Fierce Protest Over Bones Threatens to Halt Archaeology in Israel

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Archaeologists in Israel are feeling more and more besieged as they face increasingly violent attacks from the ultra-Orthodox community as well as government interference in their work.

Many archaeologists say their field is in crisis. Employees of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) are routinely harassed at work and at home. Violence against IAA workers is not a new problem, but it appears to be increasing.

Members of Atra Kadisha, a group of self-appointed preservers of grave sites who are part of the ruling council of an anti-Zionist^a religious community, have often come to blows with IAA archaeologists, several of whom have been hospitalized after encounters with them. The Authority’s cars have been torched, and excavation sites have been damaged.

Amir Drori, director of the IAA, regularly receives death threats to himself and his family. An explosive device was placed in front of his home, and he is the object of a permanent pulsa denura—a rabbinical curse that says he “deserves to die.” Ultra-Orthodox activists claim that a similar curse brought on the illness that ended the life of archaeologist Yigal Shiloh, who died in 1987, at age 50, while excavating Jerusalem’s City of David.

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, “operations chief” of Atra Kadisha, openly admits to personally distributing hundreds of copies of all the office and home phone numbers, as well as the addresses, of IAA archaeologists to religious academies (yeshivot) around the country. He says he feels no guilt for the resulting threats.

“As long as our forefathers don’t rest in peace, neither will they,” he says calmly, sipping cola in his living room in Jerusalem.

Morale is low, say many archaeologists and physical anthropologists. “People are incredibly upset. Everyone talks about it. How can we carry on as scientists in this environment?” says one IAA archaeologist who prefers to remain anonymous.

“Everyone who works here is depressed. The consensus is [that] we lost,” says Joe Zias, until recently a leading IAA anthropologist (“Fired: Bone Expert Takes the Fall”).

Drori himself, a gruff-voiced former general, appears determined to show a stiff upper lip and insists he is not bothered by the curses and attempts on his life.

“These people are hooligans, unimportant,” he says, waving his hand as though dismissing a fly.

But the problems archaeologists face are much greater than just routine violence. Last June the government announced the creation of a committee to “monitor” archaeological excavations. Although its makeup hasn’t been announced yet, archaeologists assume it will have a strong religious element. For them, the committee is bad news. They don’t want outsiders interfering with their excavations.

“It’s like asking the cat to watch the milk,” Zias says angrily.

“This new committee is a loss for archaeologists because it means we will no longer have control over the material we’re excavating,” explains David Ilan, an archaeologist at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.

“These people are anti-science,” continues Zias. “I was excavating in Jerusalem once. The haredim [ultra-Orthodox] were waiting outside the excavation, and they picked up some animal bones we had put aside—you know, sheep, dogs and so on—and were stopping cars on the street saying, ‘Look, here are the bones of our ancestors.’ These people are going to stand over me and tell me what is human and what is animal? If they go and learn anatomy for a few years at university maybe I’d be willing to listen to them.”

The makeup of the current ruling coalition in 055Israel—with 23 members of the Knesset (parliament) from religious parties, the most in Israel’s history—is making life difficult for archaeologists.

“This government is more right/religious, and the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], as we have seen, is open to pressure, so the situation is certainly worse,” says Israel Finkelstein, chairman of the archaeology department at Tel Aviv University.

Drori tries to play down the threats of violence, but he readily admits archaeologists are facing serious problems, especially the lack of a proper budget:

The Antiquities Authority has not initiated any new digs this past year. There’s no budget for it. All we do is “rescue operations.” That’s when a contractor starts to dig, to lay foundations for a new building. He usually comes across antiquities and graves. Remember, although the haredim don’t like to think so, people have actually been living in this part of the world for many thousands of years. By law, the contractor has to inform us, and then we come in and excavate whatever there is. Without excavations, there can be no [economic] development in this country.

In July, 66 IAA workers received dismissal notices because of budgetary cuts.

