Monday, May 31, 2010

For the Palestinians whose homes are threatened by the excavations, archaeology is merely the latest weapon being used against them

"The Palestinians sense that Israel has moved from ihtilal to ihlal; from occupation to replacement, and that making life unlivable for Palestine's Palestinians is the prelude to transforming Palestine itself. This is what the money coming from the west will achieve. To see the future projected for Jerusalem, you need only visit the spanking new Jewish Quarter. Go into the Temple Shop and buy teatowels and doilies and puzzles featuring the Third Temple rising out of al-Haram al-Sharif in place of the Dome of the Rock. In this approaching future it will be impossible to look out at the landscape and think of continuity, or eternity.

In place of the old, mellow stone, of the interdependent structures, softened and polished by time, there will be the jagged and the new and the fake. In place of trodden paths along the valleys and children playing freely, there will be chairlifts and viewing points and fast food outlets and always, always the iron gates and the security checks and the ticket kiosks and the merchandising. In place of the thousands of stories laid down over the ages above, below and around each other, there will be one story – and it won't, actually, be the Jewish story, because the Jewish story in Jerusalem is indivisible from the Roman, the Byzantine, the Arab, the Muslim, the Christian. It will be a fake. Like the fake inscribed prayers or mezzuzas the settlers carve into the Arab houses when they take them over. Soon, in Jerusalem, if the world does not wake up, there will be one voice: the crash of the cash register." Ahdaf Soueif 2010. The writer is the author of Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/26/jerusalem-city-of-david-palestinians-archaeology

The dig dividing Jerusalem

The search for the City of David may offer tourists a reminder of Jerusalem's ancient past. But for the Palestinians whose homes are threatened by the excavations, archaeology is merely the latest weapon being used against them

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