Politics at the City of David

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The dispute which sporadically disrupted the archaeological excavations in the City of David last summer had nothing to do with archaeology and everything to do with politics.

The incident demonstrated that Judaism, like other religions, has its lunatic fringe.

The groundwork for the incident was laid several years ago when Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) passed a law forbidding the archaeological excavation of Jewish graves. The law was passed in a bow to religious parties, whose power in the first Begin government, as in previous Israeli governments, far exceeded their small proportion of votes. Religious parties regularly garner a little less than 10% of the vote. Nevertheless, they exercise unusual leverage in Israel’s proportional representation system because they are often needed to form a coalition government when no party has an absolute majority.

In the second Begin government, which was only recently formed, the power of three small religious parties is stronger than ever because they, and they alone, provide Begin’s Likud party with a sliver-thin majority of 61 in the 120-person Knesset. The formal coalition agreement which the religious parties demanded and obtained from Begin’s Likud party, as a condition of their joining the Likud to form a government, explicitly provides that “the law forbidding excavation at gravesites will be strictly enforced.”

This law—foolish and irresponsible as it is (see Jewish Religious Law Does Not Forbid Archaeological Excavations, Even of Graves, Says Prominent Talmudic Scholar)—even if strictly enforced, presented no problem to the excavations at the City of David, because of the simple and indisputable fact that no graves are there.

The excavations at the City of David, site of the oldest inhabited section of Jerusalem, indeed the area to which Jerusalem was confined from about 3000 B.C. until King Solomon’s reign, were nevertheless vulnerable. This dusty 11-acre spur south of Jerusalem’s Old City is the site of the best-known, most glamorous and largest excavation currently under way in all Israel. This, not the existence of graves, made it the perfect target. That there were no graves here was irrelevant.

On August 3, 1981, a group of ultra-Orthodox protesters descended on the dig, physically attacked excavation director Yigal Shiloh and demanded that the digging be stopped immediately.

Politically, the protesters were to the right even of the religious parties. They were members of a group of fanatic religious zealots who are anti-Zionist and who even refuse to recognize the state of Israel. In their view, when God decides that the people of Israel should have a state, He will easily create it Himself—without man’s help. Therefore, the existing state is, for these extremists, an insult to God’s power and cannot be recognized as legitimate.

As if to emphasize their disdain not only for archaeology but also for the state of Israel itself, on the ninth of the Jewish month of Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar because it marks the anniversary of the destruction of both the First Temple and the Second Temple, these religious fanatics desecrated the graves of some of Zionism’s greatest heroes—Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism; Itzchak Ben-Zvi, second President of Israel; and Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the revisionist branch of Zionism of which Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s party is a direct spiritual descendant. This apparently was the fanatical way chosen by these ultra-orthodox zealots to protest the City of David dig. The red and black daubings upon the modern tombstones demanded cessation of the City of David excavations. On Herzl’s grave, the vandals wrote: “Why don’t you dig here?”, the implication being that the father of modern Zionism can scarcely be considered human so it is permissible to desecrate his bones. Here the archaeologists might dig, the vandals implied, but not at the City of David. At Jabotinsky’s grave, the desecrators painted a swastika.

Israel’s Archaeological Council, the supreme advisory 041body to the Ministry of Education and Culture on archaeological matters, denounced “the shameful interference by ultra-orthodox elements” in the City of David excavations.

It would have been bad enough if the event had been confined to the protests of these ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jews. Unfortunately, it was not. In the end, Israel’s orthodox rabbinical authorities exploited the opportunity to exert their own political muscles.

At first it was hoped that the intervention of Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, might defuse the situation with a face-saving compromise. Rabbi Goren had commented orally that, though the area was not a cemetery, for safety’s sake, the excavation area should be slightly reduced.

When he gave his written decision, however, Rabbi Goren unaccountably reversed himself. He was joined by Israel’s Chief Sephardi Rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, who likewise condemned the excavation. On August 19, 1981, the two rabbis ruled that the entire City of David, not just the controversial area G, is a cemetery in which no archaeological excavations can take place.

The condemnation occurred less than a month after Mr. Begin managed to splice together a coalition government which depended for its one-person majority on Israel’s three small religious parties. The timing is not without significance, especially in light of the fact that the City of David dig has been going on for four years without prior protest.

Israel’s academic community was united to a person from the outset in opposition to the Chief Rabbis’ ruling. Like the good academicians that they are, they foolishly thought that the issue was whether there were ancient graves in the City of David and that this was a question which would yield to reason.

Israel’s leading archaeologists and academicians unequivocally demonstrated that there were no graves in the City of David. Yigael Yadin and Benjamin Mazar showed that area G was a steep urban and military site that could not have been a cemetery—even in Biblical times. Medieval scholars refuted the claim that it was a cemetery 400 years ago. Moreover, the medieval layers of the site had been removed decades ago by earlier archaeologists. Nachman Avigad showed that when, in the 1920s, the 042earliest archaeological investigators started to work in what is now the most controversial area of the dig, Area G, it was a cabbage patch, not a cemetery. Excavation director Yigal Shiloh established that in four years of work in the area he had not uncovered a single grave. Seventeen prominent scholars signed a manifesto declaring that the effort to characterize the site as a Jewish cemetery “is without any scientific, objective foundation and is an effort to mislead the public.”

