On the quiet afternoon of March 5, 2024 in the northern occupied West Bank, I watched as a convoy of Israeli military jeeps drove along a narrow, winding road lined with terraced olive groves, passing the remnants of at least ten major civilizations dating back to the Bronze Age, to the summit of the tallest hill in Sebastia, a Palestinian village of about four thousand people. Near the hilltop archaeological site, a squadron of soldiers climbed out of their jeeps, toppled the flagpole erected there, and removed its Palestinian flag. Whether the soldiers were following orders or going rogue — an IDF spokesperson said that “IDF soldiers are prohibited from removing flags that are not associated with terrorist organizations or unauthorized unions” — the flag disappeared with them. Within an hour, a group of teenagers arrived and raised a new one in its place.

If God shook a dice cup of stone ruins and rolled them across the green earth, it might look something like Sebastia. The main acropolis slopes into a small town square, where locals sit in plastic chairs under towering arches. Some of the homes are built from Roman blocks; some are dotted with bullet holes. To the neighboring settlers, Sebastia is known by another name: Samaria, after the three-thousand-year-old capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and their preferred term for the surrounding region. Settlers refer to the entire West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” reverting to biblical toponyms to bolster their religious entitlement to the land. Just past the valley, on top of another hill, you can see where the settlers live: a plot of cream-colored houses with terracotta roofs known as Shavei Shomron, or Returnees to Samaria.

The high-stakes game of capture the flag has been playing out intermittently for years, but since October 7, soldiers have been coming to the hilltop with increasing frequency and hostility, sometimes firing warning shots as they drive up the road. On March 6, they turned their guns on a crowd and hit Ayman Shaer, a 27-year-old construction worker, in the thigh with a butterfly bullet. He collapsed near the acropolis. Shaer’s father told Al Jazeera that the soldiers beat him when he tried to help and blocked an ambulance from reaching his son. The soldiers continued up the hill and left with the flag. Before nightfall, the teens had raised a new one: an act of defiance not without its risks. Sebastia’s Mayor Mohammad Azem told me that earlier this year an IDF commander warned him that if the flag-raising continued, the recently renovated village center would be demolished — even though it is situated within a forum built by King Herod of Judea in the first century B.C.E., a landmark of the Jewish history that, in the settlers’ view, gives them a right to Sebastia in the first place. (The IDF declined to comment on the shooting of Shaer and on Azem’s allegation.)

The struggle over the flag, fought among the ruins, is also a struggle over the ruins themselves, the history those ruins speak to, and what they say about who gets to live on this land. With the world’s focus on Israel’s multi-front war across the Middle East and its continued destruction of Gaza — a place with relatively little religious significance for Jews — the most extreme right-wing cabinet ministers in Israel’s history have kept their eyes on the true prize: “Judea and Samaria.” This summer, two new policy initiatives, both nominally limited to governing archaeological practice, opened a bureaucratic pathway for Israel to annex the West Bank. So far, these measures have gone mostly uncovered by the international press. 

When I checked into Sebastia’s Al-Kayed Palace Guest House in March, its owner told me I was his second guest since the start of the war — the first was in January, and it was also me. I met Zaid Azhari, a tour guide who offered to take me around town and translate my interviews, at a chicken shack warmed by vats of boiling olive oil. The locals were discussing what they termed the “ice cream ceasefire,” a reference to Biden’s recent remark — made while holding a mint chip cone — that he hoped a deal would be announced soon. “Once Israel has wiped out Gaza,” Azhari asked me, “will your media pay attention to what’s happening here?”

On October 1, 2023, a group of IDF soldiers and settlers from Shavei Shomron accompanied a cohort of Israeli politicians on a visit to Sebastia. Among them were Yossi Dagan, the head of the Samaria Regional Council, who oversees 35 settlements in the northern West Bank and would be photographed just weeks later distributing assault rifles to settlers, and Idit Silman, Israel’s Minister of Environmental Protection. A video Silman shared on Facebook depicts the pair strolling through part of Sebastia’s acropolis, where a Roman basilica once stood. Now, it is a two-thousand-square-meter expanse of patchy grass and stone formations framed by three surviving colonnades. They take selfies with settler children and pose with men in Israelite costumes. “Only those who aren’t connected to this place, only those whose hearts are not here, could destroy and desecrate this historical place,” reads the text overlay. “The amazing land of Israel belongs to us,” a caption adds, “and we will continue to expand in and settle it.”

