American Zionism and the Silencing of Palestine
Part 2: Inventing the Past to Justify the Present
The Grand Workshop of Archaeological Illusions — by La Vaun Yonqui (@la_vaun)
In 1838, an American Protestant theologian named Edward Robinson traveled to Palestine with a Bible, a list of Arabic place names, and a conviction that the two belonged to each other. He was not an archeologist. He did not excavate. He walked the land with his interpreter, Eli Smith, listened to Palestinians name their villages, and declared that beneath those names lay the lost geography of the Old Testament. Jeba was Gibeon. Beisan was Beth-shan. Lubya was Lavi. The method was phonetic. The premise was theological. The output, published in 1841 as Biblical Researches in Palestine, founded a discipline. It authorized a way of reading the land in which its present inhabitants became incidental to a scriptural past that overruled them.
Robinson’s move was methodological in form and foundational in effect. He assumed the scriptural account and built a scholarly apparatus to confirm it. The Hebrew scriptures became the map, Palestine the territory the map described, and fieldwork the process of matching one to the other. Contradictory evidence became a problem of interpretation. Regardless of the outcome, the premise held.
When the archeologist William F. Albright arrived in Palestine in 1919, he took Robinson’s framework and made it institutional. Biblical archeology took shape as a discipline organized around a prior certainty: the scriptural narrative was historically reliable unless proven otherwise, and excavation existed to verify it. The burden of proof ran one way. A scholar entered the field already certain that Joshua had conquered Jericho, and spent his career locating the evidence. The text set the questions. Excavation supplied the answers. When the answers did not arrive, the questions were rephrased.
This produced confirmation by assignment. A destruction layer became Joshua’s conquest because Joshua was supposed to have conquered there. A gate complex at Megiddo became Solomon’s because Solomon was supposed to have built there. Chronology ran backward from text to soil. The premise was never the variable.
Generations of American and Israeli archeologists trained in this framework fanned out across the land with trowels and scriptural concordances, searching for Joshua’s walls, David’s palaces, Solomon’s stables, the trail of the Exodus through Sinai. The discipline was funded, credentialed, and entrenched in university departments from Johns Hopkins University to Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And then it started digging, and site by site, decade by decade, the evidence it unearthed destroyed the premise it had been built to confirm.
The First Temple is the clearest case. It is the structure around which the scriptural account of Jerusalem is organized, the axis on which the modern claim to the city turns, the foundation stone of a political architecture that has needed, for a century and a half, a Solomonic predecessor to rest on. Solomon built it. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it. Its site, we are told, lies beneath Qubbat As-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock. Still, the archeological record yields none of this. Excavations around Al-Haram Al-Sharif—the compound the Zionist discourse renames Temple Mount, after a building the ground has never produced—have been conducted repeatedly through the twentieth century under conditions as permissive as any archeologist could demand, politically welcomed and institutionally backed. They have yielded, from the tenth century BCE, no foundation course, no dressed ashlar, no cultic deposit, no fragment of the bronze and cedar the text describes in its long inventories of craftsmanship. The building is not in the ground.
Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian writing from inside the scholarly apparatus constructed to find what is not there, has stated the finding plainly: “Unfortunately, we have no archeological evidence of the existence of a First Temple.” The absence itself is the evidence. No further season of excavation will supply what a century of excavation has not. The pillar on which the claim to the city rests was never quarried, never placed, never there.
David’s capital, Solomon’s empire, the united monarchy’s regional power—excavations across Jerusalem have produced no monumental architecture, no palace, no administrative complex, no wall at the scale the text requires. The structures at Tell el-Mutesellim and Tell Jezer—rendered in the archeological literature as Megiddo and Gezer and long attributed to Solomon’s building program—were redated by later archeologists to the ninth century BCE, generations after the reign the text assigns him. At the Davidic stratum, the ground discloses a small highland settlement. The imperial capital does not arrive. Israel Finkelstein, working from within Israeli archeology itself, has described the united monarchy as, at most, a modest chiefdom in the hills. Sand’s own summary of the same stratum is that Jerusalem was, at most, a “fortified stronghold.” The kingdom the text builds into an empire does not rise from the soil.
Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Tell es-Sultan—the site the archeological literature calls Jericho—demonstrated in the 1950s that the city’s walls had collapsed centuries before Joshua’s arrival in the text. Et-Tell, rendered as Ai and made the second city of the conquest narrative, stood abandoned during the period the invasion was said to occur. At Tell el-Qedah, which the literature calls Hazor, the destruction layer Yigael Yadin first read as Joshua’s proved, under later dating, to belong to a wholly different period. Surveys across the hill country disclose the opposite of conquest: continuity. The settlements the text would later gather under the name Israelite emerged from within the local population. No army descended from outside. The conquest the text narrates left no conquered to find.
Egyptian administrative records—scrupulous in their accounting of labor, population, grain, and military movement—contain no entry for a mass departure of enslaved Israelites. Archeological survey of the Sinai, where a population of the size the text describes would have scattered, across forty years, pottery and refuse and burial ground and hearth, has returned none of it. Sand, again, wrote:
Yet there is not a single mention of any “Children of Israel” who lived in Egypt, or rebelled against it, or emigrated from it at any time ... No traces have been found in the Sinai desert of any significant movement of population through it during the said period.
The people the text brings into the land from outside never departed the place the text brings them from. There was no outside. There was no arrival. The origin was a composition.
The scholarship had invented its subject. Philip Davies, Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, had named what the discipline was studying: not the Israel of the Bible, not the Israel of history, but a third entity the discipline had invented by mistaking its own reading of the text for evidence of a past. Davies wrote:
It owes everything to Bible reading, nothing to critical reflection, and very little indeed to historical research.
The discipline had invented what it claimed to study and had kept on inventing it, because without the invention the scholarship had no subject.
Keith W. Whitelam, a biblical scholar, named what the invention accomplished. Opening The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History with the premise the discipline had spent a century refusing to say out loud—”the construction of history, written or oral, past or present, is a political act”—Whitelam extended Davies’s case into a prosecution. Writing in 1996 from within British biblical scholarship, he argued that the discipline had produced, under the authority of Western universities and the institutional prestige of the humanities, a fiction that served a specific political function, and the fiction required the erasure of a specific people.
The erasure was structural. Whitelam frames the arrangement as a paradox: ancient Israel given substance and power as a scholarly construct while Palestinian history, within the same institutions, is given neither substance nor existence. A discipline that produces one people’s past as substance and another people’s past as absence has, in the production itself, taken a political position. Biblical studies dispossesses on the page; the state dispossesses on the ground. The two are the same act with two instruments. The Palestinians, stripped of history by the discipline, are stripped of existence by the state that followed. The whole enterprise, presented to the world as objective scholarship, is bound to the political narrative the state requires—the narrative of a land that was empty and barren until Zionism “made it bloom.”
In October 1999, Ze’ev Herzog—professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, later director of the Institute of Archeology there—published an article in Haaretz titled Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho. Herzog’s opening sentence delivered what Sand had named from the excavations and Davies had named of the discipline:
This is what archeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.
The sentence read as a list of absences. No Egypt. No wandering. No conquest. No tribal inheritance. No regional power. The empire the text had built into a kingdom stretching from the Euphrates to the border of Egypt was, in the ground, a small highland chiefdom. Herzog noted, near the end of the article, that the most decisive proof of this reduction was a detail the text’s authors never supplied: we do not know the name of this kingdom. The empire the text narrated could not be located in the ground, in the records of surrounding powers, or in its own nomenclature.
Herzog framed the finding as consensus: those who “once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story” now, in their professional majority, confirmed its absence. The invention had failed on its own terms, in its own field, by the testimony of its own practitioners. The archive produced by the apparatus encounters, at last, the archive it cannot construct its way around.
