Abstract
This essay demonstrates how Zionist settler colonialism is swiftly proceeding to claim ownership over the Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Helweh in Jerusalem through the City of David archaeological park, a controversial project premised on disputed Israeli archaeological methods and biblical claims. It examines how guided tours of the site, consisting of tourists with predisposed beliefs and desires to receive more of what they already know to be true, serve to brand the site as conclusively Zionist and Jewish—a central aim of Israeli heritage tourism in Jerusalem. This takes place through a process referred to as “irrefutable divine internalization,” and through which Israel’s ongoing illegal annexation and occupation of Wadi Helweh is eclipsed, turning tourists’ gaze toward Israeli-Jewish ownership of space instead.
“We have some Muslims and Nazarenes around town,”Footnote1 the Israeli tour guide replied to the tourist who wondered what the muezzin’s call to prayer was as it echoed throughout a City of David tour. Israel’s heritage tourism industry has long been a strategic mechanism of insourcing and outsourcing a Zionist-Jewish narrative to legitimate Israel’s illegal annexation and occupation of Palestinian land, and its erasure of Palestinian peoplehood, especially in East Jerusalem, since 1967.Footnote2 A prime example of this narrative is promoted in the City of David archaeological and heritage tourism settlement, located in the Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Helweh in Silwan. Directly south of the Old City and the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Wadi Helweh is home to an estimated five thousand Palestinian residents and four hundred Israeli-Jewish settlers.Footnote3
The City of David initiative, driven and predominantly managed by the Ir David (Hebrew for City of David) Foundation, a settler organization referred to by the acronym Elad, is one of the most visited archaeological and heritage tourist sites premised on the disputed claim that it is where King David founded the first Israelite capital, thus claiming it to be the birthplace of Jewish nationhood.Footnote4 Indeed, the City of David heritage tour exemplifies the extent to which Zionist biblical settler colonialism is swiftly proceeding to claim ownership over Palestinian East Jerusalem. Replete with underground tunnels and an aboveground so-called biblical park, as well as a pending cable car that will operate as a settler-colonial swing cutting across the sky, and a suspension bridge that transports tourists back and forth, the tour is designed to make visible and link select “holy” attractions. It is also designed to distort, disintegrate, and render invisible Palestinian heritage and peoplehood in the overcrowded and impoverished neighborhood of Wadi Helweh.Footnote5
On the one hand, this essay demonstrates that Israel’s heritage tours are orchestrated in a way whereby tourists are impelled to absorb what is deliberately selected to be seen and felt and, concomitantly, to deliberately not see what is not being shown. On the other, it examines how visitors interpret the tour and archaeological structures of meaning, serving to reciprocally brand the site as conclusively Zionist and Jewish—a central aim of Israeli heritage tourism in Jerusalem. This takes place through a process I refer to as “irrefutable divine internalization,” and through which Israel’s ongoing illegal annexation, occupation, and ethnic cleansing in Wadi Helweh is swept away, turning the gaze toward Jewish ownership of space instead.
Re-narrating Heritage through Erasure
An increasingly lucrative sector in Israel’s tourist industry, heritage tourism—often fused with archaeology—transpires in locations layered in imbricated histories that span millennia and are exploited for place-based identity claims.Footnote6 While heritage is represented by traces, material and nonmaterial, perceived to bind people’s present to the past, the indeterminacy of heritage and its politicization oftentimes point to the inventiveness of those in power. In the case of the City of David heritage tourism site, politicizing historical traces serves to blanket Israel’s infrastructure of occupation and annexation on the grounds of national and theological claims.Footnote7 These include notions of superiority, divine selection, and God’s bestowal of the land upon the Jews as the so-called chosen people.
Therefore, divine archaeological proof, whether veridical or fictitious, takes precedence in the industry—proof that is used to encourage visitors’ backing for Jewish ownership of the land. This “proof” is especially important in tours for evangelical Christian Zionists who are waiting for the apocalyptic end of days,Footnote8 which include the gathering of exiled Jews in historic Palestine and the coming of the Messiah. The tours and the archaeological findings are equally relevant for some Zionist Jews worldwide seeking to assert their nationhood. Indeed, the extraordinariness of a heritage product, especially one that mixes secular, political ideology (Zionism) with divine and messianic eschatological claims, is a powerful tool for those who wish to believe, participate in, and vindicate an Israeli-Jewish national birthright in East Jerusalem.
The City of David offers a dynamic example of an extraordinary heritage product. Produced by Elad, an organization dedicated to the continuation of King David’s legacy, the site is designed to unveil ancient Jerusalem’s magnificent Jewish past through education, archaeology, and tourism. The organization is also committed to the “residential revitalization”Footnote9 of Jews in Silwan, based on the claim that properties in the neighborhood were owned by Jews who fled following the 1936–39 Great Palestinian Revolt, and despite the expulsion of Palestinians as a result.Footnote10 In effect, the commitment to so-called Jewish residential revitalization indicates the organization’s imperative of what I call “right-populating” the area with its perceived rightful settlers, and in the process, depopulating it of undesired Palestinians—a key component of JudaizingFootnote11 Jerusalem.
Elad assumed the managerial role of the City of David archaeological settlement in 1997,Footnote12 followed by practically exclusive operational control in 2005,Footnote13 thus allowing it to present and filter the site as unilaterally and messianicallyFootnote14 Zionist and Jewish. This partly transpired as a governmental initiative to Judaize what Israel calls the Historic Basin and its outskirts, along with the eventual support of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which facilitated Elad’s administration of the park, including funding digs carried out by the entity in charge of antiquities, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA). However, archaeologists have raised serious concerns about the scientific methods employed at the site. Notably, Elad-sponsored archaeologists rely on horizontal excavation methods, commonly repudiated among the archaeological community. As an archaeologist interviewee explained: “This type of side tunneling, instead of employing a stratigraphic [top-down] method, substantially jeopardizes the accuracy of determining periods according to distinct components of the soil.”Footnote15
Further, salvage excavations, usually employed as a final recourse, have become commonplace.Footnote16 These excavations are carried out when a site considered to possess archaeological remains is endangered due to construction or other works. They are differentiated from other excavations because they are carried out swiftly and produce documentation of alleged principal findings instead of accounting for all of them. In effect, these excavations are “employed to bypass international law,” as one archaeologist put it.Footnote17 The result has been the overwhelming erasure of non-Jewish heritages, effectively obscuring the heterogeneity of the area, which, according to sound archaeological evidence, has been inhabited continuously since the Bronze Age.Footnote18 As succinctly explained by another Israeli archaeologist: “There are professional archaeologists, of course, but it is apparent that archaeology as a science has been dumped to favor a political mission.”Footnote19
Finding King David and His City
David is an illustrious figure in the monotheist traditions. According to an interviewee and other archaeologists, “in Judaism, he is venerated for delivering sovereignty and a powerful empire; he is associated with the advent of Christianity;” and he has been exalted to the status of a prophet in Islam.Footnote20 Yet, David has also been the subject of heated debates among a range of believers and skeptics surrounding the use of archaeological remains to vindicate biblical narratives. On one side, there are the “maximalists” who insist on drawing the connection between biblical historicity, King David, and the land; on the other, the more critical “minimalists”Footnote21 include those who question this historicity and view King David largely as a fabrication, as well as those in between who point to his rule over a modest village.Footnote22 An examination of the evidence for and against the controversial claims is therefore imperative.
The archaeological findings of a Jewish metropolis prior to Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE have been used to justify Zionist claims to Jerusalem as Israel’s perennial Jewish capital.Footnote23 These findings in the 1960s–70s by late professor of biblical history and archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the university’s former president, Benjamin Mazar,Footnote24 were later corroborated by his granddaughter, Eliat Mazar, who claimed to have uncovered remains of King David’s palace dated to the 10th century BCE.Footnote25 However, this timeframe has been contested, as it is not based on the precise stratum excavated, but on the remains of pottery found at the top and underneath. As one interviewee explained: “Mazar and his granddaughter look at the past through a biblical lens. If this is how they see it, where is the objectivity in their interpretations?”Footnote26
Aside from contesting the dates of Mazar’s findings, Tel Aviv University Professor Israel Finkelstein argued in 2017 that the ruins are insufficient to prove the existence of a mighty metropolis in line with the biblical narrative.Footnote27 Rather, Finkelstein contended that the findings suggest, at best, a poor,Footnote28 small lot with “hillbillies,” due to the lack of evidence of the existence of administrative, bureaucratic, and military capacities—which would have been critical to indicating the site was the capital of an empire.Footnote29 Furthermore, a 2023 study published in the Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University claims to provide more solid proof that the supposed administrative and economic center of the ancient city was limited to the Temple Mount, not where the alleged City of David is currently said to be located.Footnote30 However, Hillel Geva of Hebrew University and the director of the Israel Exploration Society, as well as the IAA’s Alon De Groot,Footnote31 both proponents of the City of David narrative, dispute this claim on the grounds that there is no archaeological evidence to suggest the Temple Mount was the center of ancient Jerusalem.Footnote32
These disagreements are not new. A 1999 article titled, “The Bible: No Evidence on the Ground,” penned by professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Ze’ev Herzog, declared that, after excavating for more than seventy years, archaeologists discovered that, “the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus,” nor did they “conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel.”Footnote33 Herzog further asserted that, although “these facts have been known for years … no one wants to hear it.”Footnote34 Indeed, the Temple Mount hypothesis cannot be corroborated archaeologically due to restrictions at the site. As historian Nadav Na’aman put it, the narrative of a City of David is nothing more than “extraordinary fiction,”Footnote35 raising questions about the very existence of King David, let alone his city.
