Palestinians ask Canada to seize Dead Sea Scrolls

Blake Lambert, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: July 24. 2009 12:31AM UAE / July 23. 2009 8:31PM GMT

TORONTO // A new exhibit featuring the Dead Sea Scrolls at Canada’s largest museum has ignited Palestinian claims of cultural theft.

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), in partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority, is displaying 17 of the scrolls, including four for the first time, until Jan 3.

The scrolls contain the earliest written sources for the Old Testament as well as prayers, biblical commentary and religious laws that served as the foundations for Judaism and Christianity.

Titled Words that Changed the World, the collection includes fragments of Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Daniel and Isaiah and the War Scroll, one of the first found.

The facts regarding the discovery of the scrolls in 11 caves north-west of the Dead Sea in the Jordan Valley’s Wadi Qumran between 1947 and 1956 are not in dispute by Palestinians.

The problem for Palestinian Authority officials, who contacted ROM executives in April, is that the exhibition contains artefacts illegally acquired by Israel when it annexed East Jerusalem in the 1967 war.

The PA’s archaeological department said it was important for Canadian institutions to be responsible and act in accordance with their country’s obligations.

“I’m not saying those scrolls are not Jewish and Christian in nature,” said Issam al Ahmed, the executive director of Palestine House, an educational and cultural organisation in the Toronto area. “But they were discovered prior to the Israeli occupation and they were exhibited in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem in Palestine.”

After the 1967 war, the Israelis moved the scrolls to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a Montreal-based advocacy group, argues that ROM’s partnership with the Israeli body violates Canada’s obligations under the conventions of Unesco, the UN body that helps to conserve mankind’s heritage, regarding the protection of cultural property.

According to its interpretation, Canada cannot import cultural property from an occupied territory and must, if possible, take that property into custody and return it to the competent authorities at the end of hostilities.

The Palestinian Authority’s objection surprised the ROM.

Its officials said the Israel Antiquities Authority had previously lent the Dead Sea Scrolls to 20 major cultural institutions, including the Vatican Apostolic Library, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the New York Public Library and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

But Thomas Woodley, the director of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, said it was probably just a matter of time before the Palestinian Authority caught up with the issue.

“If the Palestinian state is ever going to be established, tourism is going to be an important part of the economy,” he said. “By cultural heritage laws of today, the Palestinians would be caretakers.”

Mr Woodley suggested the question of custodianship is symbolic of a much larger problem: there are active archaeological sites managed by Israel in the West Bank.
His group and Palestine House had called for the cancellation of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition before its launch on June 27 and met with ROM executives.

Mr al Ahmed said the museum offered to include the Palestinian perspective in its literature on the scrolls, which never happened. Palestine House then rejected the ROM’s offer for a cultural corner to exhibit Palestinian artefacts because of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s participation.

Meanwhile, Mr Woodley’s group produced a report suggesting modifications to the exhibition’s history, the inclusion of a map, pointing out “glaring” issues in the copy of the materials and providing names of speakers to reflect the Palestinian narrative. In particular, the report pointed out that Palestine and Palestinians were “conspicuously absent” from the ROM’s narrative and Judea, an Israeli term, is the reference for the southern West Bank.

Notwithstanding the claims of theft, the ROM said it “remained satisfied that the exhibition is lawful”.

As for concerns of bias, William Thorsell, the chief executive and director of ROM, wrote to the Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East that its proposed materials would inject “contemporary political content” into the project.

“This exhibition creates the ground for a constructive conversation among people of various faiths about shared roots and values,” wrote Mr Thorsell.

That view certainly appeals to Toronto’s Jewish community.

“It verifies a Jewish presence in Israel that dates back thousands of years,” said Howard English, the vice president of corporate communications for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto.

He described the exhibit as a gift to the people of this city, which they should visit in large numbers.

To the ROM’s delight the exhibition has been a success.

More than 18,000 people visited the Dead Sea Scrolls in the first nine days, exceeding attendance projections by 52 per cent.

Nevertheless, protests have taken place in front of the museum.

Palestine House called for a boycott, but Mr al Ahmed said it is hard to measure if people are listening.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East is now examining the issue to see if it can sue the Canadian government to fulfil its obligations under international law.

“What’s the point of international law? It’s to prevent the theft of cultural heritage,” Mr Woodley said. “Are we respecting the principle? I don’t think the ROM is.”

blambert@thenational.ae