What the invented history required was the disappearance of the people the land already held. What the disappearance required, in turn, was that no trace of those people’s continuity remain readable. The scholarship wrote them out of the past. The maps wrote them out of the present. The state that followed wrote them out of the land. A century and a half of this work, accumulated across every register in which a people can be rendered absent, produced the Palestinian condition as the world has learned to mistake it: a people who must justify their presence on ground they have never left.
They have never left, and the evidence of that is written in the body itself. In 2017, a team publishing in the American Journal of Human Genetics sequenced the genomes of five Canaanites buried at Sidon around 1700 BCE and compared them directly to modern populations of the region. In 2020, a larger team publishing in Cell sequenced seventy-three individuals excavated from nine Bronze Age sites across the southern Levant—among them Tel Hazor, Megiddo, Yehud, Abel Beth Maacah, Tel Shaddud, Baq’ah, and Ashkelon—and extended the analysis. The finding converges across both studies: the population the archeological record identifies as Canaanite—the population the scholarly project of ancient Israel was built to displace from its own past—is ancestral to the Palestinians and the other Levantine peoples of the region.
The 2020 paper’s own modeling reported that Palestinians derive 81-87% of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantines, “relating to Canaanites as well as Kura-Araxes culture impact from before 2400 BCE.” The continuity is total. The descent is direct. The majority of every Palestinian’s genetic inheritance is Bronze Age Canaanite. The research was conducted by Israeli scholars at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and the Israel Antiquities Authority, in collaboration with researchers in Europe and the United States. The bones came from sites across the Canaanite world, most of them inside historic Palestine. The apparatus that invented ancient Israel to displace the Palestinians has, in its own laboratories, documented the Palestinians as the living descendants of the people that apparatus was built to disappear.
The scholarship that invented ancient Israel and the mapping that invented empty Palestine both needed the same thing: a population whose documentary record could be suppressed. Neither the scholarship nor the mapping anticipated the patience of Palestinian archival labor. For decades, from exile, the Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta has assembled the counter-record. Ottoman tax registers. British Mandate cadastral surveys. Village-level property deeds. Family land titles dating to the nineteenth century. Aerial photographs held in the archives of the powers that produced them. Every village that existed in Palestine before 1948—every one of the four hundred and eighteen later depopulated, every one of the hundreds destroyed—is documented in Abu Sitta’s atlases by location, by boundary, by population, by crop, by the families who worked its land. The evidence of Palestinian presence, it turned out, was not missing. It had been produced by the imperial apparatuses that governed the land and then preserved in the archives those apparatuses left behind. Abu Sitta has spent his scholarly life making it legible.
The record he compiled cannot be un-compiled. The villages whose names the renaming project erased were named, by their inhabitants, in documents the occupying states themselves produced. The population that the terra nullius doctrine treated as absent was counted, house by house, by the tax collectors of three successive empires. The agricultural economy that the invented antiquity required to be primitive or absent was surveyed, measured, and recorded in ledgers now held in Istanbul, London, and Jerusalem. Palestinian presence before the Nakba stands in the record as documentary fact, produced by the dispossessors themselves, now cataloged by the dispossessed.
The counter-archive is compiled. The apparatus that invented one people’s past and erased another’s stands exposed, in its own laboratories, by its own instruments, in the ground it excavated. What remains is a state still removing from the land the people it has documented—an operation no longer covered by the scholarship that authorized it.
This is the second essay in a series on American Zionism and the silencing of Palestine. Part 1, Messianic Myths and Colonial Ambitions, traced the theological doctrine—scripture read as title deed, the indigenous read as Amalek—from the Puritans to the Christian Zionism that now organizes American support for Palestinian dispossession.
A companion essay, Scofield’s Bible and the American Embrace of Zionism, examines the textual apparatus—Cyrus Scofield’s 1909 Reference Bible—through which that doctrine became the operative theology of American Christian Zionism.
Important events unknown to many — yet they are the foundation of the genocide we are witnessing today.
We all know how they control us we will break out from their chains