“We reproduce this argument with a clear purpose: faced with the evident lack of knowledge of geography and of the events that strike our planet, we cannot hide behind the easy phrase ‘but that is far from here…’. Distance does not exempt us from understanding, and even less from reflecting.”
In Latin America we often look at the Middle East as a distant, complicated puzzle. But what is happening today in the West Bank deserves a clear explanation: archaeology has become a political battlefield there.
An Israeli bill seeks to transfer the control of excavations in the West Bank from military administration to a civil authority. What does this mean? That what was once presented as “temporary occupation under military control” now begins to look like permanent civil management—a step towards annexation in disguise.
The West Bank is not an empty land: three million Palestinians live there, and thousands of archaeological sites rest beneath it, telling the story of humanity itself—from biblical prophets to the Ottomans. Each discovery—a mosaic, a vessel, an ancient wall—can be used as a claim of sovereignty.
To put it in familiar terms: imagine if Machu Picchu or Teotihuacán were not administered by Peru or Mexico, but by a foreign country deciding what to excavate, what to display, and what narrative to construct. That would be far more than archaeology—it would be political power.
That is what is at stake in the West Bank today. The debate is not only about the care of ruins, but about the future of a territory. There, history has ceased to be universal memory and has turned into a border.
“Because if history teaches us anything, it is that what seems far away today ends up knocking at our own door. Saying ‘that is far from here’ is to forget that borders become fragile when they intersect with politics and memory.”
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