Yet, despite the ongoing refutations of claims to the City of David being located in Wadi Helweh, biblical archaeology pummels forth at the site in order to realize Elad’s vision of a “biblical park” being created “by blasting through layers of other cultures … trashing artifacts and human remains in the process.”Footnote36 Indeed, archaeologists have described the process as “theme park tourism”Footnote37 pointing to the “Disney-fication”Footnote38 of the site. Even Elad Vice President Doron Spielman confirmed that the City of David “is a biblical Disney World” with the qualification of it being “actually real.”Footnote39 It is these biblical enactments,Footnote40 as well as the concomitant erasure of other heritages from the site—Christian, Muslim, or anything but Jewish—that have led many to contest Elad’s initiatives as well as their myriad repercussions on Palestinians.Footnote41 An Israeli interviewee shed light on the situation: “The Antiquities Authority, initially in disagreement with Elad, was supposed to oversee Elad. Now, it’s the other way around.”Footnote42 This observation was complemented by another interviewee who emphasized “the erasure of the plurality of the site and the pushing out of Palestinians.”Footnote43
Absenting Palestinians in Elad’s Biblical Disneyland
In realizing one of its key settler-colonial goals, “residential revitalization,” Elad uses a variety of measures to absent Palestinians from their properties in Wadi Helweh.Footnote44 One of the ways it has done so is through Israel’s 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, which has been repeatedly leveraged to render “absent” Palestinian property owners despite being actually present.Footnote45 Once deemed to belong to an absented Palestinian, the Israeli regime confiscates the property and transfers it to the Office of the Custodian of Absentee Property, which then transfers it to third parties like Elad.Footnote46 Other methods of displacing Palestinians include dubious or outright purchases of their properties, as well as leaving them no choice but to leave due to archaeological excavations that damage the foundations of their homes.Footnote47
As a Palestinian from the neighborhood whose home was being impacted by archaeological digs described: “We suddenly feel the ground shaking beneath our feet.”Footnote48 Another asked: “How can we stay when the foundations of our houses are destroyed?” They then explained: “We have no choice but to leave, but then we have to come back. If we don’t, the settlers will take our homes,”Footnote49 referring to Israel’s “forcible transfer”Footnote50 of Palestinians from the neighborhood and their rapid replacement with Israeli-Jewish settlers.Footnote51 This is a necessary component of Elad’s “residential revitalization” scheme that dusts away any Palestinian trace from the space with these archaeological disappearing acts.
“Do you think this is a coincidence?” an Israeli archaeologist asked.Footnote52 “Archaeology … is being used to eject Palestinians and pluck Palestinian homes and lands—many times founded on skewed findings and interpretations.” And despite Israel’s violations of international law in the process, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the significant “destruction” and “appropriation of property”Footnote53—a war crime according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal CourtFootnote54—these modes of expropriation through archaeological excavations are speedily progressing. Indeed, despite refutations by renowned archaeologists and condemnations by international organizationsFootnote55 of the evidenced threat to Palestinians’ very existence, the narrative of the City of David has been circulated widely, even in scientific journals.Footnote56 Its veracity is seemingly unquestioned by many who visit the site, eclipsing the continuity of Israeli annexation and occupation of Palestinian land.Footnote57 Instead, what takes precedence is the belief in divine archaeological proof that legitimates Israeli-Jewish inheritance and unbounded ownership of the land.Footnote58
Present but Nowhere to Be Seen
“If you touch these stones, you can almost feel it throughout your body,”Footnote59 the tour guide told me as we walked through the “biblical park.” It reminded me of Elad Founder David Be’eri’s stated vision that the “site would be restored, both structurally and to the hearts and souls of the Jewish people.”Footnote60 I refer to this extraordinary sort of inner and outer body experience as “irrefutable divine internalization,” a phenomenon whereby individuals and collectives internalize as fact that what they see through the experience of the messianic heritage tour, and how they choose to see it, are real, subsequently espousing the non-evidentiary as truth.
