The effort has clear political overtones. “It’s an important part of nation-building,” said Adel Yahya, an archaeologist who heads the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange, a group that promotes Palestinian heritage and preservation of historic sites. Yahya said that one of the biggest challenges is to halt the looting of antiquities, which he said is driven by economic hardship among Palestinians and the popular perception of archaeology as “a tool of occupation” by Israel.
Khouloud Daibes, minister of tourism and antiquities in the Palestinian Authority, said that through membership in UNESCO, Palestinians will be able to secure international recognition of West Bank sites “as Palestinian cultural heritage, and they will not be listed or claimed as Israeli heritage and part of Israel, as many of our sites are marketed.”
She said that Palestinians did not have access to the findings of Israeli excavations in the West Bank and were seeking the recovery of artifacts removed to Israel.
In 2002, concerned about the destruction of historic buildings during an Israeli military offensive in the West Bank that followed a wave of suicide bombings in Israel, UNESCO sponsored a Palestinian inventory of 20 cultural and natural sites in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with potential for nomination as World Heritage sites. A few of the sites, such as the Qumran caves in the Judean Desert, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, remain under Israeli control.
In Israel, where the Palestinian entry to UNESCO is viewed as a purely political ploy, the government last year put two West Bank shrines — the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, a site holy to Jews and Muslims — on a list of Israeli national heritage sites slated for renovation and preservation.
On a visit this week to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli minister of public diplomacy and diaspora affairs, said it is important to remind the world of “our connection to this holy site,” which he said Israel maintains as an open shrine for visitors of all faiths. Strict security and prayer arrangements have been in force at the site since a 1994 attack in which a Jewish settler killed 29 Muslims at prayer.
Taha, the Palestinian official, said he viewed Jewish antiquities in the West Bank and Gaza as an integral part of “the mosaic of Palestinian culture.” He said that the Palestinian Authority had in recent years restored the remains of an ancient synagogue in Jericho, which was vandalized after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in 2000.
“We view it as part of our heritage,” he said. “We will protect it.”
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