The visit marked the festival of Sukkot, but the entourage was also celebrating something else: the Knesset’s approval, that May, of Silman’s $8.8 million proposal to transform Sebastia’s ruins into an Israeli tourist destination, akin to the City of David, a theme park in Palestinian East Jerusalem that critics have referred to as a “biblical Disneyland.” In July, Israel allocated an additional $32 million to preserve and develop heritage sites across the West Bank, with what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “significant budget” for cameras, drones, and other security measures. Announcing the investment, he said, “In every corner of Judea and Samaria, one need only put a spade into the ground in order to uncover archaeological finds that attest to our deep roots in the Land of Israel.” 

Even within the region’s extraordinary archaeological landscape, Sebastia stands apart for the remarkably diverse range of civilizational remains found within its soil — only some of which come from the Israelites. First settled by the Canaanites as far back as 4,000 B.C.E., Sebastia is among the oldest continuously inhabited places in the area. According to the Bible, King Omri purchased the land for 150 pounds of silver thousands of years ago. The city, located at the crossroads of one trade route from the mountainous north and another from the fertile Jordan Valley, became a cultural and commercial hub. The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians then took turns conquering and ruling the region. In 331 B.C.E., Alexander the Great destroyed and rebuilt the city of Samaria. Some three hundred years later, the Romans seized the land, and Emperor Augustus (Greek name: Sebastos) handed it to the Judean King Herod, who renamed it in the emperor’s honor. Over the next 1,500 years, Sebastia saw the rise and bloody fall of the Byzantines, Abbasids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, and Ottomans.

The seeds of an archaeological program connecting the Bible to the land were planted well before Netanyahu’s government began converting ruins into theme parks. In 1867, anticipating the Ottoman Empire’s fall, British explorers from the Palestine Exploration Fund descended on Jerusalem for an extensive land surveying campaign. The Archbishop of York spelled out the true aspiration of this self-proclaimed scientific expedition in a speech at the group’s inaugural meeting: “No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written.” 

For as long as archaeology has existed — straddling the pliable boundary between the hard and soft sciences — it has been implicated in contests over historical narrative and national identity. In her landmark 2002 book, Facts on the Ground, anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj argued that science and ideology are inseparable in archaeology. The “empirical facts” of the discipline are actually cultural products shaped by land access, funding, political interests, excavation methods, the prioritization and interpretation of particular artifacts, and the physical impact of archaeologists’ practices on the land — the laboratory itself is changed with each new study. Abu El-Haj asserted that the Israeli nation-state, its cultural imagination, and the field of archaeology developed in a “mutually constitutive relationship,” each reinforcing and shaping the others. This interplay, she wrote, generated a network of “common-sense assumptions” that formed the epistemological foundation of the Zionist project, influencing everything from national mythology to civic planning. 

When early Zionists arrived in Palestine at the turn of the century, they, like the members of the Palestine Exploration Fund, searched for evidence of Old Testament stories. In 1908, the prominent Jewish American financier Jacob Schiff funded the first dig of Sebastia — which was also the first wholly American excavation in any part of Ottoman Palestine. As the Palestinian architect and artist Dima Srouji has documented, Harvard archaeologists relied on the labor of local men, women, and children to execute the project. They extracted thousands of artifacts and effectively looted the town of its treasures, which they shipped to universities and museums across the world. Such archaeological projects across Palestine grew in scope, reappropriating the Bible into a definitive history upon which a lost people could reclaim their land and rebuild their nation. 