In the City of David, this type of internalization is produced through a settler-colonial space where the phantasm of King David and his eternal Jewish city is everywhere, yet unproven to have ever been present; it is, therefore, nowhere at the same time. This unprovable truth is further internalized through the tours in two ways: by bringing to life supposed archaeological evidence during the daytime with “augmented reality glasses,” permitting the visitor to travel in time and see the City of David as the Israelite capital;Footnote61 and through three-dimensional projections onto the ruins and the walls of the Old City during the night.Footnote62 Importantly, both visual tours are augmented with aural experiences in which storytellers speak to visitors of almost tangible vestiges of King David. Rounding out the sensorial experience,Footnote63 underground, tourists walk the passageways that kings and prophets supposedly once trod—complete with a cable car and suspension bridge rising into the sky.
Heritage tourism in the City of David is thus a type of creationism that is not only beholden to the imagination of those that produced it, but also fueled by the desire of its visitors to further affirm what they already want to know.Footnote64 This is especially prevalent when heritage narratives fantastically reproduce visitors’ predisposed beliefs and reconcile their existential reckonings. Indeed, tourists’ willingness to extricate and make meaning from external structures that lend themselves to theological and national exaltation and immanent ownership is part and parcel of producing and reproducing an exclusivist narrative of heritage. In turn, this provides a reciprocal relationship between heritage tourists and those who manufacture it: not only is their notion of reality mirrored, but it is also magnified through settler-colonial, experiential, messianic tourism where seeing is believing. This is further facilitated when the world of the City of David, juxtaposed with Palestinian Wadi Helweh, is presented to be peopled with those who belong to the so-deemed right religion and right race, and who are situated in the biblically ancient yet miraculously modern Zionist archaeological settlement.Footnote65
On the other hand, the repetitive convincing that takes place through irrefutable divine internalization is what the same individuals and collectives choose not to see. In effect, visitors’ willingness to internalize that which has been produced for their afferent experience as irrefutable and divine necessitates exclusivity, denial, and re-presentation—or, simply, not seeing others or their heritages. In fact, the survival of Israel’s heritage tourism industry depends on this. When I asked the tour guide who commented that there were Nazarenes and Muslims in the vicinity, if he was referring to Palestinians who happened to be Christians and Muslims, he was amused and laughed saying that “Palestinian” was a word that the Romans made up. He brushed my inquiry aside, flippantly stating that Palestinians did not exist. Instead, he reidentified them as some people pegged to a religion rather than a nation.
This type of rhetorical claims making was as relevantly annihilating as were the sensorial experiencesFootnote66 in the City of David tour. Not only were the “other,” non-Jewish heritages of the site generally absented and, at best, minimized through supposed archaeological evidence, the very existence of Palestinians was mocked. The supposed fact of their nonexistence was repeatedly hammered in on the tour to the extent that it seemingly caused a form of “cognitive blindness”Footnote67 among the other tourists who did not seem to think twice about my question, or about the tour guide’s answer.
This was starkly evident upon exiting the site. As is typical, Palestinian children ran up to us, asking where we were from and if they could have their photographs taken; however, the tourists walked right past them. Instead, captivated by the City of David experience, it was as though they were waiting for a photo op with a King David who would appear around the corner at any moment in this past-is-present nowhere place. Imagination appeared to be the only truth as they internalized that narrative and derived their essentializationFootnote68 from archaeological remains. The tourists looked right through the Palestinian children standing before them who seemingly became mere fleeting ghosts, as did the looming favela-like Palestinian Wadi Helweh that formed a crescent around us. In plain sight, both were somehow not there.
