Betar and the security fence

THE SITE OF BETAR, the place of Bar Kokhba's last stand, is involved in a controversy over the Israeli security fence:

Beitar's Legacy

by Benny Morris Jun 5, 2012 11:45 AM EDT (The Daily Beast)

In an effort to obstruct the construction of a section of Israel’s security fence—commonly called by Israel’s detractors the "Wall" or "Apartheid Wall," though less than ten per cent is actually a reinforced concrete wall; the rest is a razor-wire fence with sensors—Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week petitioned UNESCO to recognize the West Bank village of Battir, and particularly its terraced agricultural plots and water channels linking them, as a world heritage site. The Palestinians hope that such recognition will prevent Israel from completing this section of the fence.

A deep irony underlies the petition. The village sits on the site of the Judean fortress town of Beitar (or Bethar), where Shimon Bar-Kochba, the leader of the second Jewish revolt against Rome (132-135 AD), made his last stand and died. In the 1980s, Israeli archeologists identified the remains of the citadel and found some Bar-Kochba coins on the hillock called by the local Arabs "Khirbet al-Yahud" (the Jewish ruins) three hundred yards west of the village center, and found the remains of the Roman siege wall and two of the besiegers’ camps. A rock next to one of Battir’s springs has an etched inscription (“Leg V Mac et XI Cl”) identifying the legions, the Fifth Macedonica and Eleventh Claudia, that took part in the siege of Beitar. Presumably Battir’s terraces and water canals were first built by the Jewish inhabitants of the land more than two millennia ago.

The issue is currently before the Israeli courts, which must rule whether the planned route of the fence, just north of the village, which lies three miles west of Bethlehem, will do irreparable harm to the ancient system of terraces and canals that irrigate the village’s olive trees and vegetable gardens on the slopes. This is one of the few places in the West Bank where the ancient terrace-canal system has survived.

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