Soon after Israel was founded in 1948, the state’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, encouraged archaeological work, writing that “many mounds await a Jewish spade to disclose the riddle of their past.” Yigael Yadin, who served as the IDF’s chief of staff from 1949 to 1952, went on to lead digs at important sites like Hazor, Masada, and Megiddo in the fifties and sixties. Archaeology became a national obsession, taught in schools, highlighted in museums, and practiced by amateur volunteers. The rugged Israeli Jew, unlike his bookish, diasporic cousins, was to be rooted in the land.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli government quickly set in motion plans to excavate newly occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. These digs violated the spirit of the Hague Convention of 1954 and UNESCO recommendations, which all together affirm that people under military occupation do not forfeit ownership of their cultural assets and that an occupier’s activities must be limited to salvaging and preserving antiquities. But few in Israel objected to the post-war wave of excavations. As Rachel Poser wrote in Harper’s in 2019, “The most fervent critics of archaeology at the time were ultra­orthodox haredim, who believed that the dig was disturbing Jewish graves.” In the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, they threw stones at archaeologists and burned their offices. But opposition began to cool as some rabbis were brought into the bureaucratic bodies that oversaw archaeology and right-wing settlers recognized the discipline’s power to advance their agenda. In 1981, Israel Harel, a founder and chairman of the Yesha Council — a successor to the religious ultranationalist Gush Emunim movement that had been instrumental in the 1977 establishment of Shavei Shomron — sent a memo to Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s administration concerning the occupied territories’ archaeological potential that urged the government “to ensure that the Jewish people are in control of the sites which embody its history, its memories and the most obvious and direct testament to its roots and right to the land.” 

As the archaeologist Alon Arad, the head of an Israeli NGO that fights against the instrumentalization of archaeology in Israel, pointed out to me, the connection between the presence of artifacts and current land rights does not withstand much scrutiny. Following the same logic, Arad said, “Italy can claim ownership over half of England, Mongolia can claim ownership over most of Eastern Europe. Greece can claim ownership over India. It depends where you cut in time.” But the Israeli state has constructed an effective machine for converting archaeological discovery into territorial power. The same year Harel wrote his memo, Israel established the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA) to coordinate its administrative activities in the West Bank, including issuing travel permits, managing infrastructure, and overseeing archaeological heritage sites. The new body created an ostensible firewall between governance of the West Bank and governance of Israel proper. Technically subordinate to the Ministry of Defense, the ICA has demolished Palestinian buildings, evicted residents, and seized land under the pretext of “salvaging or preserving antiquities.” (The ICA declined to comment on these practices.) To the extent that the ICA’s Archaeology Unit engages in authentic research, it largely operates within a black box and is known for publishing its findings selectively, a taboo practice in any scientific community.

Israel’s control over West Bank antiquities tightened with 1995’s Oslo II Accord, which placed more than half of the region’s six-thousand-plus archaeological sites under Israel’s jurisdiction — part of a broader agreement dividing the territory into areas of Israeli and Palestinian control. Arad posited to me that, following the Oslo Accords, religious Zionists “understood how vulnerable the settlements in the West Bank” were, and as part of their “search for new and innovative ways to anchor” the Jewish connection to the land, they embraced projects such as the excavation of the City of David. Settler-driven archaeology “escalated dramatically when they got a second reminder” of their vulnerability following the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza. Today, members of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet endorse the settler movement’s view of archaeology as a tool for dispossession. Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, for instance, has pointed to Jewish “roots and history” on both sides of what he refers to as the “fictitious” Green Line separating Israel from its occupied territories, effectively erasing the distinction between the two — an essential rhetorical and legislative step in the plan for complete annexation.

“Here, I can build,” Jihad Ghazal said, pointing to an interactive map of Sebastia on a dusty monitor. “Here, I can’t.” Ghazal, the town’s municipal engineer, sat chain-smoking in his office, surrounded by half-filled cups of coffee. On his screen, a red zig-zagging line separated Sebastia into zones marked “B” and “C,” denoting two of the three jurisdictions established by the Oslo II Accord. Area A, which does not overlap with Sebastia, is administered by the Palestinian Authority; Area B, where much of the village sits, is under Palestinian civil and joint Palestinian and Israeli security control; Area C, where some of Sebastia’s most cherished archaeological sites are located, is under full Israeli authority.

To rationalize control over West Bank archaeological sites and their surrounding areas, settlers and right-wing Israeli officials frequently accuse Palestinians of raiding and vandalizing ancient Jewish sites. “We must put an end to the extensive looting and destruction that the Palestinian Authority carries out in our country,” Shlomo Ne’eman, a former head of the Yesha Council, told The Jerusalem Post. When Netanyahu announced the latest round of funding, he promised that $4.5 million of it would go to “rehabilitating archaeological sites that have been damaged by the Palestinians.” According to Adi Shragai of the settler lobbying organization Preserving the Eternal, “eighty percent of these sites were damaged severely” as a result of “an organized plan of the Palestinian Authority to take control over these sites and to eliminate the connection of the Jewish people to this country.” 

The use of archaeology to justify contemporary claims to the land may incentivize exactly the behavior Netanyahu and his allies claim they are trying to prevent. “If one knows for a fact that once a new ancient Israelite site or Judaic remain is uncovered that land is going to be expropriated,” Abu El-Haj asked in a 2014 interview, “why wouldn’t one want to hide it — destroy it even?” As she observed, “One’s very ability to live on one’s own land, in one’s own home, hangs in the balance.” Yet some of the damage to Sebastia’s ruins can be attributed to the fact that the town is a “living and breathing archaeological site,” as Srouji put it. “The ruins of Sebastia are not merely property of the deceased to be collected by institutions,” she wrote. Instead, Sebastia’s residents treat its ruins as “parts of a living heritage and a local economy.” 

The most glaring contradiction to Shragai’s argument is the damage caused by Israeli excavations. According to Abu El-Haj, Israelis have used bulldozers at digs to quickly “get down to the earlier strata, which are saturated with national significance.” In one dig she participated in, organized by the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, she claimed that bulldozers “summarily destroyed” the remains above the layer of interest. Poser also recorded the use of tunneling — “considered bad practice by most archaeologists, who ordinarily excavate from the topsoil down, removing each layer one by one to avoid conflating time periods” — at an excavation led by the settler organization Elad in East Jerusalem. After we spoke in his office, Ghazal led us through the village and down a staircase to a graveyard of Roman monuments shrouded in weeds and moss: an eroded lion’s head, a cracked coffin, fragments of a sarcophagus half-buried in dirt. There, in 1979, Israeli authorities attempted to transfer a portion of the stone ruins out of Palestinian control. The extraction ultimately failed, leaving the artifacts in pieces at the bottom of a pit alongside the abandoned Israeli equipment.

The IDF’s operations around Sebastia have also harmed artifacts. Azem and Ghazal described how soldiers demolished twelve newly installed streetlights in 2023, disrupting the electrical system and toppling ancient Roman columns in the process. (An IDF spokesperson told me that “the matter involved enforcement against lighting fixtures that were installed at an archaeological site in violation of the law, causing damage to it,” but did not address the allegation that the soldiers themselves had damaged the columns. I saw the downed poles and columns, and reviewed an official municipal document that reported the details of the incident.) Before a storm in January, Azem said, he sent a worker to clear water channels of debris. While the job was underway, Israeli soldiers allegedly detained him and confiscated his bulldozer. (The IDF declined to comment on this incident.) As the rain fell, Azem recounted, water overflowed from the channels and flooded the streets, halting activity in the town and upending another Roman column. 

If not for the occupation, Ghazal said, his top priority would be “to restore our archaeological sites so we can share our history with the world.” Today, empty soda cans and candy wrappers litter the ancient sites. Small flowers bloom from the cracks of the fallen columns. Local officials can’t perform even the most basic cleaning and maintenance tasks in Area C. Beyond the ruins, Israel has restricted the movement of Sebastia’s garbage trucks; settlers have dumped wastewater and sewage on Palestinians’ land. 