In this settler-colonial space where stones and biblical stories about them are vitalized and rendered more believable than living, breathing Palestinians, no Nakba, no Wadi Helweh, no ethnic cleansing, no annexation, and no occupation are happening. Indeed, the City of David archaeological settlement exemplifies a Zionist-Jewish space where what has been made to be real has, in effect, become real, sweeping over forms of settler-colonial erasure and expropriation that render irrelevant the non-reality of an irrelevant non-people who never existed anyway—a case of what is out of mind becoming out of sight.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Espinosa-Najjar
Dr. Espinosa-Najjar has a PhD in law, a master’s degree in global politics, and extensive expertise in human rights, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding. The essay draws on in-depth research and interviews with Israeli, Palestinian, and international actors during and after the doctoral fieldwork process.
Notes
1 Personal conversation with a City of David tour guide, December 16, 2019, East Jerusalem.
2 Sonia Najjar, “Calling a Spade a Spade: The Case of East Jerusalem,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture (blog), 2011, https://www.pij.org/blogs/114.
3 David Landy, “The Place of Palestinians in Tourist and Zionist Discourses in the ‘City of David,’ Occupied East Jerusalem,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 309–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1284684.
4 Doron Spielman, “Doron Spielman, Vice President, City of David Foundation,” ILTV Israel News, September 4, 2018, YouTube video, 4:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-nDEq63KeU.
5 Moshe Gilad, “Floating over Jerusalem without Ever Seeing the City’s Arab Residents,” Haaretz, July 9, 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-07-09/ty-article-magazine/.premium/floating-over-jerusalem-without-ever-seeing-the-citys-arab-residents/0000017f-e5be-dc7e-adff-f5bf1e1e0000.
6 Olivia Sandri, “City Heritage Tourism without Heirs: A Comparative Study of Jewish-Themed Tourism in Krakow and Vilnius,” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography 646 (2013), https://doi.org/10.4000/cybergeo.25934; Mark A. Bonn et al., “Heritage/Cultural Attraction Atmospherics: Creating the Right Environment for the Heritage/Cultural Visitor,” Journal of Travel Research 45, no. 3 (2007): 345–54, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287506295947.
7 Susan Pollock, “Archaeology and Contemporary Warfare,” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (2016): 215–31, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-095913; Information for Visitors to the City of David National Park, Emek Shaveh, December 2019, https://emekshaveh.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/visitors_info_web_eng-1.pdf.
8 Carlo Aldrovandi, Apocalyptic Movements in Contemporary Politics: Christian and Jewish Zionism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
9 Wendy Pullan and Maximilian Gwiazda, “‘City of David’: Urban Design and Frontier Heritage,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 39 (Autumn 2009): 29–38, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/202657; Raphael Greenberg, “Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem: The Case of Silwan/The City of David,” Public Archaeology 8, no. 1 (2009): 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1179/175355309X402745.
10 Johanna M. Selimovic and Lisa Strömbom, “Whose Place?: Emplaced Narratives and the Politics of Belonging in East Jerusalem’s Contested Neighbourhood of Silwan,” Space and Polity 19, no 2 (2015): 191–205, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2015.1047577; Ahmad Amara, “The Possession of History and the Dispossession of Silwan’s Palestinians,” JPS 52, no. 2 (2023): 85–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2023.2206786.
11 Judaization refers to the almost unilateral emphasis of the (interpreted) Jewish character of Jerusalem and the city’s holy sites.
12 Shalem Plan Overview–The Plan to Reveal Ancient Jerusalem, Emek Shaveh, April 28, 2020, https://emekshaveh.org/en/shalem-plan/.
13 Marguerite Remy and Susan Power, Finding David: Unlawful Settlement Tourism in Jerusalem’s So-Called “City of David” (Ramallah: Al-Haq, 2022), https://www.alhaq.org/cached_uploads/download/2022/11/16/city-of-david-interactive-1-page-view-1668594122.pdf.
14 Rachel Busbridge, “Messianic Time, Settler Colonial Technology and the Elision of Palestinian Presence in Jerusalem’s Historic Basin,” Political Geography 79 (May 2020): 2–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102158.
15 Personal interview with an Israeli archaeologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, December 23, 2019, East Jerusalem.
