www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-israel-antiquities_grossmanapr11,1,4619041.story

With a nudge from American colleagues, Israeli and Palestinian archeologists have drawn up a blueprint for sharing their intersecting cultural heritage-if and when peace comes to the Holy Land, where scholarly objectivity is often drowned out by nationalist passions.

The Israeli-Palestinian Archeology Working Group Agreement, heralded by its sponsors as a rare accord between the two peoples, aims to head off the kind of conflicts that have seen U.S. museums pressured to strip their collections of ancient artifacts discovered under another people’s soil.

Three years in the making, the document was unveiled before a conference attended by 50 Israeli archeologists and government officials this week in Jerusalem. It was brokered by archeologists at UCLA and the University of Southern California.

At a time when Israeli-Palestinian violence has spiked despite President Bush’s call for a peace agreement by year’s end, the accord was received with a mixture of hope and skepticism. Even its sponsors’ optimism was guarded.

“It is not a plan; it is a vision,” said Nazmi al-Ju’beh, a member of the Palestinian negotiating team.

Al-Ju’beh noted that, while formulated by private citizens, the agreement was worked out with the knowledge of Israeli and Palestinian officials.

The agreement is based on the return of archeological relics to their place of origin, whether on the Israeli or Palestinian side of a future border. It encourages an exchange of expertise and the enabling of the Palestinians to effectively care for their heritage, and it envisions a future in which both peoples can move freely among all the excavations and museums of the Holy Land.

A spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority, the governmental agency with jurisdiction over archeological heritage, said the agreement will be carefully considered.

The inherent difficulty in translating the document’s words into practice is measured by the fact that several members of the negotiating teams asked not to be publicly identified, fearing ostracism or worse from their communities for working with the perceived enemy.

“That is the problem: Culturally, we’re one country with one archeological history,” said Rafi Greenberg, a member of the Israeli team and a faculty member at Tel Aviv University. “But some people would like to see a border drawn up and the key thrown away.”

Yet if successful, the Israeli-Palestinian agreement could be a model for the resolution of disputes that have bedeviled the archeological community in recent years.

Archeology traces its ultimate origins to grave robbing, and well into its emergence as a scientific pursuit, its pioneers had no reservations about removing art objects, pottery and ancient coins from their homelands to distant museums.

The Greek government has long (and so far in vain) campaigned for the Elgin Marbles to be returned from the British Museum in London to Athens, where they once graced the Parthenon. Court action prompted the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return Greek and Roman antiquities to the countries where they were found.

Professional organizations of archeologists now subscribe to the principle that artifacts belong to the descendants of those who fashioned them.

‘Repatriation’ provision’

Accordingly, this week’s agreement provides for the “repatriation” of artifacts and museum collections taken over by Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank-the logical site of any future Palestinian state.

While the document envisions repatriation of objects both ways across future borders, Israeli archeologists would have the most to lose because of their numerous digs in the West Bank.

Some remain unconvinced by the negotiating teams’ assurance that, wherever housed, the product of their labors will remain available for scientific investigation. Skeptics within the archeology community claim similar promises were made when the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egyptian control, yet they allegedly lost access to ancient objects Israelis had dug out of its sandy soil and eventually had to return.

“We’re trying to head off conflicts like that before they happen,” said Lynn Swartz Dodd, a faculty member at the University of Southern California and one of two principal sponsors of the talks. She recalled that, initially, the two teams of archeologists had such disparate viewpoints that they needed the scholarly equivalent of marital counseling. “We hired a facilitator for them,” Dodd said.

Distinct narratives

That negotiator had his work cut out for him because Israelis and Palestinians have distinct “historical narratives,” Greenberg noted.

Israel was born 60 years ago during what Israelis call the War of Independence; Palestinians recall the events of 1948 as the nakba-the disaster. The conflicts that followed only deepened a mutual propensity to read the past according to contemporary struggles.

Israeli ultranationalists consider the whole of the biblical lands, and the archeological treasures they contain, their indivisible patrimony. During the ill-fated peace talks of 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat claimed to U.S. envoy Dennis Ross that there was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

Al-Ju’beh said the contentious history predates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It dates to the middle 19th Century, when Christian visitors [from Europe] ‘rediscovered’ the Holy Land,” he said.

Dodd and her UCLA colleague raised the money for the archeologists’ dialogue. Early meetings were held in Europe.

Greenberg said that unless Palestinians and Israelis find a way to share their archeological heritage, a cultural iron curtain could bisect the Holy Land.

In that case, citizens of a future Palestine and those of Israel would be blinded to a fact of history: The ancient Middle East knew nothing of Green Lines or modern political borders. It was one land – a truth that the agreement’s sponsors say would be best grasped by open access to all ancient sites and the invaluable historical clues they have yielded.

Plus, there might just be a political dividend.

“Maybe someday,” Greenberg said, “someone will take our blueprint out of a desk drawer and look at it as an example of the possibility of peace.”

rgrossman@tribune.com