Distinguished military commander and former head of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Amir Drori died this March of a heart attack during a hiking trip in the Negev Desert.
Drori had two noteworthy careers, first as an officer in the Israeli army and later as director of the IAA. Drori rose through the military ranks to become commander of the famed Golani Brigade during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and led the recapture of Mt. Hermon, in the Golan Heights. In 1981 he was placed in charge of Israel’s Northern Command, and he played an important role in the 1982 Lebanon war. He was subsequently promoted to deputy chief of staff, making him the second-highest-ranked general in the Israeli army. In 1988 Drori left the army to take on an entirely different command as the first chief of the IAA (archaeology had previously been subsumed under the department of antiquities and museums in the Ministry of Education). He served in that capacity until 2000, when he was replaced by the IAA’s current head, Shuka Dorfman.
Though Drori had a B.A. in archaeology and had participated in archaeological excavations, it was his organizational and leadership skills that enabled him to make significant contributions to Israeli archaeology. Above all he is credited with turning the IAA into a well-organized and effective body, expanding both its size and its scope of operations, particularly with regard to conducting countless salvage digs that are required in Israel every time a construction crew turns up an ancient artifact.
Drori was director of the IAA during BAR’s struggle to free the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls. When BAR released its two volumes of clandestinely obtained (and previously unpublished) scrolls, which broke the publication logjam, Drori considered suing BAR, but ultimately decided against it. To his credit, Drori greatly increased the official editorial team’s pace of publication by appointing Hebrew University professor Emanuel Tov as chief editor and by expanding the circle of scholars working on the scrolls.
During Drori’s tenure as IAA chief, he was at the center of a vociferous clash with ultra-Orthodox Jews, who attacked the IAA and archaeologists in general for their alleged desecration of Jewish human remains (see “Battle Over Archaeology in Israel Reaches a Boil,” BAR, September/October 1998). Later Drori was subject to criticism for the IAA’s inaction in response to the massive construction effort, done without archaeological supervision and in defiance of Israeli law, undertaken on the Temple Mount by the Waqf, the Islamic trust responsible for maintaining the holy sites on the Mount.
Distinguished military commander and former head of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Amir Drori died this March of a heart attack during a hiking trip in the Negev Desert. Drori had two noteworthy careers, first as an officer in the Israeli army and later as director of the IAA. Drori rose through the military ranks to become commander of the famed Golani Brigade during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and led the recapture of Mt. Hermon, in the Golan Heights. In 1981 he was placed in charge of Israel’s Northern Command, and he played an important role in the […]
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