16 Raphael Greenberg, A Privatized Heritage: How the Israel Antiquities Authority Relinquished Jerusalem’s Past, (Jerusalem: Emek Shaveh, October 2014), https://emekshaveh.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Privatized-Heritage-English-Web.pdf.
17 Personal interview with an Israeli archaeologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 2, 2020, West Jerusalem.
18 Greenberg, “Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem.”
19 Personal interview with a Palestinian archaeologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 2, 2020, East Jerusalem.
20 Personal interview with an Israeli archaeologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, October 9, 2023, West Jerusalem; personal interview with a Palestinian Islamic scholar who spoke on condition of anonymity, October 6, 2023, East Jerusalem; Ruth Margalit, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire,” New Yorker, June 22, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/in-search-of-king-davids-lost-empire.
21 Ilan Ben Zion, “Digging for Jewish History near the Temple Mount,” Hadassah Magazine, May 2017, https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2017/05/04/digging-beneath-surface-temple-mount/.
22 Margalit, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire.”
23 Zion, “Digging for Jewish History near the Temple Mount.”
24 Eilat Mazar, “The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem 1968–1978 by Benjamin Mazar: Final Reports Volume IV (The Tenth Legion in Aelia Capitolina),” Qedem 52 (2011): 1-350, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40142953.
25 Robin Ngo, “King David’s Palace and the Milo” Bible History Daily (blog), January 14, 2023, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/jerusalem/king-davids-palace-and-the-millo/; “The Debate Over ‘King David’s Palace,’” Emek Shaveh, August 20, 2020, https://emekshaveh.org/en/the-debate-over-king-davids-palace/; “King David’s Palace,” City of David Ancient Jerusalem website, accessed January 16, 2024, https://cityofdavid.org.il/en/king-davids-palace-eng/; Steven Erlanger, “King David’s Palace Is Found, Archaeologist Says,” New York Times, August 5, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/world/middleeast/king-davids-palace-isfound-archaeologist-says.html.
26 A personal interview with a Palestinian urban planner who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 2, 2020, and again virtually on October 15, 2022.
27 Philippe Bohstrom, “Did David and Solomon’s United Monarchy Exist? Vast Ancient Mining Operation May Hold Answers,” Haaretz, November 21, 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/MAGAZINE-timna-mines-support-biblical-tale-of-king-david-s-united-kingdom-1.5466612?lts=1630093347922.
28 Gustav Niebuhr, “The Bible, as History, Flunks New Archaeological Tests,” New York Times, July 29, 2000, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/arts/072900david-bible.html.
29 Margalit, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire.”
30 Nadav Na’aman, “Locating Jerusalem’s Royal Palace in the Second Millennium BCE in Light of the Glyptic and Cuneiform Material Unearthed in the Ophel,” Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 50, no. 1 (2023): 111–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/03344355.2023.2190284.
31 Ariel David, “King David’s Jerusalem Wasn’t Where We Thought, New Study Argues,” Haaretz, June 9, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-06-09/ty-article/.highlight/king-davids-jerusalem-wasnt-where-we-thought-new-study-argues/00000188-9649-d3a7-adcf-b74f01390000.
32 Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Translating Truths: Nationalism, the Practice of Archaeology, and the Remaking of Past and Present in Contemporary Jerusalem,” American Ethnologist 25, no. 2 (May 1998): 166–88, https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1998.25.2.166.
33 Margalit, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire,”
34 Margalit, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire.”
35 Margalit, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire.”
36 Saree Makdisi, “The Architecture of Erasure,” Critical Inquiry 36, no 3 (Spring 2010): 519–59, https://doi.org/10.1086/653411.
37 Greenberg, “Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem,” 36.
38 “Insiders’ Jerusalem: Expansion of the National Park in the Visual Basin of the Holy City,” Terrestrial Jerusalem, February 20, 2022, https://t-j.org.il/2022/02/20/insiders-jerusalem-expansion-of-the-national-park-in-the-visual-basin-of-the-holy-city/.
39 Pullan and Gwiazda, “‘City of David.’”
40 Chiara De Cesari, “Ottonostalgias and Urban Apartheid,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5, no. 2 (July 2016): 339–57, https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia.5.2.339_1.
41 Personal interview with a Palestinian professor and lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 2, 2020, East Jerusalem.
42 Personal interview with an Israeli archaeologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 2, 2020, East Jerusalem.
