Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

In the early modern period Palestinian place names contributed to the rise of biblical criticism. In the 17th century the rationalist Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam initiated a critical approach to Scriptural Studies by looking at place names in Palestine and the Bible. Using toponyms from Palestine as well as other arguments, he concluded that, contrary to the standard belief among Jews and Christians, Moses did not write the Pentateuch, the five books of the Hebrew Bible.

Palestinian place names attracted the attention of fundamentalist Christians and European imperialists in the 19th century. Toponymic projects and geographical replacing of place names in Palestine became powerful tools in the hands of the European powers which competed to penetrate the land of the Bible. The British were the first to recognise and exploit the power of state-sponsored explorations and began to link scriptural geography with ‘restorationist’ schemes, excavations and colonial penetration of Palestine. The first British colony of Kerem Avraham (‘Abraham Vineyard’) began as a small settlement founded in 1855 by the influential British Consul in Jerusalem James Finn, and his wife Elizabeth Anne Finn, the daughter of a noted English Hebrew scholar and herself a Hebrew speaker. James Finn, who served in Ottoman Jerusalem from 1846 to 1863, reigned supreme in the city and he became a central figure in the mid-19th century European penetration of Palestine. He also combined his British diplomatic job with Christian missionary activities. His activities paved the way for the biblical explorations and military mapping of Palestine by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corp on behalf of the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund.

James Finn combined biblical ‘restorationist’ ideology and missionary activities with official British civil service. He and his wife Elizabeth were originally members of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. Also, crucially, he was a close associate of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, a prominent Tory MP, a millennialist Protestant and a key contributor to Victorian Protestant Zionist ‘restorationism’, who invented the myth ‘A land without people, for a people without a land’. In the early 1850s Finn had purchased Karm al-Khalili, Arabic for ‘al-Khalili Vineyard’, from a local Palestinian for £250.

Al-Khalil is the indigenous Palestinian Arabic toponym for the (biblical)

city of Hebron, a city which both local Palestinian Muslim and biblical traditions link to the Patriarch ‘Ibrahim al-Khalil’ (Abraham); thus Finn used an indigenous name to link firmly the toponym of the modern colony in Jerusalem to biblical traditions.

After the 1967 conquests, the Israeli state was bound to base its conception of Jerusalem upon a mythologised entity, ‘Jerusalem of Gold’, and to invoke abstract historical and ideological rights in the newly acquired territories, as well as resting its claim on territorial expansion and domination and the ‘redemption of land’ through settler-colonisation. The same process of appropriation and erasure of Palestinian heritage and the superimposition of a Zionist Hebrew colonising toponymy on Palestinian sites continued after 1967. Almost immediately after the conquest of East Jerusalem the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which represented the multicultural identity and shared heritage of Palestine, was renamed the Rockefeller Museum. Some items were taken to the Shrine of the Book (Hebrew: Hekhal Hasefer), a wing of the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem, which houses parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947‒1956 in the Qumran caves. The Palestine Archaeological Museum had been located on Karm al-Shakyh, the ‘Vineyard’ of Shaykh al-Khalili, a hill just outside the north-eastern corner of the Old City. The museum had been conceived and established during the Mandatory period, with financial support from the Rockefeller family.

It was opened to the public in January 1938. The museum housed a large collection of artefacts unearthed in the excavations conducted in Palestine in 1890‒1948. Also among the museum’s prized possessions were historical artefacts from the al-Aqsa Mosque and 12th century (Crusader period) marble lintels from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Until 1966 the museum was run by an international board of trustees; it was then taken over by the Jordanian state. Since 1967 the museum has been jointly managed by the Israel Museum and the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (later renamed Israel Antiquities Authority).

The site is now the headquarters of the Israel Antiquity Authorities. While the Palestine Archaeological Museum of the Mandatory period still represented the positive diversity of religions and ethnicities that characterised Jerusalem and Palestine for many centuries, the Israel Museum and Shrine of the Book represent the single-minded determination by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Israel’s heritage industry to Judaise and colonise both the ancient and modern histories of Palestine.