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An Insidious Cultural Campaign: The Dead Sea Scrolls Are a Jewish, Not a Palestinian, Artifact

[National Post-Canada] Ed Morgan - The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are being exhibited this week at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), came from the Israel Museum which houses the scrolls in Jerusalem. Opponents of the exhibit include the Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Canadian solidarity groups supporting the Palestinian cause. The ROM is right to stare down the protests. In the first place, the part of the West Bank in which the scrolls were discovered was illegally occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan - an occupation condemned by virtually every existing international organization, including the Arab League and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. If one doesn't like Israel's current possession of the scrolls because of Israel's occupation of the territory from which they come, one cannot possibly like the Jordanian claim any better. More to the point, in Annex II to the 1994 Oslo Agreement, the Palestinians expressly recognized Israel as custodian of all artifacts found in the West Bank and Gaza pending a final resolution of the conflict. If Israel's current custodianship of the Dead Sea Scrolls was good enough for Yasser Arafat, it is certainly good enough for the ROM. In addition, the scrolls are part and parcel of Jewish, not Arab, history. The Hebrew-language parchments graphically demonstrate a society practicing Judaism and living a Jewish life in biblical times in what is today Israel and the West Bank. They predate by at least seven centuries the arrival in the region of an Arabic-speaking population and the Islamic religion, and give a portrait of the existing Israelite culture well before the birth of Christianity. In exhibiting the scrolls, the State of Israel can hardly be said to have appropriated a Palestinian artifact. The Jewish state is preserving nothing more than Hebrew-speaking, Jewish cultural history. The writer is a professor of law at the University of Toronto.
2009-07-03 06:00:00
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