Museum exhibit becomes front in Israeli-Palestinian struggle

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images - A museum worker does preparatory work before the opening of the "Herod the Great" exhibition, at the Israel Museum this week in Jerusalem.

 “The museum can grant legitimacy to the occupation this way, by presenting this as part of Israeli and Jewish heritage... The message is: This past is ours.” Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archeologist with Emek Shaveh, a group that focuses on the role of archaeology in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/museum-exhibit-becomes-front-in-israeli-palestinian-struggle/2013/02/13/dca47284-7614-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html

By Joel Greenberg, Published: February 13

JERUSALEM — A major exhibit at Israel’s national museum that is devoted to Herod the Great, the Roman-era king of Judea, has become the latest front in a struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over cultural heritage.

The show is billed as the most ambitious and expensive archaeological exhibition put on by the Israel Museum outside of its permanent collections, and its centerpiece is a partial reconstruction of what is believed to be the king’s tomb at Herodium, a hilltop palace-fortress south of Jerusalem in the West Bank.

On display are some 30 tons of material from the site, including masonry from the tomb structure and a reconstructed sarcophagus thought to have held the king’s remains, along with frescoes and mosaics restored by the museum staff, a massive royal bathtub and other finds excavated in Jerusalem and at desert palaces in Jericho and ancient Cypros, also in the West Bank.

The exhibit, which opened to the public Wednesday and is scheduled to run for eight months, has drawn criticism from Palestinian officials. They charge that the removal of the ancient artifacts to Israel violates international law and appropriates cultural property that should remain in the West Bank, which the Palestinians seek as part of a future state

Maintained by Israel as a national park, Herodium is in Area C, the part of the West Bank that remains under full Israeli control and where excavations are supervised by the Israeli military administration. ...READ MORE