Ontario's Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit generates a war of words. Dave Gordon - Friday, 31 July, 2009 (7310 views, Comment on this article)

 Israel, always the centre of controversy, has been for some time trying to win a war on the battlefield, as well as a war of words. This time, the words coming from Israel are two millennia old, in 50,000 parchment fragments, authored by Second Temple-era Jews.

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto is displaying 16 Dead Sea Scrolls during its six-month exhibit, which ends in January 2010. Some groups have called for a boycott of the display, alleging that the scrolls had been stolen from a museum once under Jordanian rule.

"I was shocked to learn about the ROM's plan to show the looted Dead Sea Scrolls," wrote Samir Jabbour, a spokesperson for Ontario's Palestine House (PH) in a press release. "I was doubly shocked to see how the ROM is being recruited by Israel to divert attention from Israel's crimes."

According to an e-mail distributed to community members by United Jewish Appeal (UJA) Chair David Koschitzky, UJA was informed that the government of Ontario and ROM have ensured that Canadian laws regarding cultural property have been fully respected. "This [boycott campaign] is part of an ongoing effort to deny the continuous Jewish presence in Israel," he wrote.

Responding to protests of the exhibit Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, Jewish groups have encouraged the community to buy tickets to see the scrolls. UJA said that it sent 25,000 e-mails out on April 10, the same day members of PH and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) picketed outside ROM to encourage people to boycott the exhibit. According to UJA sources, roughly 30 protesters attended.

More than 18,000 people visited the Dead Sea Scrolls in the first nine days of the exhibit, exceeding attendance projections by 52 percent, said ROM.

"We want to send an unequivocal message that our community celebrates the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of our cultural and spiritual heritage and that any attempt to deny Israel's historic presence in Israel from at least the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls – 2,000 years ago – will not be successful! The Dead Sea Scrolls ... provide proof of the historical facts that underpin the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state," wrote Koschitzky.

A similar response occurred during Passover this year, when anti-Israel activists demonstrated in front of liquor stores, encouraging a boycott of Israeli wines. UJA, the Jewish Defence League and others, launched an e-mail campaign to encourage the purchase of Israeli wines at the same liquor stores. The Toronto store targeted sold out its 1,500 bottles in 20 minutes, say reports.

According to PH and the CAIA, the Israeli government obtained the scrolls through looting and force during the Six Day War. Prior to 1967, the scrolls were housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jordanian-occupied eastern Jerusalem. After the Six Day War, they were relocated to Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

"Neither the location of the discovery, nor the location of the [Rockefeller] museum are, or ever were, under Israeli sovereignty. The seizure of the scrolls was illegal under international law," said a PH press release.

Though ROM's detractors assert Israel's violation in international conventions protecting cultural artifacts, its defenders say that, prior to 1967, Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank, where the scrolls were found. It was an occupation condemned by all but two United Nations countries, as well as the Arab League and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. 

Ed Morgan, law professor at University of Toronto, recently noted that Yasser Arafat, as leader of the Palestinian people at the time, recognized Israel as custodian of all artifacts found in the West Bank and Gaza, pending a resolution of the conflict. Morgan continued in a National Post editorial that, "Annex II to the 1994 Oslo Agreement, setting out the protocols on civil affairs in the territories, preserves the status quo with respect to archeological finds and artifacts."

When the Independent attempted to reach CAIA, their media liaison's phone was not allowing incoming calls, and their office line rang and didn't go to voicemail. PH did not return any calls before press time.

"The ROM's willingness to collaborate with the Israeli authorities less than four months after Israel's brutal attacks on the Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip is an insult to the 1,400 victims of that war, and an insult to the tens of thousands of Canadians who took to the streets all over Canada to protest the war. It also shows complete disregard for the Palestinian campaign, which calls for enforcing international law through a boycotts, divestment and sanctions campaign. Instead, the ROM decided to reward the Israeli authorities for their violations," PH said in a press release.

It continued, "Israel seeks to improve its image in the wake of its massive violations of international conventions and law through the exhibition of artifacts it looted in violation of international conventions and law. Israel's public relations project is made possible with the ROM's complicity and collaboration."

ROM, according to the release, agreed at some point in the future to host a Palestinian exhibit.

Found in 11 caves in the Qumran region near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1952, the scrolls – the earliest known copies of the Hebrew Bible – date from about 2,300 years old to about 1,900 years old, about a thousand years before the next-oldest existing biblical manuscript.

Written by Jews, mostly in Hebrew but also in Aramaic, the scrolls include all parts of the Tanach except the Book of Esther and non-canonical writings and includes written contracts between Jews who lived in what is today Israel and the West Bank. The scrolls predate Islam and the arrival of an Arabic speaking population by at least seven centuries.