now suddenly archaeology is being “politicized,” as if up until now it was not political. I’ve increasingly tried to demonstrate to my colleagues, and in general, that this entitled, supposedly apolitical stance is political. It’s not that you wake up thinking, how am I going to instrumentalize archaeology to take over this hilltop or this valley? It’s more like: if the border with Syria is now opened up and there’s a wonderful early Bronze Age site to be excavated, then the archaeologist is just going over the border on the weekend to see the antiquities near Quneitra. I’m speaking hypothetically, but I would not be surprised if it has happened already.
In Hebrew you say, po’al yotseh — “it comes with the territory.” That’s what happens: when Israel occupies some place, archaeologists will soon follow, sometimes within days.
So it seems like what we’re seeing now is a very brazen kind of settler strategy for acquiring more territory in the West Bank.
Yes — if you zoom in to the Jordan Valley, for example, you will find archaeology implicated there. Now again, those archaeologists, they’re just there to do science. It just is convenient that the science is right next to a settler outpost. So it becomes part of the enclosure [of Palestinian land]— of surrounding these Palestinian shepherds and small villages with things that represent the Israeli authorities.
There are some staked-out archaeological sites in the Jordan Valley, and I’m sure that if you ask the excavator, they’ll say, “Oh, this site was surveyed 20 years ago, and they picked up some Iron Age pottery. This is exactly what I’m interested in. And I happen to be from Ariel University [located in the occupied West Bank], but we’re not political, we’re just investigating antiquities.”
At some point, I can understand that my colleague at Tel Aviv University who studies the Roman period and doesn’t read social or political theory might not understand the role of his everyday Roman archaeology in colonialism, but can a person teaching at Ariel University and excavating in the West Bank misunderstand their role? I think you have to be willfully ignorant.
Given that the colonial element of Israeli archaeology predates its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, can you speak a little bit about archaeology inside of Israel proper and how Israeli archaeologists have engaged with Palestinian history from the last few hundred years?
Hebrew University in Jerusalem had a monopoly on archaeology until 1967. At this point, there was an established curriculum which divided archaeology into prehistoric, biblical, and classical archaeology. All Israeli archaeologists accepted and studied within this framework, and when the new research universities were established in the 1970s, they adopted the same basic curriculum, which brings you up to more or less the Byzantine Age. Any student could choose two specializations, one of which had to be the biblical period.
This meant that biblical archaeology was the raison d’être of Israeli archaeology. There was no Islamic archaeology; at Hebrew University, there was [only] a small cottage industry in Islamic art.
This focus on biblical archaeology — biblical tales, sites mentioned in the bible, and biblical geography — renders the present and past few hundred years unimportant. Up until 30 to 40 years ago, this meant that when excavations were undertaken at ancient sites, you either went quickly through the uppermost layers, or sometimes you just removed them entirely without documentation. That’s no longer considered good practice.
I always understood this [omission of recent history from the archaeological record] in a theoretical way, but in two projects that I was recently engaged in, I came to a much more tactile understanding of what that means. The first was a project I worked on with Hebrew University art historian and archaeologist Tawfiq Da’adli at Beit Yerach, or Asinabra [near the Sea of Galillee]. The site had been excavated and repeatedly misidentified as Roman or Jewish, but Tawfiq and I managed to re-identify it as an Umayyad palace from the 7th–8th centuries CE. Only the foundations of the palace had been preserved, so there were objective barriers to understanding what the site was.
We spent two short seasons excavating. All of the paid labor were Arabic-speaking Palestinians from the Galilee, so Arabic was the working language at the site, and my Arabic is very basic. But together with Tawfiq and another archaeologist from Chicago, Donald Whitcomb, I studied up on the Umayyad period and what a mosque from this time might look like. That was my first attempt to go out of my comfort zone.
The more recent attempt is the work I’ve been doing in Qadas, a Palestinian village depopulated in 1948 when it was occupied intermittently by the Israeli army and Arab Liberation Army troops. The inhabitants fled and became refugees in Lebanon. In order to understand what I’m doing there at Qadas, I had to engage with a large number of people that I had never spoken to before: scholars of the Middle East, Shi’i residents of that area of the Galilee, and people who could tell me about the battles of 1948 and the Arab Liberation Army. We opened up [the Israeli] archives, so it became a very extensive study of the whole context of this excavation.
This was a very long-winded explanation of why when you don’t have an academic curriculum or intellectual basis for the excavating, it will have no meaning. Only when I turn it into a focus of study does it become archaeologically significant.
On top of that, Israel’s antiquity laws only apply to sites or objects dating back before 1700. Anything from more recent periods, even if it was excavated ethically, was never interpreted or curated in a significant way.
