LETTER FROM JERICHO
The archaeological site of Tell es-Sultan rises a little away from the city center of Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank. It appears to the lay visitor as a simple mound of earth with holes, a tangle of ditches and stairs, a little disappointing for those who go there without first informing themselves. But the Palestinians are not shying away from their pleasure: these remains are the first that they have managed to have classified as a UNESCO world heritage site, by a unanimous vote of the committee meeting in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, in mid -september.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization salutes the universal value of these remains, one of the first known settlements where men became sedentary, from the 10th centurye millennium BC. Around 7,000 BC, the heads of certain deceased people were buried there with an overmodeling of clay: this is one of the first manifestations of religious worship in the region. Then in the Bronze Age one of the first cities worthy of the name in the Near East was built there: a structured and compartmentalized habitat, revealing a social organization, equipped with enclosures and palaces, which flourished near waters from the Jordan and a local spring.
Difficult to contest in substance, this classification nevertheless provoked strong reactions in Israel. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced “a new sign of the cynical use that the Palestinians make of UNESCO, and of their politicization [de l’institution] “. The ministry does not dispute the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority for the site, the result of the so-called Oslo II agreements of 1995, nor its right to submit it to the UNESCO committee. But he believes that this classification knowingly erases the more recent Jewish history of the site, by not mentioning the biblical story of the conquest of Jericho by the Hebrews, led by Joshua, then that of their establishment on the promised land. “They are thus erasing the city’s Jewish but also Christian heritage,” says Lior Haiat, the ministry spokesperson.
“Ultranationalist vision”
Israeli diplomats were pressed to react by a far-right ally, the Minister of national missions Orit Struck, Jewish supremacist from the settler movement. The minister responsible for links with the Jewish diaspora, Amichai Chikli, for his part compared the choice of UNESCO to the propaganda methods of the Thirde Reich. He also feared that the Palestinian Authority “do not damage” the site, “if left unchecked”.
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