43 Personal interview with a Palestinian professor and urban planner who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 4, 2020, East Jerusalem.
44 Governmental support of Elad’s “revitalization” endeavors include similar and complementary efforts to those spearheaded by the settler organization Ateret Cohanim in the adjacent neighborhood of Batan al-Hawa. In a personal interview with a leading representative of the organization in January 2021, he referred to the Palestinians as “… Amalekites who have taken the place of the legitimate Jewish owners.” The organization has relied extensively on the 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law to lay claim to pre-1948 properties owned by (mainly Yemenite) Jews to “inject and restore Jewish life into the area.” For more on the multidimensional dispossession of Palestinians in Batan al-Hawa, see Eyal Raz and Aviv Tatarsky, Broken Trust: State Involvement in Private Settlement in Batan al-Hawa, Silwan (Jerusalem: Ir Amim and Peace Now, May 2016), https://www.ir-amim.org.il/sites/default/files/Broken%20Trust-Settlement%20in%20Batan%20al-Hawa-Silwan.pdf; Amara, “The Possession of History and the Dispossession of Silwan’s Palestinians.”
45 “Absentees’ Property Law,” Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, accessed December 21, 2023, https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/538.
46 “Absentees’ Property Law,” Adalah.
47 Pullan and Gwiazda, “‘City of David.’”
48 Personal interview with a Palestinian from Wadi Helweh who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 5, 2020, East Jerusalem.
49 Personal interview with one of the heads of a Palestinian NGO, East Jerusalem, November 17, 2019.
50 “Reignited Plan for ‘King’s Garden’ Park Threatens to Displace over 1000 Palestinians from Al Bustan, Silwan,” Ir Amim (blog), March 25, 2021, https://www.ir-amim.org.il/en/node/2627.
51 Remy and Power, Finding David.
52 Personal interview with an Israeli archaeologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, January 4, 2020, East Jerusalem.
53 Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 147, 1949, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-147#:∼:text=Grave%20breaches%20to%20which%20the,suffering%20or%20serious%20injury%20to.
54 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Rome, July 17, 1998, https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-10&chapter=18&clang=_en.
55 The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “UNESCO Slams Israeli Archeological Digs in East Jerusalem,” Forward, July 9, 2015, https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/311747/unesco-slams-israeli-archeological-digs-in-east-jerusalem/.
56 “Discoveries of Eilat Mazar: The Summit of the City of David,” Let the Stones Speak, September–October 2022, https://armstronginstitute.org/52-discoveries-of-eilat-mazar-the-summit-of-the-city-of-david.
57 Shahar Shilo and Noga Collins-Kreiner, “Tourism, Heritage and Politics: Conflicts at the City of David, Jerusalem,” Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research 24, no. 6 (2019): 529–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/10941665.2019.1596959.
58 Shilo and Collins-Kreiner, “Tourism, Heritage and Politics.”
59 Personal conversation with a City of David tour guide, December 16, 2019, East Jerusalem.
60 Amanda Borschel-Dan, “Futuristic Tech Dramatically Illuminates the City of David’s Past,” Times of Israel, June 30, 2017, https://www.timesofisrael.com/futuristic-tech-dramatically-illuminates-the-city-of-davids-past/.
61 “City of David VR,” City of David Ancient Jerusalem website, accessed December 26, 2023, https://cityofdavid.org.il/en/product/the-city-of-david-comes-to-life-vr-tour/.
62 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror,” British Journal of Criminology 57, no. 6 (November 2017): 1279–300, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw066.
63 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “The Occupation of the Senses.”
64 Shilo and Collins-Kreiner, “Tourism, Heritage and Politics.”
65 Rachel Busbridge, “Messianic Time, Settler Colonial Technology and the Elision of Palestinian Presence in Jerusalem’s Historic Basin,” Political Geography 79 (May 2020): 2–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102158.
66 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “The Occupation of the Senses.”
67 Dennis Sandole, “Cognitive Blindness,” Beyond Intractability, 2003, https://www.beyondintractability.org/audiodisplay/sandole-d-9-blindness1.
68 Uzma Z. Rizvi and Murtaza Vali, “The Fertile Goddess at the Brooklyn Museum of Art: Excavating the Western Feminist Art Movement and Recontextualizing New Heritages,” Near Eastern Archaeology 72, no 3 (September 2009): 143–45, https://doi.org/10.1086/NEA20697232.