To pull us back to the present, how do you understand the dissonance between being opposed to the legislation extending IAA authority to the West Bank and then taking part in the conference at the Dan Jerusalem Hotel in the occupied part of the city?
When someone from my university speaks at that conference, perhaps they’re promoting a graduate student who did some excavation there, or they want to get ahead and to get [their research] published. Or they’ve gotten money from the government and they want to show the government that they’re not antagonistic to it — so that they’ll continue getting support.
Archaeology is an expensive business. It needs outside support and people are reluctant to go against the government. Look no further than what is happening in North America. We in the Israeli left are gobsmacked by the rapidity of the collapse of the liberal front in the Ivy League universities — the rapidity with which people jettison all of their beliefs and try to cozy up to [the U.S.] government. It’s really the same mechanism [in Israel]. It’s where the power is.
And people triangulate and they say, “Ok, my name will be on the lecture, but I won’t deliver it. I won’t actually show up at the conference, but I will give it my tacit approval by being part of it. It’s for the good of science.” I think only a tiny minority would say, yes, we are in favor of annexation and illegal Jewish settlement.
I don’t think the conference in occupied East Jerusalem is so important. I was more so shocked by the participation of people from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and from Manitoba than the participation of Israelis.
How has Israel’s archaeology community responded to the destruction of Gaza over the past year and a half? And now that, at least among Israeli liberals, the narrative has shifted from one of uncritical support to one of a war of choice — a war for Netanyahu’s political survival — has the tune changed?
It hasn’t responded at all. There has been no official response by any group except Emek Shaveh. At the beginning of the war, we set up a response group, which included some people from Emek Shaveh, and Dotan Halevy and Tawfiq Da’adli, and we tried to monitor the destruction of cultural heritage. And then my co-director at Emek Shaveh, Alon Arad, and I published an op-ed on the whole phenomenon of destruction and how we, as archaeologists, see the pursuit of maximum destruction of Palestinian heritage everywhere since 1948.
Certain archaeologists did participate in a very public way in the forensic retrieval of human remains in the kibbutzim, in the places that were attacked on October 7. That was part of a kind of civil society effort in the absence of any kind of government response. So it was archaeologists using their expertise to help in a positive way, but it was also manipulated by some members of the community to support the Israeli position and anti-Hamas war propaganda.
People who I had worked with — who had participated in scholarly discussion of Yanis Hamilakis’ and my book — withdrew and became part of this group of Israeli academics that were really upset by the response of the global left and the pro-Palestinian response to October 7. These archaeologists were sort of in this Eva Illouz camp, if I can use her as a typecast: they said, “We thought we were leftist, but now that we’ve seen what the left is, we’re no longer leftist.” They were pretty upset with me for being outspoken, but never said anything out loud, which is par for the course.
Last November — a few weeks into the fall semester at Tel Aviv University — I initiated a daily strike where I and a few other people would stand on the lawn of the university and hold signs against the war. Eventually others joined, but there were never more than 20 or 30 of us there. This was against university regulations. I was approached by security and by counter-demonstrators. It created a small but vociferous resistance.
A couple of graduate students told me what I was doing was terrible — that some of my students serve in the military, in the reserves, and that I am accusing them of war crimes. I often wondered: Who do you represent? Why are you so confident that you represent all of the reserve officers?
But the tune has changed with the recent renewal of bombings [in mid-March]. I think that’s the inflection point here — the fact that Israel didn’t see through the ceasefire agreement. And I think from that point on, the academic response has grown exponentially. People are willing to identify as being against the war. So until the ceasefire, you could not publicly on campus call for an end to the war. That was considered a violation of university regulations.
So the tune has changed, but does opposition to the war at all center Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza? And among your archaeology colleagues — what about the utter destruction of all the mosques and many churches in Gaza?
It’s a question I have for my colleagues: You’re upset about the dismantling of some ancient wall in the West Bank, and yet you said nothing about hundreds of sites that were wiped out in Gaza.
I recently received a book from a German colleague, a biblical archaeologist who is about my age. I don’t think he made any public statements about the war on Gaza but he wrote an 850-page monograph collating everything that’s known about the antiquities of Gaza. It has no statement at the beginning except we don’t know what has happened to all these sites, and expresses some general hope for the well-being of everyone involved. And this in Germany [where anti-Palestinian repression has intensified].
This type of humanistic response, it’s a great thing to do. It’s a resource, a service to the community. It illustrates the importance of that tract of land, its history, its depth, everything that Israelis want to ignore. But the German guy did it, not an Israeli guy.
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Dikla Taylor-Sheinman is a NIF/Shatil Social Justice Fellow at +972 Magazine. Currently based in Haifa, she spent last year in Amman and the previous six years in Chicago.
Tags: Archaeology, Fake History, Fake Science, Israel, Jews, Official Lies and Narratives, Palestine, Palestinians, Science
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