Israel's archaeological apartheid: an update

A new report from Jasper Nathaniel

Last year, I reported for The Drift from Sebastia, a Palestinian village in the West Bank that was built around the ruins of at least ten major civilizations. It is, among other things, the site of Samaria, the northern capital of the ancient Israelites some three thousand years ago. For some religious Zionists, this sliver of Jewish history makes Sebastia one of the most coveted tracts of land in the West Bank.

In my Drift piece, I relayed the account of Sebastia’s mayor, Mohammed Azem, who said that in May 2023, Israeli forces warned him that he would be arrested if the town conducted municipal work in or around any of the village’s heritage sites. This November, the Israeli Civil Administration announced an expropriation order for Sebastia’s historic acropolis and the surrounding area, which includes homes and shops and comprises nearly forty percent of the village’s total land — on the grounds of “intentional neglect by the landowners and the Palestinian authorities.” The Israeli occupation bars Palestinians from maintaining their own heritage sites, then cites the resulting deterioration as justification for taking them.

In a social media post announcing the land confiscation in Sebastia, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu declared that “the flag of the invented people will be removed from Ahab’s palace and replaced by the flag of the Jewish people.” But the Heritage Minister seemed to mix up the heritage sites: the graphic he posted showed an Israeli flag superimposed over the Palestinian flag in Sebastia’s Roman forum — not the hilltop flag by Ahab’s palace. A different site entirely, though perhaps it made no difference to him, since it was swept into the expropriation order all the same.

On the ground, the confiscation process had been underway for months before the expropriation order. Israeli excavations, which began in May 2025, had already transformed the landscape. When I returned to Sebastia this October, I found that Israel had effectively built an archipelago of militarized archaeological outposts. The neighboring Shavei Shomron settlement had inaugurated a new “dirt filtering facility.” Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, who is spearheading the transformation of Sebastia into a tourist attraction, candidly described the opening as “not just an archaeological event, but an actual act of sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, the human cost has continued to escalate. On January 19, weeks after I published my Drift story, an Israeli sniper shot and killed fourteen-year-old Ahmad Jazar near Sebastia’s kindergarten. In response to questions about Ahmad’s killing, the IDF told me that a soldier had “responded with fire” after “terrorists hurled stones toward IDF soldiers.” But the shot that killed Ahmad came from several hundred meters away — much farther than a stone could be thrown. When I pointed this out, the IDF told me that the “incident is under review.” Ayman Shaer, the 27-year-old construction worker whose shooting I described in my Drift piece, is still bedridden, his leg held together by pins. Elsewhere in Sebastia, beyond the archaeological sites, settler outposts have spread across agricultural fields, and armed settlers and soldiers have blocked local farmers from reaching their own land.

If completed, the new expropriation will be the latest step in the march toward de facto annexation that Israel has been pursuing through its archaeological policy, which is hardly confined to Sebastia: on December 4, Israel’s Civil Administration raided another archaeological site near Ramallah, seizing Roman columns and dozens of other artifacts and transferring them to an Israeli-run museum.

Abroad, there have been some glimmers of pushback — last month, the U.K.’s Palestine Exploration Fund announced it would boycott Israeli archaeologists working in the occupied West Bank — but the pressure is on individual researchers, not on the state apparatus enabling them. All the while, a cascade of new land orders, legal workarounds, budget reallocations, and administrative sleights of hand have quietly consolidated Israeli control over the West Bank. The IDF has even created an online campaign called “In the Path of Judea,” which invites soldiers and the Israeli public to visit West Bank archaeological sites and outposts in order to strengthen their connection to the land.

In one video from October, a soldier strolls through the ruins of Sebastia — pausing to sit on toppled Roman columns and rest his boot on the ancient stone — describing, in Hebrew, how Jews in the 1940s trekked “through an area with no Jewish settlement at all,” “evading not only British police but also hostile Arabs” to reach “Samaria.” “Here they learned what the land of the Bible really is,” he says. “Here it’s truly possible to discover the homeland.”

He ends with an invitation: “Come visit,” he says, “and may we meet on the paths of Samaria.”

Jasper Nathaniel is a Brooklyn-based writer and reporter. He covers Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and other political and cultural affairs on infinitejaz.substack.com.

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Image credit: John Kazior