Pool of Siloam Property
Below is a post that Canon Don Binder from St George’s Cathedral East Jerusalem, posted today on Facebook. As some of you may not be on Facebook we decided to include the full text as this is an area you may not be familiar with and is another alarming example of how destructive the Israeli occupation can be.
“Last year, two days after Christmas, the radical settler group Elad, aided by police, raided land in East Jerusalem situated over top of the ancient Pool of Siloam, mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments (Isaiah 22:9, John 9:7).
Although it had been a Greek Orthodox Church-owned property for more than a century, the settler group alleged that they were the actual owners. And so they kicked out the Palestinian family that had been renting and cultivating the property since 1933.
Elad has since boldly advertised that, in concert with the Israel Antiquities Authority, they would soon open “live excavations” of the ancient pool to the public.
Both troubled and intrigued, I hiked down to the site last Friday afternoon in order to see what was going on.
What I discovered shocked me to the core.
As the photo [above] reveals, in less than three months, Elad has almost completely dug-out the five dunam property (1.25 acres), using a controversial excavation method known scornfully in the profession as “Backhoe Archaeology.”
Here, as even the novice dig volunteer knows from the introductory lecture, “Archaeology is destruction.” That is why proper archaeological excavations proceed painstakingly across each 4-by-4 meter square, slowly pealing back each layer. While doing this, excavators document shifts in soil color and pottery deposits in order to preserve the record of each level of civilization.
The use of bulldozers and backhoes precludes such a careful and precise methodology.
From visual inspection, the heavy equipment looks to have dug down to at least three meters below the surface of the site, displacing tons of historical evidence. In short, something that normally takes years of careful archaeological work was dug out in just over two months!
That the settler group did so with such speed suggests at least three motivating factors:
1. Elad did not want the courts to intervene in the property dispute, and so dug as quickly and as widely as possible in order to create “facts on the ground” before any court injunction–or sudden change in government–could stop them.
2. Through its speedy removal of the layers above the first-century occupation (where the bulldozers stopped), Elad demonstrated–at a minimum–a lack of concern for nearly two-thousand years of occupation after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.
3. Elad wishes to expose the entirety of the Pool of Siloam as quickly as possible so as to increase its admission revenues with the opening of such a sensational historical site.
I will admit that, as a student of the Bible and Ancient Middle Eastern history, part of me is thrilled at the prospect of having the complete first-century Pool of Siloam open for the public to explore.
Yet the field of archaeology also has a moral responsibility. When a dig involves legally questionable seizures of privately held property in the politically sensitive area of East Jerusalem–a region that most of the world considers as under military occupation; when it is led by a group whose main agenda is to “Judaize” that part of Jerusalem and displace its Palestinian residents; and when it involves highly questionable methodologies that demonstrate blatant disregard for past civilizations other than one’s own–then, as we say in America, “Houston, we have a problem.”
I hope that the archaeological profession and the public at large will at the very least question and offer their own critiques of this project, keeping in mind the above points.
Unfortunately, archaeology in this region has been and continues to be riddled with similar types of operations–and all too often, nothing is ever said, either due to ignorance or apathy.
For more information on the seizure of the Pool of Siloam property, please click here.
For more information about ethical issues in archaeology in Israel and the West Bank, please visit the site of Emek Shaveh, an Israeli advocacy organization that does actively monitor such morally problematic digs: