In the Holy Land, piles of stones take on a contested ideological significance
|
Version 0 of 1. Jesus was baptised in the river Jordan. That much we know. But what we don't know is exactly where, or more specifically, on which side. Did he step into the muddy waters from the east or from the west? I know, I know: who really cares? Well actually, it matters – not least to Israel's $3bn a year religious tourist industry and to those in Amman who also want a greater share of the pie. The Holy Land is big business. Last year, nearly half a million pilgrims visited the Castle of the Jews site on the Israeli side of the river. But when Pope Francis goes to the Jordan on Saturday, he will approach the river from the Jordanian side, to the lesser-visited Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan that was rediscovered in the 1990s. The first chapter of John's Gospel explicitly mentions this place as the centre of John the Baptist's operations: "This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptising." Jordanian archaeologists insist that the remains of a 4th century monastery, possibly commissioned as a part of the Emperor Constantine's great building spree, is the real clincher. Of course, in conferring further legitimacy on the Jordanian site, the pope is making a political point. In this part of the world, piles of ancient stones are always more than that – they have contested ideological significance. It is not insignificant, for instance, that some of the most hawkish Israeli nationalists – from Moshe Dayan to Ariel Sharon – were obsessed with archaeology and (let's call it…) "collecting" the remains of biblical sites. As Edward Said argues in his work on Freud and the complexities of Jewish/Israeli identity, claiming the ideological ownership of historic sites was a way of establishing a sense of continuity between the modern state of Israel and ancient/biblical Israel. This politics of archaeology is most obvious at Masada. In AD73, those who made a final stand against the Romans committed suicide rather than submit to imperial rule. Throughout most of Jewish history, the remains of this mountain fortress were considered of little consequence but were rediscovered in the 1940s – as Rommel's troops were advancing east in the African desert – by the Glaswegian Jew Shmaryahu Gutman, investing the place with a huge, mythical, almost cultic, Zionistic significance. Interestingly, like many of those who sought to reclaim the ancient past, Gutman was a humanist, more interested in nationalism than religion. It is nonsense to deny that there was a long Jewish history in the modern land of Israel – though some still do. And the parallels Gutman noted between the Roman invasion and Rommel's army advancing towards Israel are indeed a powerful reminder of the historical precariousness of Jewish existence. But when Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, set up his renaming committee in 1948 – telling them "We are obliged to remove Arabic names for reasons of state" – he began a process of rebranding, thus politicising biblical and other historic locations in such a way that tells only one side of the story. Which is why Palestinian archaeology can be so ideologically threatening to Israelis. Said again: "Palestinian attention to the enormously rich sedimentations of village history and oral traditions potentially changes the status of objects from dead monuments and artefacts destined for the museum … to remainders of an ongoing native life and living Palestinian practises of a sustainable human ecology." Christian pilgrims are often naive in swallowing a political narrative that is served up to them by the rebranding of archaeological sites. Turning the Holy Land into a kitsch religious Disneyland is often a way of pretending that the politics doesn't apply. That, thankfully, is not the present pope's style. Twitter: @giles_fraser |