agitated successfully for archaeological control
over the digs. The work also fed Muslim suspi-
cions that the real Israeli goal was to penetrate
the wall and access the sacred platform.
One summer morning in 1981, just after Raid-
ers of the Lost Ark opened in theaters, those sus-
picions were confirmed. Guards from the waqf
encountered a prominent rabbi knocking down
a crusader-era wall that sealed an ancient sub-
terranean gate beneath the sacred platform. The
rabbi believed the lost ark was secreted beneath
the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s oldest
and holiest shrines. An underground scuffle
ensued, and Israeli prime minister Menachem
Begin quickly ordered the gate sealed before the
conflict could morph into a full-fledged inter-
national crisis.
Fifteen years later, it was the turn of Israeli
Jews to express outrage. In 1996 the waqf turned
one of Jerusalem’s most impressive under-
ground spaces, an enormous columned hall
beneath the southeastern end of the platform
known as Solomon’s Stables, from a dusty store-
room into the large Al Marwani Mosque. Three
years later, the Israeli prime minister’s office
granted a waqf request to open a new exit to
ensure crowd safety—Israel controls security on
the platform—but without informing the IAA.
Heavy machinery quickly scooped out a vast
pit without formal archaeological supervision.
“By the time we got wind of it and stopped
the work, a huge amount of damage had been
done,” recalls the IAA’s Jon Seligman, then in
charge of Jerusalem archaeology. Nazmi Al
Jubeh, a Palestinian historian and archaeolo-
gist at Birzeit University, disagrees. “Nothing
was destroyed,” he says. “I was there, monitor-
ing the digging to be sure they did not expose
archaeological layers. Before they did, I yelled,
‘Khalas!’ ”—Enough! in Arabic.
Israeli police later hauled the resulting tons
of earth away. In 2004 a privately funded sift-
ing project started sorting through the dirt and
has so far recovered more than half a million
artifacts. When I visit the project’s lab, archae-
ologist Gabriel Barkay pulls out cardboard boxes
containing chunks of colored marble he believes
came from courtyards surrounding the Jewish
Temple. Seligman and many of his colleagues,
however, dismiss the finds as having little value,
since they were discovered out of context and
might have been deposited on the platform
in later periods. “The paradox,” he adds, “was
Arafat Hamad sits
among the ruins of
his outdoor kitchen,
which he says collapsed
when Israeli archaeolo-
gists tunneled beneath
his home. Hamad and
his Palestinian neigh-
bors complain of costly
damage, but tunnel
builders insist that their
engineering is sound.MANY
PALESTINIANS
BELIEVE THE
JERUSALEM
EXCAVAT I O N S
AND ATTEMPTS
TO DISPLACE
THEM ARE
INTIMATELY
CONNECTED.
60 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC