'Tunnel vision' How Israel is using archaeology to make its case for complete control

When Marco Rubio visited Jerusalem this month, the itinerary his Israeli hosts laid on involved more archaeology than anything else.

- Julian Borger

On the first day, Benjamin Netanyahu took the US secretary of state underground to excavations near the Western Wall. On the second, Israel's prime minister gave his American visitor the honour of inaugurating a tunnel burrowed under a Palestinian district. It ran along the “Pilgrimage Road”, a Roman-era street in the City of David archaeological park established by an Israeli settler organisation.

Both events were intended to emphasise Jerusalem’s Jewish roots and its status, Netanyahu stressed, as “our eternal and undivided capital”.

While Rubio was on his tour, Israeli planes bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City, pulverising three decades of work.

The battle over history has long been part of the broader Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Officials from the Israel Antiquities Authority have followed Israeli troops into occupied zones in search of artefacts.

But that struggle has seldom been as conspicuous as in the past month. Rubio’s tour was designed to underline a shared Judeo-Christian history focused on Jerusalem that binds the evangelical base of the Republican party to the state of Israel.

Along with their wives, Netanyahu and Rubio were accompanied by a man who embodies that bond, Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Baptist pastor, US ambassador to Israel and an unapologetic advocate of Israeli territorial expansion.

He has said “there's really no such thing as a Palestinian” and rejects the term West Bank in favour of the Israeli rightwing use of the biblical terms Judea and Samaria for the occupied territory.