Museum of Tolerance Special Report / Part II: Secrets from the grave
Round-the-clock work, long shifts and unprecedented security characterized the five-month excavation of the cemetery on the museum site, where sources say more than 1,000 skeletons were unearthed.
By Nir Hasson Tags: Israel news Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance
The earthworks
The first one to excavate the site and come upon human remains was archaeologist Gideon Sulimani. Sulimani, a senior archaeologist with the Antiquities Authority, would come to play a key role in the affair. In December 2005 he began a “rescue excavation” financed, as mandated by Israeli law, by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, intended to remove antiquities, or in this case, human bones, before the area was cleared for construction.
The act of excavation thrills Sulimani, from a scientific point of view. A serious excavation, says Sulimani, could open a window into the lives of Jerusalem’s Muslim residents over the past millennium. In this case, however, he says that there was pressure on him to hurry up and remove the graves without adhering carefully to professional standards.
“They constantly wanted to lengthen the work days and I was always fighting to shorten them. They told me: Switch teams, work in shifts. But I can’t bring someone into someone else’s excavation. That’s something that is not done,” he says.
The pressures Sulimani faced during the excavation were also typical, apparently, of the next part of the works. After the High Court ultimately rejected the Islamic Movement’s petition, in October 2008, and thus permitted work at the site to continue, the digging was resumed with greater urgency. Testimony obtained by Haaretz indicates that the guiding principle of the work was not a careful and scientific archaeological excavation, one that was respectful of the remains found at the site, but rather an excavation that proceeded as quickly as possible so as to leave the whole skeleton affair behind, so that full attention could be turned to building the Museum of Tolerance.
[...]
Museum of Tolerance Special Report / Part III:Unearthing a legal morassExcerpt:
The High Court approved continued digging at the site based on a disputed report submitted by the Antiquities Authority, which ignored warnings of a senior archaeologist that a ‘rescue’ excavation carried out there had been unsatisfactory.
By Nir Hasson
Dueling reportsThese reports are hard to excerpt or summarize, but they are very detailed and the accusations are damning. This story is now being picked up by the rest of the media (e.g., the AP here, the Telegraph here, the Ottawa Citizen here). If the IAA wants to avoid serious damage to its reputation it needs to provide a much fuller response than the brief one published in Haaretz yesterday. This does not strike me as an issue that is likely to go away if it is ignored.
The most important − and contentious − document submitted to the High Court was the opinion drawn up by the Israel Antiquities Authority concerning the condition of the site.
This document raises many questions about the the IAA’s conduct in the affair. After archaeologist Gideon Sulimani left the first stage of excavations, in 2005, he wrote a report in which he noted that the work at the site was far from complete. “The excavation was not completed in most of the excavation area, other than in parts of areas A1 and A2, and the area cannot be reconstructed without the completion of the excavations,” Sulimani wrote in the conclusion to his report, adding: “All told, about 250 remains of bodies were dug up from approximately 200 graves .... Another 200 graves were uncovered which were not excavated. Based on our understanding of the layers of burial, our assessment is that there are all told almost 1,000 graves in the area of the project.”
Instead of Sulimani’s report, the IAA submitted a “supplementary notice” that diverges greatly from the report, to put it mildly. The IAA notice played down the number of human remains at the site and of its overall archaeological importance, paving the way for the release of most of the area to the project’s developers, even though it had not been fully excavated.
The IAA − which by law can require a professional archaeological “rescue” excavation, at the developers’ expense, of a site where there are signs of antiquities − divided the area into a number of sections. The first section, according to the notice submitted to the High Court, was completely cleared; in the second section “only a few dozen graves remained,” the IAA report stated; and in the third section, known as the “purple area,” graves remained, “but the required scientific data were extracted and the area is released for construction on condition that there be no subterranean penetration.”
Sulimani maintains that the IAA submitted a false report to the court. The IAA says that the excavation was ultimately carried out in accordance with Sulimani’s original approach. According to Sulimani, many graves remained even in the areas that the IAA marked as having been completely excavated.
No one informed Sulimani about the change in the IAA’s position; he discovered it while reading the judgment on the Internet. “I was shocked to read it,” Sulimani said in a newspaper interview. “I feel that the IAA betrayed me, betrayed the profession. My feeling is that they threw out all the professional work that I and the excavators did in Mamilla.”
The Museum of Tolerance episode was only the first in a series of disputes between Sulimani and his superiors in the IAA, which ultimately led to his resignation. He is not currently working as an archaeologist.
Part one, response, and additional background here and follow the links.