Disruption of the town’s basic civic functions was constant — Ghazal’s tour was interrupted by news that an Israeli bulldozer had driven into Sebastia and deposited a mound of dirt and boulders in the middle of a busy agricultural road, isolating dozens of homes. Azem picked me up in his truck and drove me to see it. The sharp smell of freshly turned soil hung in the air. I asked Azem what the Israelis’ justification had been, but he laughed off the question. (When I reached out for comment, the IDF did not provide any.) That afternoon he spent much of his time on his phone, speaking with families blocked in by the dirt. He was doing all he could, he assured them, though it didn’t seem like there was much he could do. When he finally put his phone down, I asked about his plans for Sebastia’s future. “There is no time for future plans,” he said. “First, I build it, then they knock it down, then I build it again.” 

Azem told me that in May 2023, Israeli forces showed up at his home at night, locked his wife and children in a separate room, and presented him with a summons to appear at the police station at the Ariel Settlement. (Though I saw the summons, the IDF declined to answer my questions about the incident.) According to an ICA spokesperson, the mayor was summoned over a newly opened road in Area C that damaged ancient burial caves. But as Azem pointed out, and satellite imagery confirms, the road had existed since at least 1997, and had recently been paved. Moreover, Azem claimed that at the Ariel Settlement, the ICA’s Deputy Head Archaeological Officer Benny Har-Even warned him that he would be arrested if his town conducted work in or around any of its heritage sites, including those in Area B. (An ICA spokesperson confirmed that the meeting with Har-Even occurred, but declined to answer questions about the warning.) Azem was then arrested in November 2023. He alleged he was detained at gunpoint, handcuffed and blindfolded, thrown on the floor of a jeep, and dropped off on a dark military road. The IDF declined to comment, and Azem said he was given no explanation for the arrest.

Azem is a sturdy 49-year-old man with a thick, graying mustache on a weathered face. He looks the part of a politician, dressed in typical mayoral attire: a carefully pressed gray suit, oxford shirts, earthy sweaters. When we spoke in his office, portraits of former and current Palestinian Authority presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas peered down from behind his desk, and Al Jazeera was playing on the television over the conference table, sharing one of the first reports of children starving to death in Gaza. 

In 2021, Azem told Ha’aretz, “There is nothing in Tel Sebastia related to the history of the Jews or Israel.” When I asked him about that comment, he explained how politically difficult it was to acknowledge Jewish heritage in the area. “When we try to develop anything in Sebastia, the occupation may come in at any moment and accuse us of destroying Jewish history,” he said. In his view, the ancient peoples living in Sebastia, of all religions, were ancestors of its current inhabitants. He said he’s been unable to conduct repairs on the Roman columns for years, and “they’ve threatened to arrest anyone who touches them.” He added, “Who is really destroying history?”

When Azhari and I visited Sebastia’s forum, the Roman archaeological site that also serves as the anchor of the town’s civic life, children hopped from block to block. Two sweaty teenagers in gym clothes stopped to greet me, assuring me that peaceful visitors from anywhere in the world were welcome. Just then, Azhari received a Telegram message from a community member alerting him of the IDF’s arrival, and within seconds, multiple jeeps sped into the forum. Masked soldiers charged out, cocked their rifles, and aimed them at the four of us. One pointed the barrel of his gun toward me and shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here?” Azhari answered for me: “Tourist! He’s an American tourist!” They gave us five seconds to leave the forum, keeping their guns trained on us as we hurried to Azhari’s car with our arms raised. (In response to my questions about this incident, an IDF spokesperson said only that the army “has been required to operate in civilian environments due to the nefarious use by terrorist organizations of civilian infrastructure and local residents themselves as human shields.”)

To get a better sense of the quotidian violence residents of Sebastia face, I talked to Nemer Ghazal, who said he was shot in the thigh as a teenager during a protest, and Mofeed Shihab, who said his left leg was shot off while he was walking home from school in 2009. “I felt like I was set on fire,” he told me. I also met a seventeen-year-old named Nawar, who hasn’t been able to play soccer or concentrate in school since he was shot in the thigh while picking up lunch for his family. (I am withholding the last names of minors for their protection.) While we spoke, his friend Islam walked by and waved me off when I offered him a seat. “He can’t sit,” Azhari said. “They shot him in the ass in November.” 

