Rising From Ruins

I spent last Sunday, a gorgeous early spring day, visiting a colonnaded street leading to a Roman theater, the 30 B.C. temple of Augustus and a church built to commemorate the martyrdom of John the Baptist, which supposedly occurred on this hill. These and many more ruins can be seen in Sebastia, an ancient city first settled in the Early Bronze Age less than ten miles northwest of Nablus.

 

 

Throughout our tour of this impressive archeological site my two companions and I did not see a single label identifying what we were looking at. There were no entrance fees, ushers or brochures. Valuable ruins were scattered over a large area: a Roman bronze column here, a beautifully carved capitol there, all laying in thick green grass among pink cyclamen, red poppies and yellow dandelion. Shards of clay vessels stuck out of the path where we walked.

 

No official, neither Israeli nor Palestinian, manned the entrance to the site, and no guard protected the relics from robbers. In the course of the entire day we spent in Sebastia we saw only two small clusters of tourists, one of South Koreans and the other a small American church group from Georgia.

 

The four restaurants around the site were empty. I asked Mahmoud Ghazal, the owner of Samaria Restaurant, why that was. “Because this falls in Area C,” he told me, referring to the area of the West Bank that is under Israel’s jurisdiction according to the 1993 Oslo Accords.

 

“It starts from this part of my building where the restaurant is. The rest of the building where you are in now, the souvenir shop, is area B, under the Palestinian Authority.”

 

The Oslo Accords list Sebastia among the archeological sites of importance to Israel, yet Israel is not taking care of the place, arguably one of the most important set of ruins in the West Bank. Nor is it allowing the Palestinian Authority to do so. And even though USAID-supported renovation work is taking place in the village, supposedly to improve the ailing Palestinian economy by encouraging tourism in the West Bank, the international community has done nothing to oppose Israeli actions that impede tourism (and are contrary to international law).

 

A hilly village nearby, which is also called Sebastia, falls in Area B. It is under Palestinian control, protected by Palestinian guards and inhabited by some 3,000 Palestinians. Significant renovation work has been conducted there, with funding from the Italian government.

 

There are the Roman tombs first excavated by Israel in the 1970s — and then abandoned when no Jewish tombs were found. There is also a so-called Great Hall, which was used as a stable during the Crusader period, and the beautiful mosque of Nabi Yahya (the Arabic name of John the Baptist), last rebuilt by the Ottomans in the 19th century. An attractive tourist guesthouse with modern facilities and porches overlooking cultivated fields and blooming almond trees stood empty.

 

A few years ago when I visited Sebastia, I was stopped at the Shave Shomeron checkpoint and was kept there for several hours. No one stopped us on Sunday. But the red signs in Arabic, English and Hebrew warning visitors they are entering a Palestinian-controlled area at their peril, a zone where Israeli citizens are prohibited to enter, hardly were welcoming.

 

The economic situation in the West Bank is so dire these days that the Palestinian Authority is struggling to pay the salaries of its civil servants. If European and American funders really want to help, they should pressure Israel to allow Palestinians in the West Bank to properly exploit the resources at hand. Sebastia surely is one of those.