When theTrumpet.com broke the story two weeks ago about Nehemiah’s wall being discovered in Jerusalem, we mentioned that the opportunity arose only after a tower adjacent to David’s palace began to collapse. What we didn’t tell you was that before the tower began to give way, archaeologist Eilat Mazar wanted to remove much of it anyway in order to reveal what she believed would be a seam between the base of the palace wall and the famous Stepped Stone Structure. Scholars had traditionally believed the Stepped Stone Structure was built by the Jebusites, who inhabited the Canaanite city before David conquered it in the 10th century b.c. Dr. Mazar believed it was built for David’s palace. So she wanted to remove enough of the tower to prove it.

But the Israel Antiquities Authority (iaa) wouldn’t allow it—even if it would reveal more about Jerusalem’s founding father and his magnificent palace—King David. “Excavations go through a long process to get their license,” Mazar told theTrumpet.com. The iaa makes many demands of archaeologists—before, during and after excavations. If their standards are not met, we don’t dig, she explained. And indeed, Mazar would have never discovered the relationship between the Stepped Stone Structure and David’s palace, not to mention the wall Nehemiah built, were it not for the fact that the tower began to crumble on its own.

Arab workers, on the other hand, have long been trampling over Israeli antiquities and without drawing nary a peep from the iaa. In August, for example, Arab construction workers used tractors and other heavy equipment to carve a massive 400-foot-long trench, 5 feet deep, across the Temple Mount of all places. Even as Arab workers were smashing remains from the First and Second Temple periods, iaa officials allowed the trench-digging to continue.

“It’s worse than turning a blind eye,” Mazar said. “They stand and watch the Islamic authorities destroy antiquities on the Temple Mount and then say that everything is fine.” Besides the recent bulldozing, over the last 10 years the iaa has approved the illegal construction of two underground mosques on the Temple Mount.

Thus, even as the iaa holds archaeologists to the strictest application of Israel’s antiquities laws, unreasonably so at times, it simultaneously aids and abets the Islamic desecration of Jerusalem’s holiest sites.

What are we to make of the obvious irony here?

For one, it takes little imagination to point out what will happen to Jewish holy sites if Western policy makers get their way and the Palestinian Authority gains control of the Temple Mount. As Emmanuel Navon noted recently in Azure, the question Jews must ask is this: “If Israel could allow the PA to turn the Temple Mount into an exclusively Muslim site even while it was still officially under Israeli sovereignty, how would Israel manage to prevent the further Islamization of the Mount after formally abandoning its sovereignty there?”

An already bad situation would then worsen, Navon writes, once Hamas gains control of the PA in Jerusalem, as it did in Gaza. Radical Islam, he points out, “calls for the destruction of non-Muslim sites in ‘Muslim lands.’” Christian fundamentalists should be concerned about this too—and many of them are.

These concerns are now beginning to work their way into the political discourse as well, as brought out in a report last week on cnsnews.com:

Some Israeli lawmakers are seizing on archeology as a way to fight Prime Minister Olmert’s apparent plan to divide the city of Jerusalem.The Knesset members see archeological digs as the best way to illustrate the link between the Jewish people, Jerusalem and the land of Israel—and to mobilize public opinion against the division of Jerusalem.

In attempting to de-legitimize Israel’s right to exist, Palestinian leadership has been actively fighting on two fronts in order to destroy that link between the Jews and the land of Israel. While they adamantly maintain “that the temple of Solomon was fictitious,” Dore Gold wrote in The Fight for Jerusalem, “they simultaneously [attempt] to destroy any archaeological evidence proving otherwise”—and with little or no resistance from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

On the other side of the struggle, in an increasingly irreligious and secular Western world, about the only thing left to re-establish that link are the ancient ruins buried beneath the surface of Israel’s homeland. And in recent years, with little or no help from the Israel Antiquities Authority, archaeologists like Eilat Mazar have been making fantastic discoveries—palaces, pottery, city walls and bullae—much of it dating to the First and Second Temple periods. “In almost every place where archeological digging is taking place throughout Israel,” cnsnews reported, “archeologists are uncovering Jewish artifacts and history.”

We should expect these new discoveries to find a more prominent place in Israel’s future political discourse, especially after peace talks with the Palestinians break down. But will they lead to a spiritual revival within the deeply divided Jewish state? Navon wrote in Azure,

In the end, Israeli Jews must make a choice between claiming their Jewish past and relinquishing it altogether. Throughout recent history, some have believed that by choosing the latter option, they would finally be left in peace. But as history has shown, the opposite is true: Denying our past, as well as our historical mission as a people, is as hopeless an act in our own land as it was in exile. Instead, the time has come to reclaim our past—indeed, to fight for it.

This past, of course, is grounded in the Hebrew Bible, where Jerusalem is referred to more than 650 times. Founded by King David, Jerusalem became Israel’s capital city one thousand years before the establishment of Christianity—1,700 years before Islam.

For Arab propagandists to erase that from their history books is one thing.

But for Israel’s own leaders to separate themselves from that heritage?

Columnist Shmuel Schnitzer asked years ago in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, “[W]hat kind of Jewish people will this be with no attachment to its land, without all the places of the book of Joshua, the wonderful vistas there, without the intensity of the prophetic vision, without the heritage of our fighters who spilt their blood for the country which was promised them and their descendants?” (Sept. 14, 1994).

Surrounded by enemies bent on de-legitimizing their right to exist, Israel’s survival depends on winning the fight for its own history. The Bible, Schnitzer pointed out, can’t become a historical curiosity. It must be their calling card. Otherwise, as Schnitzer intoned, they will become a new Jewish people—“a nation which doesn’t belong to its land.”

Israel’s enemies have always believed the Jews don’t belong where they are. And by denying their past, Israel’s Jews are essentially saying the same thing.