The mayor’s children have their own way of dealing with the violence: over coffee and cookies in their living room, they reenacted for me the night the Israeli forces came into their home to issue their father the summons. Azem’s twin fourteen-year-old sons laughed, ran outside, then pounded on the door. As Azem mimed rubbing sleep from his eyes, the twins burst in, pointing finger guns, while their six-year-old sister rolled on the floor giggling. During the performance, real gunshots sounded, and Azem’s phone started ringing. It was the news that soldiers had shot Ayman Shaer, the 27-year-old construction worker. 

Less than eight months earlier, the town had experienced its greatest shock in living memory. On July 21, 2023, a squadron of soldiers opened fire on the car of eighteen-year-old accounting student Fawzi Makhalfeh as he was driving to his father’s plastics factory to warm up the machines. They killed Makhalfeh and injured Mohammad Mukheimar, his best friend since childhood, who was in the passenger seat. “I will never be happy again,” Mukheimer, who was shot in the arm, told me. After the killing, soldiers sprayed tear gas at the gathering crowd, some of whom hurled stones back. Skull fragments and brain matter were found on the road several meters from where Makhalfeh was shot, according to Azem. Makhalfeh’s family said that hospital workers removed fifty bullets from his body. 

Hours after the shooting, the IDF tweeted that soldiers had “neutralized” a driver engaged in “a car ramming attempt.” Military officials never produced any evidence to back up this allegation, and the Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem found that there was “no reason” for the shooting. In a comment to me, the IDF repeated the line about the car-ramming, but when I spoke with a settler archaeologist, Yair Elmakias, in February, I heard an altogether different story. A doctoral student at Ariel University, one of the primary institutions that conducts archaeological work in the West Bank, Elmakias had recently returned from fighting in Gaza. He’d heard from a military official, he told me, that the shooting of Makhalfeh had been a mistake — an admission the IDF had never publicly made, and declined to comment on to me. Still, Elmakias seemed to blame the shooting on the locals’ hostility toward Israeli visitors to the archaeological sites. “If you throw rocks at them, if you mean by that you don’t want them to come, you need to face the consequences,” Elmakias said. “Maybe a soldier will shoot you.” (To reach Sebastia’s main archaeological site in Area C, Israeli visitors must cross the busy forum in Area B, where Palestinians sometimes greet them with stones. Azem said this only occurs when visitors are accompanied by belligerent soldiers, and that there is no armed resistance in Sebastia.)

The settlers I spoke with often invoked the specter of Palestinian violence to explain why military and bureaucratic force so often accompanies what they frame as a quest to reclaim their heritage. To cross over from Sebastia to Shavei Shomron, I was transported to a tucked-away backroad by a Palestinian driver, dropped off like a bag of drugs, and picked up by my settler tour guide, Miri Bar-Tzion — a ninety-minute journey to cover approximately a thousand meters as the crow flies. On a hilltop overlooking Sebastia, Bar-Tzion flipped through a binder documenting Jewish history in Sebastia, including a tax bill with ancient Hebrew lettering and ivory carvings that supposedly belonged to King Omri. She was showing me these objects in order to establish Israel’s right to Sebastia. But whatever role archaeological narratives play in justifying territorial claims, it’s guns and power that enforce them — also in the binder was a famous 1975 photograph of religious Zionists celebrating the agreement that allowed them to move to Palestinian land the IDF had seized near Sebastia.

After we finished our history lesson, Bar-Tzion introduced me to Yair and Hen Weisz, the couple that manages security for Itamar, a nearby settlement of 1,500 residents. “Terrorism needs infrastructure,” Yair explained. It’s much easier to catch a terrorist, he said, if a city’s ten exits are reduced to one. The pair’s explanation for the violence I’d witnessed was simple: “It’s a war zone.” I checked to make sure we were still talking about Sebastia, which I’d emphasized was a quiet, nonviolent town. “Yes,” Yair said. “Why are you so surprised?” Hen cited a 2011 incident in which two Palestinians, who weren’t from Sebastia, breached Itamar’s gates and killed five members of the same family. More recently, October 7 had strengthened Yair’s resolve. “It was like the Holocaust on steroids,” he told me. “Now, we are the strong ones, but we still remember what happens when we’re weak.” As far as the future was concerned, the couple’s message to the Palestinians was clear. “If you want to stay here, and you don’t accept me as a landlord,” Hen said, “we have to fight, we’ll fight hard, and we’ll fight to death.”

