Coming of Age: The Decline of Archaeology in Israeli Identity

The warrior glanced west, over the rampart, as the rising sun sent its golden rays beyond the cliff fortress. He could see the glistening of the spears and shields of the Roman army as it crystallized into a fighting phalanx and began to march toward the ramp. The realization that resistance was futile at this point occurred to him as an afterthought, virtually irrelevant to his existence up to this point. He strode to the prayer room to inform Elazar. The archaeologists, gathered like reunited family from all over the world, scraped and polished the monument to and the myth of these heroes of ancient times. The young paratrooper, staring at the rising sun over Masada, imagined the last days of the besieged Jews, accepted them as his fathers-in-arms, and swore an oath to himself that Masada should not fall again. This is the heady stuff of myth. It is a well-established fact that archaeology has been a significant tool used by the state and pre-state agencies of Israel to fashion an old-new Jewish identity based upon ties to the land of Israel and a conception of the modern Jew (read Israeli) drawn from the ancient Judean Commonwealths, and in contradistinction to the Diaspora Jew. 1 Given the above fiction, in all its purple prose splendor, it is clear that it does not take much imagination or originality of thought to see the role that archaeology has played in the fashioning of Israeli consciousness.