Judaization Underground – How Archaeological Tourism in Occupied East Jerusalem Targets Palestinian Lives and Jewish Minds

We enter the so-called City of David – a glistening, modern stone edifice built on multiple levels in the hillside, with open vistas onto the town of Silwan – amidst a deafening cacophony of children’s voices, shouting, laughing, shrieking with joy.

Even though we are on the south end of occupied East Jerusalem, a supposedly Palestinian area, these are not Palestinian children. Nor, despite my previous misconception, is the “City of David” another illegal Jewish settlement among the 14 planned “neighborhoods” and dozens of individual units already thriving in East Jerusalem (500+ Israeli settlers live in Silwan alone). No, the hundreds of clamoring children who surround us on all sides are Jewish, sent by Zionist organizations and parents in the US, Europe and Israel to be immersed in the physical hasbara meant to captivate their hearts and minds and win their indelible allegiance to the Israeli state and Jewish national and ethnic identity.

I am overcome with powerful emotions in this place — memories of my own proto-Birthright trip to Israel as a Jewish teenager; anger and despair, not at the children themselves so much as the realization that they are being brainwashed with beautiful lies; anguish at the possibility that they could be my own grandchildren (the same age as Anna and Jack). Frozen and weeping, enraged, I can barely move along our procession through this terrible site, filled with frightening contradictions.

As for the “City of David” itself, I learn from our soft-spoken but powerful guide, Daoud (ironically, Arabic for David) that it is a glorified theme park, constructed on an archaeological dig which in turn is constructed on a Biblical myth.

The purpose of the entire project, like many other archaeological sites scattered throughout occupied East Jerusalem, is at least two-fold. One is material, to justify Israeli control over still more parcels of Palestinian land. The other – longstanding, since even before the founding of the Israeli colonial state – to unearth evidence to substantiate that the Biblical King David lived and ruled here before there was any such thing as Palestine or Palestinians or Arabs.

We follow the steps down to one underground excavation site that just appears to be a lot of stones and broken masonry, with no visible workers.

On a higher level Daoud takes us through a gate opening to a much larger excavation, digging up an area the size of a parking lot that used to be a playground for Palestinian children. A Jewish man who appears to be the foreman tells us we can’t be here, it’s off-limits to visitors. We leave, but not without seeing that “security,” Biblical excavation, and tourism form an assemblage – an intricately interrelated system.

In fact, as the Palestinian anthropologist Nadia Abu-El Haj (Facts on the Ground) and Jewish historian Gabriel Piterberg (The Returns of Zionism) have so persuasively shown, no verifiable evidence of King David’s existence or his temple has ever been discovered; and Daoud confirms this.

Israel – the Goliath that keeps pretending to be David and keeps digging for King David’s relics as a pretext for seizing more and more Palestinian land and creating a Zionist dreamworld for Jewish children – personifies the colonial charlatan.