Reconciling National and International Interests: The Rockefeller Museum and Its Collections

This essay addresses the imminent transfer of the library, British Mandate Archives and potential continued movement of antiquities from the Rockefeller Museum to sites in West Jerusalem. It further addresses the recent Israel Supreme Court ruling which challenges international law governing institutions in the Occupied Territories and allows the Israel Antiquities Authority and Israeli museum officials to move the museum’s collections to West Jerusalem. The focus of this article places the Rockefeller and its collections in historical context as the major antiquities museum of Palestine, based previously in two other buildings in East Jerusalem now considered by international law to be in the Occupied Territories.

On Tuesday, July 19 the court decided that the Israel Antiquities Authority is responsible for antiquities at the Rockefeller Museum and has the right to transfer the library and the archaeological artifacts from the museum to West Jerusalem. In doing so, the Supreme Court ruled that the archaeological artifacts at the Rockefeller Museum, most of which have been there since the British Mandate, are under Israeli possession, and Israel thereby has the right to take them. The Supreme Court ruled that the decision is to be based on Israeli law and that international law is irrelevant in the case of the Rockefeller Museum. It was stated that the fact that artifacts were taken out of the museum twice since the 1930s (the Dead Sea Scrolls and the coin collection), proves that there was never a policy to conserve the museum’s current state, and the Antiquities Authority’s decision to transfer the library and other artifacts would not be prevented.¹

Emek Shaveh, an Israeli organization with the stated mission “to prevent the politicization of archaeology in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” issued this statement with respect to an action they brought before the Supreme Court of Israel. The High Court’s final decision held that Israeli law superseded international law in the case, and approved the movement of the Rockefeller Museum’s collections, library, and archives from the museum to locations in West Jerusalem (Fig. 1). In the context of repatriation, which is usually considered to be the return of valuable artifacts to their country of origin, this case is, to say the least, unusual in that it involves the removal of the venerable museum’s entire corpus of cultural property from a location in East Jerusalem, which is not internationally recognized as a part of the State of Israel, to locations regarded as within the borders of Israel. (Jerusalem’s status is unsettled in international law, which is why no countries’ embassies are located there. However, it is generally assumed that West Jerusalem is part of the State of Israel, while East Jerusalem is claimed by Palestinians as the capital of their future state.)

Fig 1.

Aerial view of the Palestine Archaeological Museum and Qasr al-Shaykh from the southwest, mid-1930s.

(Photo Matson Collection, Library of Congress [http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/matpc.15847].)

The salient (and most controversial) part of the decision² reads as follows: “The Antiquities Authority is responsible by law for all of Israel’s antiquities, including all of the artefacts in the Rockefeller Museum and its library. … [t]herefore the Authority may transfer anything (as needed, according to professional considerations) to the new facility in West Jerusalem … since Jerusalem is considered, according to Israeli law, as an inseparable part of Israel” (Regev 2016: 2).³

The case brought to the Supreme Court by Emek Shaveh speaks to a situation that has long existed between the Rockefeller (also called the Palestine Archaeological Museum) in East Jerusalem and Israeli cultural institutions in West Jerusalem. In essence, the case merely publicized developments that have taken place since 1967, and has also provoked a public discussion of the implications of the ruling beyond the Rockefeller as a cultural institution in what is generally considered by international law to be the Occupied Palestinian Territories, i.e., part of the land Israel conquered in the Six-Day (June) War of 1967. This...