All of this was, of course, to no avail because the dispute did not concern graves, but politics. The outcome did not depend on reason, but power. Besides, Rabbi Goren claimed to have visited the site unnoticed and himself uncovered some human bones—“without even needing a pickax”!

Despite the rabbis’ ruling, the archaeologists continued their work, albeit under heavy police protection from religious protectors.

In late August the question became one of law: Did the rabbis have legal power to shut down the dig? After all, the archaeologists had a valid permit from the Ministry of Education and Culture, of which the Department of Antiquities was a subdivision. The archaeologists claimed the rabbinical ruling was not binding. The Minister of Religious Affairs, however, said it was.

Then Zevulun Hammer, the Minister of Education and Culture, got into the act. Although Hammer is a member of the National Religious Party, one of the three small religious parties that were necessary to Begin’s coalition government, it was thought at first that Hammer might be able to work out a political compromise. He himself said he doubted that there were old Jewish graves at the site. The rabbis’ rulings, he said, should not be taken “too seriously.”

Rabbi Goren reacted strongly and threatened to issue a ketav seruv against Hammer. A ketav seruv is an official religious proclamation criticizing disobedience to a rabbinical ruling. The effect would be that the Torah could not be read in any synagogue while Hammer, an orthodox Jew, was in attendance.

A proposed order was then prepared in Hammer’s Ministry of Education and Culture requiring a two-week suspension of the excavation. The suspension would allow Israel’s attorney general to rule on the question: Did the 043rabbinical ruling condemning the dig invalidate the excavation permit issued previously by the Department of Antiquities?

The proposed two-week temporary suspension order was given to Avi Eitan, the Director of the Department of Antiquities, for his official signature. To his everlasting credit, Eitan refused to sign. It could not be justified on professional grounds, he said.

Faced with this refusal, Education Minister Hammer capitulated to rabbinical pressure and signed the order.

Meanwhile, the Chief Rabbis’ ruling had been affirmed and expanded by the Supreme Rabbinical Council and the Supreme Rabbinical Court, which declared “the whole slope of the Temple Mount” to be a Jewish cemetery. According to Rabbi Goren, this includes “the whole area from the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount down to the Silwan Pool,” the entire ridge on which King David’s capital was built. The broad rabbinical ruling directly called on the government to declare the whole area a Jewish cemetery and appealed to Hammer to stop excavations immediately and cancel the excavation license.

Faced with Hammer’s two-week suspension order, the Hebrew University and the Israel Exploration Society, sponsors of the City of David excavation, took the matter to court. The High Court of Justice ruled that the two-week suspension order was illegal and that digging could continue.

The Supreme Court President, Justice Moshe Landau, delivered the opinion of the court and stated that because of Israel’s democratic and non-theological governmental structure, rabbinical rulings are not in any way binding on state officials fulfilling their legal authority. “Whatever the importance of a rabbinical halachic ruling to a religious person,” the Court stated, “the Chief Rabbis and the Supreme Rabbinical Council are not by law empowered to determine facts necessary to the implementation of law.” Minister Hammer should not have been influenced by a rabbinical decree, the Court ruled, and therefore he had no legitimate basis for suspending the dig.

One of the tiny religious parties in the Begin coalition, Agudath Israel, has threatened to resign from the government if excavation continues. If the party does 044resign, the Begin government could fall. As of this writing, that is where the matter stands. In the larger picture, this may be the occasion for resolution of some long-buried issues regarding religious and secular power in Israel.

More immediately, nothing less than Israel’s archaeological enterprise is at stake. As Professor Mazar warned, if the ultra-Orthodox have their way, “All archaeology in the Holy Land will have to stop.” They could declare the entire country “a giant Jewish cemetery,” Mazar added.

Enlightened comment has been uniform. The Jerusalem Post called the rabbis’ decision “preposterous.” Of Rabbi Goren’s initial ruling, The Jerusalem Post reported that “the entire archaeological fraternity has unanimously pronounced it, in so many words, an example of ignorant boorishness.” Liberal members of the Knesset have referred to the “lunacies of the Chief Rabbinate.” Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek declared, with scarcely less directness, “Archaeologists, not rabbis, must decide in the matter of excavations. Such things cannot be determined out of complete ignorance, whether the ignorance is of a young yeshiva student or of someone at the top of the ladder.” Israel’s Academy of Science unanimously condemned what it called the rabbis’ “unwarranted interference” in the excavation. The leading Hebrew newspaper Haaretz put the question this way, “Will we live as free people in spirit, mind and action, or will we be ruled by the darkness of the Middle Ages at the end of the twentieth century?”

We can only express our hope that Israel’s magnificent archaeological enterprise will emerge from this political attack stronger and more scientifically independent than ever. In the meantime, this attack should be seen for what it is, a political power play that has nothing to do with archaeology—or with religion, for that matter. There is a difference between religion and religious authority.

The dispute which sporadically disrupted the archaeological excavations in the City of David last summer had nothing to do with archaeology and everything to do with politics.

The incident demonstrated that Judaism, like other religions, has its lunatic fringe.