Atra Kadisha’s Meshi-Zahav, unmoved by the argument that Israel needs to develop economically, has an alternative suggestion: “If you really have to build, then the answer is simple. You can build on top of a grave if you don’t know it’s there. Just [do] not excavate at all,” he says, as though all this could easily be resolved if only the archaeologists would listen to reason.

In response, Drori snorts dismissively. He notes, “We have situations—such as the proposed Carmel Tunnel in Haifa—where you are going to have to remove graves; you can’t just cover them up. A tunnel involves digging deep in a mountain, and there are hundreds of graves in there. With new buildings, where they dig several meters deep, you can’t just leave the graves covered in concrete, suspended in the air.”

“It’s amazing how much information is preserved in bones, even ones that are thousands of years old,” 076says Professor Yoel Rak, of the anatomy and anthropology department at Tel Aviv University.

“We can understand the history of many diseases, such as malaria. We can trace the domestication of certain foods, such as wheat. We can reconstruct demography—how many children there were in a community, or the ratio of males to females,” says Rak. “That’s just a few of the things we can learn. It’s not that there is some automatic benefit to mankind; that’s naive. This is information which provides us with insight into many things. It gives us a more profound understanding about the way we humans lived.”

But Meshi-Zahav and his faithful volunteers decline to respond to these arguments. “I know where I come from; I don’t need proof,” he says firmly.

Drori and other archaeologists, among them some who are themselves Orthodox Jews, argue that Atra Kadisha, instead of attacking them, should be thanking them for saving graves. Without the archaeologists, Drori says, bones would simply be plowed back into the ground by building contractors who don’t want work held up by long excavations. And when Atra Kadisha gets involved, dragging out the excavations even longer, it only strengthens the resolve of building contractors to ignore or destroy any antiquities—including graves—that they come across.

Drori cites as an example a recent case in Caesarea, where the owner of a plot of land was about to bulldoze antiquities—including a large grave with many human remains dating from the Roman period—without informing anyone. He was stopped by an IAA worker who lay in front of the tractor to stop it.

“The man who owned the plot started a court case against us, but after a year he realized that the law was on our side and allowed us in to excavate. Then they [Atra Kadisha] started. Yet we were the ones who saved that grave,” says Drori.

In Jerusalem four years ago, the French Hill riots sparked by the discovery of graves on the site of a new road, were another case of unfair attacks, insists Drori.

“We knew that French Hill was the site of a 2,000-year-old Jewish cemetery,” he says, keen to set the record straight.

“We told the municipality, which absolutely refused to change the plans for the new road. They said it was impossible, there was no other way. So we worked side by side with the tractors, one archaeologist per tractor. When they found a grave they’d stop and we’d excavate. We worked like this for two months, with only four and a half graves left to excavate, when the haredim started 077their rioting and took us to the Supreme Court, suing me. It went on for months, and in the end the Supreme Court ruled in our favor.

“But what I can’t understand is why they accuse us of destroying graves,” Drori says angrily. “We are saving them! They should be giving us a medal, not cursing us!”

Three years ago, a dog cemetery was found in Jaffa—“The Persians liked to bury their dogs properly,” Drori says—and the bones were removed to a warehouse. Ultra-Orthodox activists broke into the warehouse, attacked the guard with a metal bar and removed the dog bones.

“They’re now buried in a Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem,” Drori notes grimly.

This article was adapted from the Jerusalem Post.

Archaeologists in Israel are feeling more and more besieged as they face increasingly violent attacks from the ultra-Orthodox community as well as government interference in their work. Many archaeologists say their field is in crisis. Employees of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) are routinely harassed at work and at home. Violence against IAA workers is not a new problem, but it appears to be increasing. Members of Atra Kadisha, a group of self-appointed preservers of grave sites who are part of the ruling council of an anti-Zionista religious community, have often come to blows with IAA archaeologists, several of […]