How a peace process meant to calm the land left too much of Jewish memory exposed, renamed, and neglected

The older I get, the more I find myself drawn not only to Israel’s battles and breakthroughs, but to its stones.

Not stones in the abstract. Not archaeology as a museum hobby. I mean the living stones of Jewish memory: the City of David, the old arteries of Jerusalem, the Western Wall tunnels, the Judean Desert, Jericho, Solomon’s Pools, the ancient pathways that once carried pilgrims up toward the Temple Mount. These are not decorative fragments of a romantic past. They are part of the biography of a people.

That is why one of the most disappointing aspects of the Oslo era, for me, is not only what it did to Israeli security assumptions or diplomatic expectations, but what it helped normalize in the realm of heritage. Too much of the Jewish story in its own homeland was treated as negotiable, peripheral, or administratively inconvenient. Too many sites of enormous historical, biblical, and civilizational value were left exposed to neglect, distortion, division, or outright narrative theft.

And that, I must say plainly, is a tragedy.

I wrote recently about Yitzhak Rabin, Oslo, and Israel’s unfinished peace. I meant every word of respect I expressed for Rabin the soldier-statesman. He was a serious man, and serious men are increasingly rare in political life. But seriousness also demands honesty. If Oslo was, in part, a diplomatic wager, then one of its most unpalatable side effects was the casual way in which Jewish heritage in Judea, Samaria, and around Jerusalem seemed to be treated as an afterthought.

That still astonishes me.

How does a nation so ancient, so textually rooted, so conscious of memory, sleep at the wheel while some of its most significant heritage sites drift into political gray zones, physical vulnerability, or hostile reinterpretation? How does a country whose very existence is intertwined with history allow the renaming of its historical landscape to proceed with so little urgency? How does the Judean Desert become linguistically airbrushed? How do the Hasmoneans begin to disappear from the public vocabulary? How do the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran get pushed to the margins of a story in which they are central?

This is not merely a quarrel over labels. It is a struggle over civilizational authorship.

Names matter. Names are anchors. When the Judean Desert cannot be called the Judean Desert, it is not just semantics; it is erasure by syllable. When sites bound up with Jewish antiquity are assigned invented terminology stripped of Jewish meaning, we are not witnessing innocent rebranding. We are witnessing a contest over memory itself.

And memory, in Israel, is never a luxury item.

It pains me that under the broad canopy of peace-making, so much heritage seemed to become expendable. Solomon’s Pools should never have felt like a cartographic absurdity. The Hasmonean legacy should never have been allowed to slip into fragmented administrative limbo. Joshua’s Altar should never have been left dangling just beyond the line, as if biblical significance could be measured by a bureaucrat’s pen stroke. One reads these things and thinks: surely somebody in government understood what was being risked here? Surely somebody grasped that this was not simply land management, but identity management?

Yet again and again, Israel appeared strangely hesitant, even lackluster, in defending that inheritance.

I do not say this with malice. I say it with disappointment.

For a nation that has shown astonishing brilliance in security, agriculture, medicine, intelligence, and technology, there have been moments when it seemed oddly timid in safeguarding the physical stage on which Jewish history unfolded. Israel can send probes into the future, build a startup nation out of sand and nerve, and produce some of the world’s finest archaeologists and historians. Yet in this arena, too often, it looked as though the government was reacting late, speaking softly, and yielding ground in the battle of narrative.

That is one reason the Temple Mount question continues to trouble so many hearts, mine included.

I understand the sensitivity. I understand the explosive volatility. I understand that statesmen and police commanders must weigh consequences that writers do not. But still, a question lingers with a stubborn moral force: why should Jews be permitted to visit the holiest site in Judaism, but not pray there openly? Why should access without devotion be considered a satisfactory arrangement? Why should Jewish presence at the epicenter of Jewish memory be tolerated only in whispers, glances, and careful body language?

There is something emotionally jarring about that arrangement.

It feels like a civilization being told it may inspect its soul, but not speak to it.

‘Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount feels like a furtive act’

Yes, realities on the ground are delicate. Yes, the status quo was designed to prevent conflagration. And yes, recent years suggest that practice is changing, quietly and incrementally. But the deeper issue remains. If Israel is sovereign in Jerusalem, why must Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount feel like a furtive act? Why must the Jewish connection to the site forever be treated as diplomatically embarrassing, to be acknowledged in speeches but rationed in practice?

The paradox is hard to miss: Muslim worship is visible, audible, and unquestioned; Jewish reverence, at the place of the First and Second Temples, is expected to remain discreet. Even when one appreciates the complexity, one cannot help but feel the sadness of it.

Still, I do not write in despair. That is not the Israeli way, and if I have learned anything from loving this country, it is that disappointment need not cancel admiration.

In fact, one of the most encouraging aspects of this story is that Israel has not entirely surrendered to indifference. There are signs of correction, signs of seriousness returning, signs that some people in public life now understand that heritage cannot be left to drift. The creation of new heritage-focused structures, renewed excavation efforts, and more visible determination to protect endangered sites suggest that, at last, parts of the state are beginning to wake up.

And here I must express real appreciation for institutions and professionals who have kept faith with the land even when politics seemed distracted.

The Israel Antiquities Authority, in particular, stands as one of the quiet guardians of Jewish continuity. Again and again, its work reminds the world that Jewish attachment to this land is not mythology floating in the air; it is fact embedded in the ground. A road is uncovered. A fortress emerges. A mikveh, an inscription, a seal, a coin, a tunnel, a wall, a burial cave, a ritual bath, a stretch of ancient street: each discovery is a rebuke to denial. Each excavation is a refusal to let history be looted, buried, or renamed out of existence.

There is something beautiful about that.

I was especially struck by the reopening of the ancient Pilgrimage Road linking the Pool of Siloam to the foot of the Temple Mount. What a metaphor for Israel itself: a buried path, long obscured, re-emerging stone by stone. It is not simply an archaeological triumph. It is a moral one. It says that the Jewish past is not gone; it can be recovered, walked, touched, taught, defended.

The same is true of new research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, where modern tools and AI are helping scholars refine dating and deepen understanding. Here, too, one sees the best of Israel and its wider scholarly world: not merely defending history, but innovating the future of Israel through science, evidence, and intellectual courage. There is poetry in that. The people of the scroll are now using artificial intelligence to illuminate the age of the scrolls. Ancient memory and modern ingenuity are not rivals in Israel; they are partners.

And perhaps that is where the real lesson lies.

A Jewish state cannot afford to treat heritage as secondary to diplomacy, or as a sentimental extra to be revisited later. Heritage is not the wallpaper of sovereignty. It is part of sovereignty. It shapes legitimacy, identity, education, tourism, national confidence, and the moral bond between generations. A people that knows its past walks differently into the future.

That is why the battle over names, sites, access, and preservation matters so much. It is not about antiquarian obsession. It is about whether the Jewish story in its homeland will be told whole, half-told, or edited by those who resent it.

I remain disappointed by what Oslo helped expose in this regard: a softness, a nonchalance, a dangerous underestimation of the heritage front. But I also remain hopeful. Israel is at its best when it rediscovers what should never have been neglected in the first place. That is resilience and renewal in one of its purest forms.

The task now is clear: protect the sites, teach their meaning, contest false narratives, expand access, strengthen preservation, and stop behaving as though Jewish heritage in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem is somehow impolite to defend. It is not impolite. It is necessary.

Israel’s stones still speak. The only question is whether the state will fully rise to speak for them.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)