The intentional destruction of Palestinian heritage by Israel, despite its own ratification of the first 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, is part of its drive to erase the history of Palestinian and Arab identity in the region. The Israeli entity accelerates the destruction, theft, and appropriation of the Palestinian people’s heritage through Zionist archaeological programmes which form a significant ideological underpinning of Zionist expansionism. It is a practice fundamental to the colonisation of Palestine.
The Zionist state’s murderous invasion of Lebanon and contempt for any ceasefire agreements there has not only destroyed many lives but is erasing the region’s rich cultural heritage. Israeli strikes on the ancient city of Tyre have brought death, but also severe damage to the city’s historical sites. These bombardments mirrored the Zionist state’s deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of the regions it has seized. UNESCO has confirmed malicious Zionist damage to 164 historic sites there since October 2023.
Through substantial state funding, educational programmes and extensive media coverage, archaeology has been twisted into a cultural tool of Israeli settler society. Prior to the founding of the Israeli state, Zionists were already employing archaeology to provide its aligned settlers with a fashioned history of the ‘homeland’. These histories diminished Palestinian heritage in order to foster a new Israeli national identity and manufacture the new settlers’ connection to the later stolen land. After the violent seizure of territory in 1948 – and the massive influx of Ashkenazi (European) Jews – Zionists intensified this approach by investing considerable funds into archaeological projects, aiming to concoct a ‘national’ origin for the newly imposed artificial state.
Zionists used the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh (adopted by Christians in the second century) to search for this national origin. Its muddle of thin and scattered historic memories subsequently contorted and elaborated into mythological narratives were interpreted as historical justifications to shape excavations as searches for ancient Israelite and Judaic settlements. Archaeologists excavated in the Upper Galilee and Hazor with predetermined conclusions, reading the Bible as an historical text. They sought to formulate the basis for the existence of an ancient Israelite nation-state comparable with the contemporary Zionist state.
Their practice was underpinned by the pseudoscientific presumption that distinct nations and ethnicities could be traced back archaeologically across the landscape, in order to allow Zionists to reclaim an ancient ‘national’ territory. This absurd ‘nationalistic’ perversion of archaeology arbitrarily correlated artefacts with ethnicities, casuistically obscuring the region’s cultural diversity where trade and interaction between Philistines, Canaanites and other ancestors of Palestinians, governed the material record. It happily overlooks those parts of Jewish/Christian myths (the Book of Numbers) stating that the Israelites were outsiders, who invaded and conquered the land in the first place and that in the process Moses ordered the extermination of the resident Amorites, Midianites, and Canaanites. In creating the theocratic myth of a divinely approved perpetual residence, Zionists framed Palestine exclusively as the Jewish national home for modern settlers, who have a ‘right’ to reclaim it, justifying their anachronistic and savage colonial occupation.
Following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967 the Zionist state immediately planned excavations in Jerusalem, in violation of the Hague Convention. Through these illegal excavations, Zionists aimed to establish the continuity of an ancient Israelite presence in Jerusalem, to be able to reclaim it as their own capital. To engineer this artificial continuity, archaeologists deliberately ignored the fact of the preceding historical presence of Palestinians, in order to fabricate the ridiculous myth of an empty land ready for settler reclamation. This myth, which plays a role similar to Hitler’s ‘lebensraum’ doctrine, is now extended to the West Bank, along with comparable notions of racial superiority. To strengthen this claim, Zionists not only unearth material from ancient Judah and Israel, but take Palestinian artefacts from excavations, displaying them in museums as Israeli objects while denying their Palestinian origin.
In November 2025, the Israeli ‘Civil Administration’ issued an expropriation order covering nearly 450 acres of privately owned land around the Sebastia archaeological site. It is the largest antiquities-related land seizure in the West Bank since Israel’s internationally illegal occupation began in 1967. The aim is to separate the archaeological mound there from the Palestinian town of Sebastia and destroy the town’s tourist income, as well as its use of its extensive olive orchards. Zionist campaigns focus especially on the tendentious findings from the ‘Israelite Kingdom’, from the 9th and 8th century BCE, ignoring everything else, the Greek columns, the Roman temple, the Byzantine church, the Ottoman Mosque, as irrelevant to their story.
For twenty years archaeology has become a tool, a mechanism, to justify both Jewish settlement and the displacement of Palestinians all across the West Bank. However, Zionists do not merely use archaeology to justify their military occupation ideologically. It is also weaponised to assist in the physical erasure of Palestinian history. Archaeologists conducting illegal excavations in the Palestinian district of Silwan in East Jerusalem, dating from the Canaanite period, occupy and destroy Palestinian residences based on its identification as the biblical ‘City of David’. Because of its proximity to the Old City’s ‘Holy Basin’, it is a major focal point for Zionist claims over the entire city’s future. Zionists have contentiously attempted to correlate remains with David’s ‘palace’– using a single shattered stone remnant – and despite lack of evidence beyond the Book of Deuteronomy, which claims he was one of the legendary United Monarchy’s four ‘Kings’. To claim the land as Israeli, archaeologists demolish villages, displace Palestinians, and appropriate their heritage. Zionists claim the neighbourhood of Al-Bustan as the biblical ‘King’s Garden’ based solely on its name, despite it being only 1,000 years old. In order to displace local Palestinians, the Zionist state seeks to raze 100 homes and cynically convert the area into a biblical park.
In order to prove their own indigeneity and to justify their occupation, Zionists destructively dig through thousands of years of Islamic, Byzantine and Roman history to reach the Iron Age layers of the ancient Israelites. Zionist archaeologists utilise bulldozers to reach these layers, destroying the layers above and consciously erasing the Palestinian heritage that disproves the Zionist myth. The layers of history that archaeologists deliberately destroy were accumulated over centuries, forming levels upon which Palestinian villages stand, signifying thousands of years of continued habitation. It is this continuous history that Zionists destroy to fabricate their own claims, erasing the deep connection between Palestinians and their land.
Harri Robin
