Israel Protects Jewish Archeological Sites Under Palestinian Attack

All over Israel there are 20,000 archeological sites, testifying to the Jewish presence in the land over the past 3500 years. And in Judea and Samaria (a.k.a the West Bank), Palestinian Arabs have damaged or destroyed sites that testify to that presence. Yet in the Western media, it is the Jews who, in trying to protect those sites under Palestinian attack, are presented as aggressors, seizing “Palestinian” land to which, is claimed, they have no right or title. More on this meretricious coverage can be found here: “How the Media Helps Spread Libels About Israel’s Historical Sites,” by David M. Litman, Algemeiner, August 7, 2026:

News coverage of Israel regularly follows the pattern of inverting cause and effect, or victims and the perpetrators. Justin Klawan’s August 3, 2026, article at The Week, “The politics of archaeology: Israel digs in on control of ancient West Bank sites,” offers a clear illustration of how this process works.

Klawan’s article attempts to build a narrative of Israel “attempting to seize the land around archaeological sites,” such as Sebastia – the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel – as part of “Israel’s movement in the region” to “extend” its control over the West Bank. The controversy, the article implies, began with an Israeli bill empowering a new body to manage archaeological sites there, purportedly to protect said sites. The carefully selected commentators suggest, however, that the bill is an “overzealous” ploy to “expand control” and “annex…occupied land,” forcing the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a “political battle” to protect the sites, namely its effort to declare the ancient Israeli capital a “Palestinian” site at UNESCO.

But this narrative is backwards. It relies on omissions to rhetorically reverse cause and effect.

“The next major fight,” as the article puts it, is not over “Israel…attempting to seize the land,” but precisely the opposite.

Consider several crucial and highly relevant facts which undermine Klawan’s narrative.H [sic]

Israel Already Administered the Site

The Sebastia site is in Area C of the West Bank. As Klawan acknowledges a few paragraphs in, that means it is “under full Israeli civil and security control according to the Oslo Accords,” referring to the internationally endorsed agreement between Israel and the PA signed in 1993 and 1995. Yet, the second sentence of the article tells us “Israel is currently attempting to seize the land…”

Casual readers could be forgiven for missing that Klawan is confusingly suggesting that Israel is trying to “seize” land it is already legally permitted to control, anyway.

The Palestinian Authority’s Destruction of History

But it gets worse.

Klawan completely omits that three years ago the PA paved a road on top of the Sebastia archaeological site, destroying a Herodian era wall and enabling the looting of burial caves. Sadly, this is far from an isolated incident.

Everywhere they can, the Palestinian Arabs have been damaging or destroying Jewish archeological sites, and the Israeli government is only trying to protect them.

Israeli officials have cited incidents like that as necessitating the bill to protect the sites. Indeed, there is a long, documented history of Palestinians damaging and desecrating Jewish heritage sites. Perhaps Israel’s “claims,” as Klawan puts it, that the legislation is necessitated by the “deliberate and systematic destruction” of these sites by the PA are true….

Palestinians have thrown Molotov cocktails at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, and have repeatedly attacked Joseph’s Tomb just outside Nablus. They have built new structures near archeological sites, including some that are not Jewish, that as a result of this new building are weakened. They have also looted sites of their movable antiquities. Among the sites that have suffered are the following: Khirbet Qila (Khirbet Keila), an ancient Bronze Age site and Canaanite city-state that illegal pits and heavy machinery used by illicit diggers searching for marketable antiquities have heavily scarred; Khirbet Wili Shabbuni, a historic site featuring a Byzantine monastery and ancient ruins where extensive looting pits have disrupted ancient strata and stone structures; Khirbet Umm A-Ros, a Second Temple-period site where local antiquity thieves from nearby West Bank villages have been caught pillaging subterranean historical layers.

It is the Palestinians who loot Jewish archeological sites, firebomb Jewish religious sites in Judea and Samaria with Molotov cocktails, cover over other sites with asphalt roads, as happened at Sebastia, the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the 9th century B.C. King Herod later rebuilt and renamed it Sebastia in honor of Caesar Augustus. It is also revered as the burial place of John the Baptist. And all the while, the Palestinians claim that Israel’s heroic efforts to protect the Jewish people’s historic heritage (and that of others as well) that are under continuous threat from Palestinian despoilments, is really an attempt to “seize” more land from the Palestinians, even though the land in question rightly belongs — see the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which in 1922 assigned all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean to what was intended to become the Jewish state — that is, to Israel.