The division of Jerusalem is the thorniest issue under discussion in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. During his January visit to Israel, President Bush admitted, “I know Jerusalem is a tough issue. Both sides have deeply felt political and religious concerns. I fully understand that finding a solution to this issue will be one of the most difficult challenges on the road to peace, but that is the road we have chosen to walk.”

On Sunday, the Jerusalem Post reported that “secret talks” have been taking place between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on the subject of dividing Jerusalem. These talks, Palestinian official Hatem Abdel Qader later told the Post, are both “on the table and under the table.”

On Wednesday, the Jerusalem municipal opposition leader told ynetnews.com that a secret agreement was already in place. The day before that report, however, Israel unveiled plans to build 1,100 apartments in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev.

Meanwhile, in the Arab village of Silwan, archeologists are hard at work excavating the original Jerusalem—the City of David. Given the media exposure Jerusalem archeology is beginning to have, it is possible that Jerusalem’s past could spark more than just archeological fervor.

Last Sunday, an Associated Press story run by numerous publications outlined how archaeology in Silwan is “hard-wired into the politics of modern-day Arab-Israeli strife” and that new digs in the ancient city are cutting to the heart of who owns the holy city today. “Palestinians and Israelis are trying again to negotiate a peace deal, one which must include an agreement to share Jerusalem,” the AP report says. “The collision in this neighbourhood—between Silwan and the City of David—encapsulates the complexities ahead.”

AP explains that in recent years, the Elad Foundation, an organization associated with the religious settlement movement, has funded archeological digs in the City of David, which is just outside the walled Old City. The area has expanded to become one of Jerusalem’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing 350,000 visitors a year, most of them Israelis. Within the archaeological park, there are numerous ongoing excavations, both above ground and below.

Hezekiah’s tunnel, for example, was cut into the rock beneath the City of David about 2,700 years ago. In 1880, a Jewish boy discovered an inscription carved inside the tunnel that reads, “While the excavators were still lifting up their picks, each toward his fellow, and while there were yet 3 cubits to excavate, there was heard the voice of one calling to another, for there was a crevice in the rock, on the right hand. And on the day they completed the boring, the stonecutters struck pick against pick, one against the other, and the water flowed from the spring to the pool ….”

According to 2 Chronicles 32, anticipating a siege from King Sennacherib’s Assyrian forces, Judah’s King Hezekiah redirected water from the Gihon Springs by carving the 1,700-foot tunnel. The “conduit” is also mentioned in 2 Kings 20:20 and is corroborated by Sennacherib’s own written account of his campaign to conquer Jerusalem.

Besides the famous tunnel, many other recent discoveries have been made—palaces, pottery, city walls, and bullae. In 1982, for example, the late Yigal Shiloh discovered a collection of 53 bullae (clay discs used to seal scrolls) within a building that would later be called the House of the Bullae. Shiloh assumed the structure must have been some kind of archive building, located close to the palace complex where the kings of Judah reigned.

That palace has now been located, thanks to Eilat Mazar’s recent work, and indeed, it’s situated on a hilltop platform just above the House of the Bullae. One bulla from Shiloh’s collection was inscribed with the Hebrew name “Gemariah, son of Shaphan.” Mentioned in Jeremiah 36:10, he was one of the princes of Judah during Jehoiakim’s reign. His father, Shaphan, worked for King Josiah (2 Kings 22:3).

Within King David’s palace, in 2005, Eilat Mazar found a bulla bearing this inscription: “Jehucal, son of Shelemiah.” He was a royal officer who worked in the administration of King Zedekiah, Judah’s last king before going into Babylonian captivity during the sixth century b.c. Jehucal is referred to twice in the book of Jeremiah (37:3; 38:1).

“The City of David shows us the history and archaeology of Jerusalem since the day it was founded. Jerusalem’s foundations are here,” archaeologist Eli Shukrun told the Associated Press. “It’s hard to list another city similar to this one,” says Roni Reich of Haifa University. “And this hill is where it all started.” The AP notes, “Archaeologists not connected to the City of David digs don’t dispute their importance” (op. cit.).

The location of the archaeological park, though, is what makes it so controversial. It’s imbedded in the low-income Arab neighborhood of Silwan—in the annexed half of Jerusalem that Israel captured in 1967 and which the Palestinians want for the capital of a Palestinian state. Silwan has about 40,000 Arab residents.

While Israel wants to reconnect with its past, Palestinians accuse the Jews of using archaeology as a political weapon. The AP says the Elad Foundation has a yearly budget of about $10 million, most of it from donations, “and is buying up Palestinian homes in Silwan to accommodate Jewish families. Around 50 have moved in so far, living in houses flying Israeli flags and guarded by armed security men paid for by the Israeli government.”

Last month, the South China Morning Post also reported on the growing divide between Arab residents of Silwan and the activities Elad sponsors in the City of David (January 3):

Abed Shalodi, a Silwan resident who helps the alternative archaeologists conduct their tours, views Elad as a threat. “They want to take over all the land here. We can’t live with them because they don’t want us here. They want the land without the people.”[Elad spokesman Doron] Spielman said it was not “realistic” to expect the area to become completely Jewish. “Our goal is that it should be as strongly Jewish or Jewish-identified as possible,” he said.

Spielman says dozens of Arabs in Silwan are in fact employed by Elad, and that the foundation’s activities include projects to beautify the area for Palestinian residents. But, he said, “We do not deny we have a Zionist dream—to reveal the ancient city beneath the ground and create a thriving Jewish neighborhood above the ground.”

Archaeologists working at the site deny any connection to politics, but some of their colleagues charge them with being complicit with Elad’s desire to move Jews into the Arab neighborhood. The City of David dig “is connected by its umbilical cord to politics,” said Rafi Greenberg, an Israeli archaeologist from Tel Aviv University. “No amount of dealing with ceramics and rocks can obscure the fact that the work is being done to establish facts in the present,” he said.

Dr. Yoni Mizrachi, another dovish archaeologist—who wonders aloud if King David was anything more than a mythical figure—was quoted by the Post as saying “[a]rchaeology should not be a political tool.” Mizrachi then offered this tidbit of convoluted self-hatred:

If I find a synagogue or a mosque or a church [and] it tells me about the past of a place … that doesn’t mean that one person has more rights in a place because the find belongs to his culture. The past also belongs to those who live here now. Even if they found the palace of David, it doesn’t mean that what existed 3,000 years ago needs to be resumed today.

But if it’s wrong for Jewish settlers to lay claim to the region by raising the ruins of their historical legacy, where does that leave Islamic scholars who inexplicably deny that those ruins even exist, or work behind the scenes to destroy them in some cases, all the while holding the position that the Jewish nation is illegitimate and should be obliterated?