In June, Israel’s Security Cabinet approved Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s proposal to extend the ICA’s authority over heritage sites from Area C into Area B, effectively erasing the lines on Ghazal’s map. Smotrich, who was granted sweeping powers over the West Bank in 2023, had previously promised to “establish facts on the ground that will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian terrorist state,” dropping the pretense that Israel’s occupying presence in the West Bank is intended to be temporary. A little more than a week after the cabinet decision, Israel’s Ministerial Committee on Legislation gave preliminary approval to a bill transferring oversight of West Bank archaeology from the Israeli Civil Administration to the Israel Antiquities Authority, the body responsible for sites within Israel’s 1948 borders — a step toward the far-right goal of dismantling the ICA piece by piece until the separation of governance across the Green Line disappears, turning the West Bank into de facto Israeli territory.

These new developments represent a bold gambit engineered to unravel key components of the most significant peace deals between Israel and Palestine, the Oslo Accords and the Camp David Accords — strengthening Israel’s control of the West Bank while setting the stage for annexation. Donald Trump’s return to the White House seems likely to embolden the settler movement further. On November 11, Smotrich called Trump’s election an “important opportunity” to “apply Israeli sovereignty to the settlements in Judea and Samaria” and said that he had no doubt that President Trump “will support the State of Israel in this move.” Smotrich is probably right — in November, Trump nominated former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel. In 2017, Huckabee said, “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria.”

Israeli archaeologists who flout international law by operating in the occupied West Bank are shunned by much of the global field. Some of their peers inside the Green Line, including the head of the Antiquities Authority, have opposed the plan to transfer oversight of West Bank archaeology away from the ICA — out of concern for their own interests, according to Arad. He said his establishment colleagues understand that erasing “the separation between legitimate archaeology in Israel and non-legitimate archaeology in the West Bank” would mean international organizations’ “boycotting the Israeli Antiquities Authority.” Funding could dry up, and even Israeli archaeologists unwilling to cross the Green Line might be barred from attending conferences and publishing in scientific journals.

For decades, mainstream Israeli archaeologists have allowed the far-right to use their discipline as a weapon for chipping away at the brittle veneer of laws protecting Palestinians. It’s a familiar story in Israel: a powerful group of cynical actors aggressively seeks to oppress and displace Palestinians; a left-wing minority belatedly emerges to protest in vain; meanwhile, the majority of the population carries on as if nothing is wrong. And by the time they recognize the threat they’ve nurtured within their society, it’s too late to stop it.

In July, the IDF issued an order to seize 1,300 square meters of Palestinian land around the contentious hilltop flagpole in Sebastia for unspecified “military needs.” The head of infrastructure for the Israeli Civil Administration reassured a committee of concerned Knesset members that an Israeli flag would soon replace the unsightly Palestinian one. Assaf Cohen, an aide to Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, told the Financial Times that the goal is to convert Sebastia into “a tourist site accessible to all the people of Israel,” complete with a “gigantic” flagpole. Elmakias approved. “It’s very simple,” he said. “It’s symbolic to put the Palestinian flag over the palace of the biblical king of Israel.” I asked him directly if the land grab and new legislation were part of a larger project to erase the Green Line and break down the difference between Israel and the West Bank. “We are going step by step,” he said, “doing what you just described, making life in Judea and Samaria more similar to life inside Israel.” 

Aharon Tavger, another settler archaeologist at Ariel University, contends that the law around the occupied territories has never made much sense. “If we accept the recognition of Israel — the Israeli state,” Tavger said, “because of the historical right, or the connection of the people of Israel to the land, there is no difference between Tel Aviv and Sebastia.” He continued, “And I can say even the opposite: The heartland of Israel, of the ancient Jewish land, is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank — much more than Tel Aviv.” The whole argument against excavating in the West Bank, in his view, raises a thornier question. 

“In 1948, Israel also occupied territory,” he said. “So what’s the difference?”