Targeting the past

Can the Palestinians preserve their heritage from Israeli aggression? Nevine El-Aref reviews efforts to stop the carnage
Archaeological experts from 11 Arab countries gathered at the Arab League at the start of this month to discuss the destruction of monuments and cultural heritage in Palestine, and to suggest appropriate measures to protect them as world heritage sites. Palestinian antiquities experts were unexpectedly prevented from attending by Israeli-imposed exit restrictions.
The three-day conference approved a draft resolution put by the UNESCO's World Heritage Committee (WHC), and recommended a full inventory be compiled of damaged Christian and Islamic monuments in Palestine in advance of the June WHC meeting in Budapest.
The archaeologists also called on the Arab League to call on all members of the WHC and on the UNESCO director-general to accord Bethlehem, Hebron, the old city of Nablus and other historical sites in Palestine all necessary protection.
Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the recommendations were vital to exposing Israel's crimes against Palestine's heritage. "It is essential to help our Palestinian brothers protect and preserve their cultural heritage," Hawass said.
Antiquities officials are suggesting that, following the example of Algeria, each Arab country mount a temporary Palestinian heritage exhibition.
Over the last month the world has witnessed devastating damage done to the West Bank cities of Nablus, Tulkarem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and the old city of Hebron. Tanks, missiles, shells and bulldozers have turned the core of Nablus into rubble, destroying two thousand years of Palestinian cultural heritage and wiping many traces of a history going back to 71 BC. There has also been much destruction in Bethlehem, the most important of all Christian sites.
The Palestinian National Committee of ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites) has written to UNESCO director Koïchiro Matsuura: "F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters have made pinpointed missile assaults from the air on Nablus's Ottoman-era structures such as khans, an 18th-century hammam (public bath), a traditional soap factory and a number of distinguished historic family palaces. A side door of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ... was blown out and mosaics shattered by snipers. Jamal Abdul-Nasser mosque, on Manger Square, was burned." Roman water resources and several mosques -- including 20 per cent of the 1,800-year-old building of the Al- Kabir mosque, originally a Byzantine church -- have been destroyed. The letter, a copy of which was given by ICOMOS to Al-Ahram Weekly, described the situation as "a cultural vandalism" of the Palestinian past and present.
Restoration and urban development in Nablus and Bethlehem prior to the Israeli invasion, intended to prevent some of the priceless monuments from collapse, was brought to an abrupt halt. Mo'ein Sadeq, director-general of the archeological department at Palestine's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, said all the work carried out by the international community two years ago to restore Manger Square and other sites in Bethlehem, to coincide with the millennium celebrations, had been undone by the Isaeli army. "It is the same scene in the old commercial hub of Nablus, which has existed since Roman times," Sadeq told the Weekly.
In the meantime, Mohamed Sobeih, the Palestinian representative to the Arab League, told the Weekly that the archaeological destruction was a deliberate attempt to uproot Palestinian history and reinforce Zionist claims. Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, Egypt's representative at UNESCO for Jerusalem Affairs, has warned against the serious repercussions of Israeli excavations under Al-Aqsa.
Hemdan Taha, Head of the Palestinian antiquities office in Jerusalem, said that since it seized East Jerusalem in 1967 Israel had realised that stating its patrimony would only be possible through the ratification of its identity and sovereignty. This led to a series of destructive moves. Four days after the June 1967 war began, the Israelis demolished the Moroccan zone (Hay Al-Magharba) in East Jerusalem, with its two 15th-century mosques and 135 houses, to clear an area in front of the Western Wall. They closed the Moors' Gate and converted the Boraq Wall into the Wailing Wall. They looted the Palestinian National Museum and turned the building into the Israel antiquities bureau.
Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa remained the main target. In 1969, the Salaheddin menbar at the mosque's eastern gate burned down, while in 1984 there was an attempt to blow up the mosque.
Saleh Lamie, a member of the international branch of ICOMOS, said archaeological digs carried out by a group of rabbis had demolished many of the Islamic and Coptic artifacts all over Palestinian territory. For example, the treatment of the remains of four Umayyad palaces discovered in 1998 at the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was a grave violation of Palestinian heritage. Despite the Palestinian waqf jurisdiction (an administrative office responsible for religious endowments) over the palaces, the Israeli antiquities authority ruined their authenticity by building a metallic pergola in the central courtyard. In 1999, an evaluator of the World Heritage Sites revealed that owing to Israeli intervention and neglect the palaces had lost many archaeological features. "The Israeli authority has trivialised their authenticity," Taha said.
Following the latest escalation on violence, UNESCO's Matsuura has written to Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres urging them to exert all effort "to respect the sacred character of religious sites, not only those known as the 'Holy Places', but all other structures built around them in the region, which was the cradle of civilisations and are the symbol of our shared humanity."
He also called on the State of Israel, as a party to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to do everything within its power to ensure compliance with this convention in all the Palestinian autonomous territories. "This cultural heritage is the most striking symbol of the fruitful interaction between peoples, cultures and religions," Matsuura said. "In destroying it, we jeopardise the future."
At its 26th session in Paris on 8 April, the WHC adopted a draft resolution for discussion in Budapest. Abdel-Maqsoud said the draft recommended a number of demands, most important of which was the condemnation of Israeli crimes committed against the common cultural heritage of humanity. It strongly urged the protection of Palestinian heritage in its multi-cultural diversity. It also recommended assigning a UNESCO technical fact-finding mission to investigate, assess and evaluate the extent of the destruction.
Sheikh Zayed Al-Nehiyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, has offered to restore the Church of the Nativity once the Israeli forces leave. Promising as they appear, however, Abdel- Maqsoud fears that "all these reactions will not fit in with American wishes." America's UNESCO observer Shirley M. Hart has objected in a statement to the WHC's draft resolution. According to Hart, the draft did not abide by the UNESCO charter. "Adequate time was not permitted to review the resolution and there was no time for its debate," the statement said.
However, Hart's words have been received with scepticism. "According to the UNESCO charter, the US as an observer does not have any rights," Lamie argued.
Attributing the US reaction to its Israeli bias, Hawass said the WHC issued a similar resolution last year when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan. "What they are doing is only an attempt to abort UNESCO and Arab world efforts to condemn Israel," he said.
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